In Holman Jenkins’ opinion piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal concerning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energy war against Europe (as a secondary front in his war against Ukraine), he offered this regarding Europe’s stick-to-it-iveness vs Putin’s:

Mr Putin will quickly adapt once it’s proven to him Europe’s governing parties can’t knuckle under to Russian blackmail and retain their democratic viability.

If Europe doesn’t surrender in the face of Putin’s energy war, it will be the Russian people who feel the resulting economic, and other, pain.

Jenkins is incredibly naive to think Putin cares about that. He’ll persist until he is militarily driven out of Ukraine. And he’ll persist elsewhere for as long as he’s in power. The situation is all about Putin and his angst over the “greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century” and his obsession with redressing that.

Europe needs to defeat Putin in his energy war, not only to save themselves (and Ukraine) in the near term, but also to greatly mitigate the costs of Putin’s aggressively pushed obsession in the longer term.