The Russians are using the tools at their disposal to weaken Western solidarity, to create doubt, to support nationalist parties, just as the old Soviets supported leftist parties. We need a united Western response to this multi-pronged threat.

Sanctions are a strong and agreed element of the West's response to Russia's aggression. It is puzzling to me that there is so much skepticism about the sanctions. I don't understand it.

For two generations up through the mid-1980s, many thought we were losing the Cold War, even in early 1989, few believed that Poland`s solidarity movement could win, that the Iron Curtain would come down, that the Baltic states could be free, that the second of the 20th century`s great evils, communism, could be vanquished without war, but it happened and the West`s great institutions, NATO and the E.U., grew to embrace 100 million liberated Europeans.

Nationalism is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you.

America's sanctions policy remains intact, and it will remain intact until it changes, if it does, and I'm not sure it will.

We Americans are focused on Russia`s attacks with our electoral system and we`re consumed with that. But Russia is pushing against the West generally.

No great power is ever satisfied with its sphere of influence. They never are.