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Some of the countries on Russia's periphery do not want to be dominated by her. Russia, in spite of some strengths, is inherently weak and does not require U.S. exertion

Putin is now in a position where, in order to retain with confidence his domestic authority, he must act decisively to reverse the outcome. The problem is there is no single decisive action that would reverse events.

One is simply to accept the reversal, which I would argue that he cannot do. The second is to take action in places where he might achieve rapid diplomatic and political victories against the West -- the Baltics, Moldova or the Caucasus -- while encouraging Ukraine's government to collapse into gridlock and developing bilateral relations along the Estonia-Azerbaijan line.

The United States has been developing, almost by default, a strategy not of disengagement but of indirect engagement. Between 1989 and 2008, the U.S. strategy has been the use of U.S. troops as the default for dealing with foreign issues. From Panama to Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States followed a policy of direct and early involvement of U.S. military forces.

Because the current Russian Federation is much weaker than the Soviet Union was at its height and because the general geographic principle in the region remains the same, a somewhat analogous balance of power strategy is likely to emerge after the events in Ukraine.

The coalescence of this strategy is a development I forecast in two books, The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years, as a concept I called the Intermarium. The Intermarium was a plan pursued after World War I by Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski for a federation, under Poland's aegis, of Central and Eastern European countries. What is now emerging is not the Intermarium, but it is close. And it is now transforming from an abstract forecast to a concrete, if still emergent, reality.

First, Ukraine is a large country, and the force required to protect it would outstrip U.S. capabilities.

Second, supplying such a force would require a logistics system that does not exist and would take a long time to build.

Finally, such an intervention would be inconceivable without a strong alliance system extending to the West and around the Black Sea.

If the United States chooses to confront Russia with a military component, it must be on a stable perimeter and on as broad a front as possible to extend Russian resources and decrease the probability of Russian attack at any one point out of fear of retaliation elsewhere.

The problem is that NATO is not a functional alliance. It was designed to fight the Cold War on a line far to the west of the current line. More important, there was unity on the principle that the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to Western Europe. 

That consensus is no longer there. Different countries have different perceptions of Russia and different concerns. For many, a replay of the Cold War, even in the face of Russian actions in Ukraine, is worse than accommodation.

The countries that were at risk from 1945 to 1989 are not the same as those at risk today. Many of these countries were part of the Soviet Union then, and the rest were Soviet satellites.

The rest of Europe is not in jeopardy, and these countries are not prepared to commit financial and military efforts to a problem they believe can be managed with little risk to them.

the Baltics, Moldova and the Caucasus are areas where the Russians could seek to compensate for their defeat. Because of this, and also because of their intrinsic importance, Poland, Romania and Azerbaijan must be the posts around which this alliance is built.

. Poland is eager for a closer military relationship with the United States, as its national strategy has long been based on third-power guarantees against aggressors.

In Western hands, Moldova threatens Odessa, Ukraine's major port also used by Russia on the Black Sea. In Russian hands, Moldova threatens Bucharest.

Should Dagestan and Chechnya destabilize, Azerbaijan -- which is Islamic and majority Shiite but secular -- would become critical for limiting the regional spread of jihadists.

Azerbaijan also would support the alliance's position in the Black Sea by supporting Georgia

To the southwest, the very pro-Russian Armenia -- which has a Russian troop presence and a long-term treaty with Moscow -- could escalate tensions with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan serves a more strategic purpose. Most of the countries in the alliance are heavy importers of Russian energy

The key to the pipeline will be Turkey's willingness to permit transit. I have not included Turkey as a member of this alliance.

I view Turkey in this alliance structure as France in the Cold War. It was aligned yet independent, militarily self-sufficient yet dependent on the effective functioning of others.

This is not an offensive force but a force designed to deter Russian expansion.

In each case, the willingness of the United States to supply these weapons, for cash or credit as the situation requires, will strengthen pro-U.S. political forces in each country and create a wall behind which Western investment can take place.

There are those who would criticize this alliance for including members who do not share all the democratic values of the U.S. State Department. This may be true. It is also true that during the Cold War the United States was allied with the Shah's Iran, Turkey and Greece under dictatorship and Mao's China after 1971.

The balance of power strategy allows the United States to use the natural inclination of allies to bolster its own position and take various steps, of which military intervention is the last, not the first.

Weak and insecure states with temporary advantages are dangerous. The United States has an interest in acting early because early action is cheaper than acting in the last extremity. This is a case of anti-air missiles, attack helicopters, communications systems and training, among other things.

These are things the United States has in abundance. It is not a case of deploying divisions, of which it has few.

Likely an archaic institution, the Electoral College still represents the founders' fear of the passions of the people — both the intensity of some, and the indifference of others.

They had two visions: that representatives would make the law, and that these representatives would not have politics as a profession.

The founders saw civil society — business, farms, churches and so on — as ultimately more important than the state, and they saw excessive political passion as misplaced.

First, it took away from the private pursuits they so valued, and it tended to make political life more important than it should be.

Second, they feared that ordinary men (women were excluded) might be elected as representatives at various levels.

They tried to shape representative democracy with standards they considered prudent — paralleling the values of their own social class, where private pursuits predominated and public affairs were a burdensome duty.

Of course it was the founders who created political parties soon after the founding. The property requirements dissolved fairly quickly, the idea that state houses would elect senators went away, and the ideological passions and love of scandal emerged. 

The first was to generate and offer potential leaders for election at all levels.

The second was to serve as a means of mediation between the public — for multiple classes, from the wealthy to the poor — and the state.

