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Politicians, scientists and commentators greeted the prime minister’s U-turn on Monday night, when he ordered a UK-wide lockdown, as a belated but welcome decision to join the rest of Europe, and much of the world, in a necessary strategy.

The mystery is why it took so long

Last week Ireland, which shares a land border with the UK, struggled to understand Downing Street’s hesitation. “Boris Johnson is gambling with the health of his citizens,” said the Irish Times.

“The Brits were doing their own thing and it looked like we were going to have to live with it. They got there in the end.”

It was a variation of an observation attributed to Winston Churchill about America doing the right thing after exhausting all other options.

Foreign observers had become accustomed to Johnson’s breezy pronouncements on Britain steering its own course during Brexit showdowns last year but they winced at hearing the same tone in the context of a global health emergency.

Giorgio Gori, the mayor of Bergamo, the city hardest hit by Italy’s coronavirus outbreak, flew his two daughters out of the UK, deeming them safer at home.

“When I saw what the English government was thinking about this problem, I decided to bring them back, because I think that even if we are at the centre of the epidemic, probably they are more secure here than in England, because I don’t understand why the government didn’t decide in time to protect their citizens,” he told Sky News.

American success isn’t a random effect. It requires leadership.

Mr. Trump will emerge from this crisis either as just another president or a president who led his entire country through a great battle. If Democrats choose to be the opposition in this battle, voters will judge that choice.

Mr. Trump’s path to presidential greatness may begin by doing something small but desired by virtually all Americans: Separate himself from the pettiness of our politics

It diminishes a wartime president to spend valuable time tussling with the barely relevant nonquestions of NBC reporters. It diminishes the president’s most impressive accomplishment: delegating and distributing operational authority for the details of the coronavirus battle to Vice President Mike Pence and the task force’s scientific and administrative experts.

Churchill had his war rooms. The White House press scrum is no war room. The public will keep faith with the president if it believes policy decisions are being made in the Situation Room.

If by September Mr. Trump and his team are bringing the U.S. through the threat from this pandemic, he will be re-elected. Without a single rally. Rallying a nation is what gets presidents remembered.

above them all is a mercurial, impulsive, and ignorant president who has no desire to be pulled into a Middle Eastern war in an election year, and who wants to look tough without being prepared to follow through. This is a recipe for strategic ineptitude, and possibly failure

There seems to have been no one playing that role, and thereby ensuring that second- and third-order considerations had been identified and explored.

As the United States has learned to its cost, good decision making requires a forceful brake, or at least a counterpoise, to a tempting decision like the one to eliminate Soleimani

The novelist James Gould Cozzens observed higher headquarters at close range during World War II. He drew on that for his masterly World War II novel, Guard of Honor.

In one passage, his protagonist admits to himself that some of his seniors “were not complete fools.” However, he noted, it was the habit of all of them to look straight, and not very far, ahead. They saw their immediate duties and did those, not vaguely or stupidly, but in an experienced firm way. Then they waited until whatever was going to happen, happened. Then they sized this up, noted whatever new duties there were, and did those. Their position was that of a chess player who had in his head no moves beyond the one it was now his turn to make. He would be dumbfounded when, after he had made four or five such moves (each sensible enough in itself) sudden catastrophe, from an unexpected direction by an unexpected means, fell on him, and he was mated.

that may be where the United States government is headed.

In the United States, the great wartime mobilization of resources and manpower seemed to reflect what this unique nation was capable of achieving when set against a global, existential threat.

Of course, there’s a limit to these metaphors’ potency. In geopolitical terms, the Trump administration and nationalist governments elsewhere in the West are almost explicitly interested in breaking up the post-World War II political and economic order, not rallying it

“We might forgive our leaders’ frequent and self-serving language of war and their invocation of Churchill in 1940 if only it is accompanied by some of that wartime spirit that reset and expanded the boundaries of the possible,” wrote Oxford University historian Margaret MacMillan. “What had seemed fantastical or too expensive in peace — mass producing penicillin, splitting the atom, making jet engines — swiftly became reality.

In Europe, the trauma of the war now forever lurks beneath the continent’s appeals for unity and solidarity.

