ABSTRACT
The crisis has a name—Ukraine—but the crisis is about more than one country, and it is even about more than Ukraine's aggressor, Russia. The Germans have coined the word Russlandversteher—people who understand Russia. The crisis of the West is both external and internal. The Ukrainian crisis is therefore but a manifestation of something more deeply gone wrong in the West. The combination of foolishness and fecklessness comes at a time of economic lethargy in the West, of the increasingly severe crisis of the euro, whose success depended ultimately on a degree of political unification that the peoples of Europe would not accept, no matter what their betters believed. One sometimes wonders if belief in big, deeper things itself has gone out of fashion in the postmodern West, as if the larger ideals of the past have somehow become an embarrassment.