The party bosses did not have visions of redemption or apocalypse. They were what the founders didn't want: professional politicians, not necessarily holding office themselves but overseeing the selection of those who would.

This was a system made for corruption, of course, and it violated the founders' vision, but it also fulfilled that vision in a way. The party bosses' power resided in building coalitions that they could serve.

The system was corrupt, but it produced leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as some less illustrious people.

Starting in 1972, following Richard Nixon's presidency, the United States shifted away from a system of political bosses. This was achieved by broadly expanding primaries at all levels. Rather than bosses selecting candidates and controlling them, direct democratic elections were used for candidate selection. Since the bosses didn't select candidates, the candidates were beholden to the voters rather than the bosses. Each election year, the voters would select the candidates and then select the officeholder. Over time, the power of the political machine was broken and replaced by a series of elections. The founders did not want this level of democracy, but neither did they explicitly want the party boss.

The first was that the importance of money in the political process surged.

Corruption moved from favors for bosses to special treatment of fundraisers, but it was still there.

First, a primary system for the presidency is fiendishly expensive simply because delivering the message to the public in 50 states costs a fortune. Second, given the stakes, the desire to influence government is difficult to curb.

The second unintended consequence was that it institutionalized political polarization.

The founders designed politics to be less important than private life, and in the competition on Election Tuesday, private life tends to win, particularly in off-year elections and primaries.

in the primaries, only two types of candidates win. One is the extremely well funded — and the passion of the wings make funding for them even more important. The other is the ideologically committed.

All of this applies equally to elections to the House and Senate. It has been said that there has never been less bipartisanship than there is now. I don't know if that is true, but it is certainly the case that the penalties for collaboration with the other party, or for moving to the center, are extremely high.

This is not meant to romanticize the bosses. We are, on the whole, better off without them, and we can't resurrect them. I am trying to explain why our elections have become so long, why they cost so much money, and why the wings of the parties get to define agendas and legislative and executive behavior.

There has been a long struggle between the founders' vision of how politics should work and the reality of the process.

The political parties emerged against the founders' intentions, because political organization beyond the elite followed from the logic of the government. The rise of political bosses followed from the system, and simultaneously stabilized and corrupted it. The post-Watergate reforms changed the nature of the corruption but also changed the texture of political life. The latter is the issue with which the United States is now struggling.

America's geopolitical position required that it continue to position itself in terms of this European struggle.

The Jeffersonian Democrats wanted to support the French. The Federalist Party, cautious of British naval power and aware of American dependence on trade, supported an alignment with Britain.

With minimal north-south transportation and dependence on the sea, the United States needed strategic depth.

The conflict between France and Britain was intensifying once again, and by 1803, Napoleon was planning an invasion of Britain. Napoleon's finances were in shambles, a fact Jefferson took advantage of to solve America's strategic problem: He negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France.

He probably did just that, but either way he had managed to expel the French from North America and achieve strategic depth for the United States, all without triggering a crisis with Britain. For a man who didn't care for entanglements, it was a tangled, but brilliant, achievement.

The Americans had been protected before independence because they had treaties with Britain, but the treaties did not apply to the independent United States. Rather than negotiate a treaty, Jefferson chose to go to war, fighting on the same Libyan soil that is so discussed today: The Marines' Hymn, which references the shores of Tripoli, is talking about Benghazi, among other places.

The geopolitical reality was that the United States could not maintain its economy on domestic trade alone. It had to trade, and to trade it had to have access to the North Atlantic. Without that access it would fall into a depression. The idea that there would be no entangling alliances was nice in theory. But in reality, in order to trade, it had to align with the dominant naval power in the Atlantic, namely, the British.

All of this culminated in the War of 1812.

The British lack of manpower led London to order the seizure of U.S. ships and the impressment of British-born sailors into the Royal Navy. The British were also allied with Indian tribes to the west, which could have led to a reversal of the achievements of the Louisiana Purchase.

The British were not particularly interested in the Americans. Instead, it was their obsession with the French that led them to restrain trade and impress seaman.

Regardless of desires for peace with everyone and the avoidance of war, the United States accordingly declared war on Britain. Although the war resulted in the burning of Washington, the ultimate strategic outcome of the war is generally regarded as satisfactory to the United States.

This account wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention the Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823 with the goal of regulating the extent to which European powers could be involved in the Americas.

Interestingly, the United States was in no position to enforce the doctrine; it could do so only in cooperation with Britain. Yet even so it asserted its unwillingness to allow European powers to intrude in the Western Hemisphere.

In his farewell address, frequently cited as an argument for avoiding foreign adventures, George Washington had a much more complex and sophisticated approach than Jefferson's one-liner did (and Jefferson himself was far more sophisticated than that one-liner). It is worth extracting one section:

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Washington noted that American distance gave it the hope that "the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance." For him, this was a goal, not a reality.

nlike the French Revolutionaries, who took the revolution to its bloody reduction ad absurdum, the Americans had modest expectations for their revolution

It's not clear that that time has come or that it will come. What undermined the peace Washington and Jefferson craved was the need for trade. It made the United States, weak as it was, vulnerable to Britain and France and even the Ottomans and forced the United States to engage in the very activity Washington and Jefferson warned against.

The desire of the president, the left and the right to limit our engagement is understandable. The founders wanted their prosperity without paying the price of foreign entanglements, but prosperity depended on careful management of foreign relations.

You cannot be economically entangled in the world without also being politically and militarily entangled.