“Many of the actions undertaken to put the United States on a war footing in the 1940s were natural outgrowths of Franklin Roosevelt’s decade-long attempt to equip the federal government with new capabilities and grant it the necessary authorities to overcome the Great Depression,”

“The creation of new agencies and organizations was second nature to that generation, as was a willingness to experiment boldly, persistently, and swiftly on what might provide immediate relief for millions of affected Americans. Those habits have long since been forgotten.”

And maybe, as a virus paralyzes the globe, the lesson that matters is not one of leadership or courage or sacrifice, but something more tectonic and imperceptible.

“From the vantage point of the 21st century, if there is a historical grand narrative that does justice to the significance of the 1945 moment, it is not that of international organizations like the Bretton Woods institutions or national welfare states,” wrote Adam Tooze

It is, rather, “what 21st-century environmental historians call the ‘Great Acceleration,’ the vast and dramatic acceleration of humanity’s appropriation of nature that reached a turning point in the middle of the 20th century,”

“In its globe-spanning dimensions, in its multifaceted integration of the land, the sea, and the air, and in its violent intensity, World War II was an anticipation and driver of that process, which continues down to the present day.”

Churchill set a frenetic pace for his whole government, showering his aides with “Action This Day” memos.

The second element of British resilience was intense social connection. People were forced together every night in tightly packed group or family shelters.

In national crises, a sort of social and psychological arms race takes place. The threat—whether bombings or a pandemic—ramps up fear, unpredictability, divisiveness, fatalism, and feelings of weakness and meaninglessness. Nations survive when they can ramp up countervailing emotions and mindsets

Third, laughter. Brits credit themselves, accurately, for being a comic people. During the war, every disaster was turned into an occasion for humor,

The fourth factor in British resilience was moral purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that “he who has a why to live for can endure any how.” The Brits had a firm sense of the moral rightness of their cause, the unique evil Hitler represented, and the reason they had to endure all this

Finally, there was equality. During moments of threat and crisis, people are intensely sensitive to inequality, to the feeling that some people are being treated better than everybody else.

The pressure of the situation induced people to be frenetically social. Singers offered free concerts, which were packed. Larson reports that young women would set up dates for every night, planning weeks in advance, so as to never be alone

This happens when countries take actions, even if only symbolic ones, that make frightening situations feel more controllable and predictable. This happens when they foster social solidarity by paying extreme attention to fairness. This happens when they intensify social connection and create occasions for social bonding and shared work.

Societies that build resilience do not hide behind a wall of happy talk or try to minimize the danger.

Resilience is built when people confront a threat realistically, and discover that they have the resources to cope with it together.

Resilience is built when people tell a collective story about the danger that places the current terror they are facing within a larger redemptive context. When all this is over, we’ll be better because of it.

What was once a scary threat to be avoided, releasing a surge of destructive cortisol, becomes a challenge to be met, releasing a cascade of adrenaline.

Evolution equipped us to deal with short bursts of terror, such as getting chased by a lion, not to cope with long, unrelenting months of stress.

Isolation, fear, and stress send the autonomic nervous system into overdrive, and weaken the immune system. The social-distancing measures we are taking to avoid the coronavirus make us more susceptible to it when it comes.

in some ways, COVID-19 presents an even more dire challenge to us than the bombing did to Great Britain in 1940. A study by the Russell Sage Foundation found that what makes societies resilient during a crisis are high levels of faith in institutions, high social trust, high levels of patriotism and optimism, and high levels of social and racial integration. The United States that confronts the coronavirus pandemic has catastrophically low levels of all these things.

Worse, unlike the Blitz, this pandemic deprives us of the thing social resilience needs most—close physical and social connectio

In America, the pandemic finds a country that has already seen a recent tripling of the number of people suffering from depression, a sharp increase in mental-health issues of all varieties; a sharp rise in suicides, and record levels of tribal hostility and polarization. The dread and isolation that COVID-19 causes threaten to exacerbate all this, to drive people even farther apart.

Today, the world is threatened by a virus. The moral story we tell has to be less about the evil we face and more about the solidarity we are building with one another. The story we tell has to be about how we took this disease and turned it into an occasion to become a better society

"While we're burning down and the glaciers are disappearing and the Arctic is melting and hurricanes ... moderators in the debate groups have ignored this issue totally," Inslee says. "Yes, it's a good thing that it was brought up, but it was very, very disillusioning that one of the candidates prevented a rational discussion of this because it deserves it big time."

