“The focus on ‘green’ energy has left the West increasingly dependent on Russian energy,” laments National Review’s John Fund. The “Biden administration is infested with devotees of green energy who are hostile to the fossil fuels we urgently need right now. So too is the European Union.” Thanks to this president, last year America “imported more gasoline and other refined petroleum products from Russia than from any other country,” a fifth of all gas imports. “Germany, after shutting down its nuclear reactors, became dependent on Russia for 50% of its natural gas and 41% of its oil.” The West made Vladimir Putin’s plot “to undermine and eventually invade Ukraine” easier “by pursuing energy policies that transferred billions of dollars to Moscow’s coffers while pursuing misguided ‘Green New Deal’ policies.”

“History, we are told, repeats and rhymes,” recalls Steve Israel at The Hill. “Now the aphorism strikes in Ukraine, in missiles streaking across skies, in the rumble of tanks. It is either historical coincidence or a reflection of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pathology that his invasion of Ukraine occurs three weeks before the 83rd anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.” That “was a naked, unprovoked, unjustified land grab, a savage conquest. No different than today’s military operations in Ukraine.” Also echoing Hitler, “Putin believes it is his destiny to reconstitute the former Soviet Union, to reclaim by coercion and killing the proxy states lost to democracy.” The question now: “Will the West repeat our own history of appeasement or resistance?”

“In one breathtakingly foolish maneuver, Putin has demonstrated the limits of Russian military capabilities and birthed into existence a new European political covenant of the sort that Western hawks have spent decades unsuccessfully advocating,” notes Commentary’s Noah Rothman. He’s “left Russia politically isolated, economically devastated and militarily boxed in.” But: “As much as these conditions are of material benefit to the West, they are also extremely dangerous” as Russia may try “to escalate the conflict in order to deescalate it.” Ukraine “cannot be sacrificed,” but “the Russian regime also needs a soft place to land.” It’s “a hard pill to swallow,” but the world must avoid “an infinitely more terrible set of circumstances.”

“Putin’s bloody assault on Ukraine is opening many eyes, and perhaps the biggest awakening is in Germany,” argue The Wall Street Journal’s editors. This “epiphany in German defense and foreign policy” includes “a reversal of Berlin’s policy since World War II of not supplying lethal weapons,” agreeing to SWIFT sanctions of some Russian banks, “stepping back from its decades-long entente with Moscow,” “going all-in on NATO” and hiking defense spending. Chancellor Olaf Scholz “also connected energy policy to security, warning that the country can no longer treat energy solely as a question of the domestic economy or climate change.”

“The goal posts on pandemic policy haven’t just been shifted,” snarks Matt Welch at Reason. “They’ve been uprooted, hitched to a helicopter and transported to a different county.” Two years ago, then-President Donald Trump promised that “focused action” would help “turn the corner [on COVID] and turn it quickly” — but with “800,000 dead Americans . . . no such corners were ever turned.” What came after Trump’s “naive and prematurely optimistic projections” was “no less cruel”: “a zig-zagging series of arbitrary and far-reaching edicts” on masks, vaccines and lockdowns. And while President Joe Biden “was supposed to bring more scientific rigor into the building . . . [CDC chief Rochelle] Walensky has repeatedly massaged research findings to fit her policy desires,” so that schools in heavily Democratic districts . . . preemptively responded to the Omicron surge” with remote-only learning. Turns out it’s always “just a few more weeks to stop the spread. Or months. Or years.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board