The GOP’s moral collapse threatens global security.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Republicans need to recover their senses about the dire moral and strategic tests Ukraine and the West face in Europe.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

A Test of Will and Commitment

Wars test people and weapons on a battlefield, but eventual victory rests on much more than combat. Wars also stress-test political institutions, ideas, and the courage of entire societies. At this moment, the United States is on the verge of failing a challenge of will and commitment, much to the delight of the neo-fascist Russian regime that has turned Ukraine’s fields and homes into an immense abattoir. President Joe Biden, most of NATO, and many other nations recognize the crisis, but the world could face a Russian victory—and an eventual escalation of Russian aggression against Europe—solely because of the ongoing drama and inane bickering within the Republican Party.

The GOP, the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, once supported the bipartisan American understanding that U.S. leadership in the world was both a strategic and a moral imperative, especially in the great struggle with the Soviet Union. Reagan, however, supercharged the idea of the Cold War as a moral crusade. When he talked about the need for the West to oppose an “evil empire,” he meant it—and as we found out years later, his words stung Soviet leaders. As one adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev later admitted, Reagan’s rhetorical attack did not change much at the very top in the Kremlin, but for many of the people who worked in Soviet foreign-policy circles, “this term and this propaganda was perceived as punishment for what we did in Afghanistan. In other words, we felt that we deserved it.”

Soviet leaders deserved it then and Russian leaders deserve it now. Reagan’s detractors will point to his policies in Central America and elsewhere as examples of what can happen when righteous fixation on noble ends leads to the justification of bloody and repulsive means. But........

© The Atlantic