The fires are under control now, but we have to understand we have been ravaged by what I would call not wildfires, but climate fires. These are climate fires, fundamentally, because the recent cataclysmic events we've suffered now in multiple years

When you talk to the firefighters, what they will tell you is that they're seeing fire behavior that they've never seen before. Not only are they more frequent, but the intensity of these fires — people have just never seen this in our state before. And these are not just forest fires. These are grass and brush and sagebrush fires. And the situation now is the heat and the aridity have dried out this fuel, so that they are like putting gasoline all over the state of Washington.

Fires like these are becoming the norm, not the exception. That's because as the climate changes, our fires change."

The smoke from the forest fires have created a risk for a degradation of our grapes. We're having changes in the hydrological cycle where you don't have irrigation water.

So farmers are one of the first groups who were hardest hit, but they are also the group who can play such a pivotal role in reducing carbon, getting it out of our atmosphere because the soil can sequester carbon. We need to get carbon out of the atmosphere and into our topsoil and farmers play a very important role in that and can have a revenue stream so that we can pay farmers for a service of sequestering carbon to get it out of the atmosphere.

And that plus they have the ability to grow abundant biofuels, which they're doing today.

There is progress going on in the United States. We just need to make it national. That's No. 1.

No. 2, the technology, the rapidity of the technological progress is incredible.

And the third reason that we need to be optimistic is that it's just the only effective tool. I think maybe it was Churchill who said, "when you're going through hell, keep going." And that's what we need to do in this matter.

Professional associations like the American Geriatrics Society and advocacy groups like Justice in Aging have focused more on the opposite possibility: They want to prevent older and disabled people from being arbitrarily sent to the rear of the line.

“Our ability as physicians to prognosticate is generally poor, particularly in the heat of the moment,”

In March, the Office of Civil Rights reaffirmed that the Affordable Care Act and other federal statutes prohibit discrimination, in health facilities receiving federal funds, on the basis of age, disability and other characteristics.

“It’s akin to the person who runs into a burning building or gives up the last seat on the lifeboat,” said Dr. Andrea Kittrell, an otolaryngologist in Lynchburg, Va., who created the organization in March. “There are those people who are selfless and generous and value other people’s lives as much or more than their own.”

Successful programs like Experience Corps also point to a common criticism of the fair innings philosophy: The last innings of the game can be among the most significant.

In March 1940 two more exiled German scientists working at Birmingham University, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, outlined the first practical exposition of how to build a nuclear weapon, a device “capable of unleashing an explosion at a temperature comparable to that of the interior of the sun”. Peierls recruited Fuchs to join him in the top-secret project to develop a bomb, codenamed “Tube Alloys”.

Fuchs arrived as a refugee in Britain in 1933 and, like many scientists escaping Nazism, he was warmly welcomed by the academic community. At Edinburgh University he studied under the great physicist Max Born, another German exile.

Fuchs was extremely clever and very odd: chain-smoking, obsessively punctual, myopic, gangling and solitary, the “perfect specimen of an abstracted professor”, in the words of one colleague. He kept his political beliefs entirely concealed.

The son of a Lutheran pastor, Fuchs came of age in the economic chaos and violent political conflict of Weimar Germany. Like many young Germans, he embraced communism, the creed from which he never wavered. He was studying physics at Kiel University when his father was arrested for speaking out against Hitler. His mother killed herself by drinking hydrochloric acid. Returning from an anti-Nazi rally, he was beaten up and thrown into a river by fascist brownshirts. The German Communist Party told him to flee.

When Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to collaborate on building the bomb (while excluding the Soviet Union), “Tube Alloys” was absorbed into the far more ambitious Manhattan Project. Fuchs was one of 17 British-based scientists to join Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.

“I never saw myself as a spy,” Fuchs later insisted. “I just couldn’t understand why the West was not prepared to share the atom bomb with Moscow. I was of the opinion that something with that immense destructive potential should be made available to the big powers equally.”

In June 1945 Gold was waiting on a bench in Santa Fe when Fuchs drove up in his dilapidated car and handed over what his latest biographer calls “a virtual blueprint for the Trinity device”, the codename for the first test of a nuclear bomb a month later. When the Soviet Union carried out its own test in Kazakhstan in 1949, the CIA was astonished, believing Moscow’s atomic weapons programme was years behind the West. America’s nuclear superiority evaporated; the atomic arms race was on.

Fuchs was a naive narcissist and a traitor to the country that gave him shelter. He was entirely obedient to his KGB masters, who justified his actions with hindsight. But without him, there might have been only one superpower. Some in the Truman administration argued that the bomb should be used on the Soviet Union before it developed its own. Fuchs and the other atomic spies enabled Moscow to keep nuclear pace with the West, maintaining a fragile peace.

As the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer made the world markedly less secure. Fuchs, paradoxically, made it safer.

In Putin’s plan to dismember Ukraine by embracing self-determination for ethnic Russian separatists, he, like Hitler in 1938, is exploiting careless rhetoric that ignores the fact that ethnicities do not tidily coincide with national boundaries.

Lansing, who called Wilson “a phrase-maker par excellence,” warned that “certain phrases” of Wilson’s “have not been thought out.” The “undigested” phrase “self-determination” is “simply loaded with dynamite.” Nevertheless, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill in their Atlantic Charter of August 1941 affirmed the right of self-determination for all “peoples,” which the United Nations Charter also affirms.

This phrase can be used to sanitize the dismemberment of Ukraine — and some other nations (see above: the Baltics). And perhaps can reduce nations supposedly supporting Ukraine to paralytic dithering about whether sanctions, or which sanctions, are an appropriate response to an aggression wielding a Wilsonian concept.

Much of Putin’s geopolitics consists of doing whatever opposes U.S. policy. Call this the Nelson Rule. Before the Battle of Trafalgar, Lord Nelson, meeting with some of his officers, reportedly picked up a fire poker and said, “It matters not at all in what way I lay this poker on the floor. But if Bonaparte should say it must be placed in this direction, we must instantly insist upon its being laid in some other one.” Regarding the United States, Putin is Nelsonian.

raw power lubricated by audacious lying is Bismarckian. In July 1870, the French ambassador to Prussia asked King William of Prussia for certain assurances, which the king declined to give. Bismarck edited a telegram describing this conversation to make the episode resemble an exchange of insults. Passions boiled in both countries, and France declared war, which Bismarck wanted because he correctly thought war would complete the welding of the German states into a muscular nation.

They also need to hear about the semi-genocidal nature of the Russian attack on Ukraine—not just the extensive torture, murder, and rape of the civilian population, but the kidnapping of thousands of children, and the attempt to wipe out Ukrainian language and culture.

They need to hear how staunchness now, even in the face of nuclear threats, is infinitely better than a large-scale, possibly global war in a decade

Americans and Europeans need to hear about the consequences if Russia were to crush Ukraine; about the invasions and depredations that would surely come next in the Baltic states, and quite likely beyond; about the conclusions a no less ruthless Chinese government would draw; and about how a failure to take a stand here would mean something much bigger and more dangerous in a few years’ time

Americans also need to hear a celebration not only of Ukrainian courage and tenacity, but of their skill.

Modern politicians very rarely speak this way, but they need to try

The opposition to aid to Ukraine is still divided, hampered by its own crankiness and embittered introversion, and undermined daily by Russian barbarity, and no less, the astonishing Julius Streicher–like candor with which its propagandists howl for the blood of innocents.

Ukraine’s struggle for freedom and for its very existence is the struggle of a much larger order, not just in Europe but globally, and indeed of the human spirit.

The situation calls for sound policy, no doubt; it also calls for eloquence that soars. There is an epic speech to be delivered here; let us hope that there is someone who can deliver it.

this is the key part—people did not accept the reasonable expectations. They fought and organized and worked. They bent the curve of the future.

now is no time for celebration. To use a World War II analogy, we’ve survived Dunkirk, the Blitz and Pearl Harbor—but much damage has been done, the enemies of liberalism remain formidable, and we’ve only just begun the effort to regain ground. Even if victory is possible, there is a long and difficult road ahead.

Perhaps Churchill’s 1941 Christmas Eve address from the White House, where he was visiting Roosevelt, is apt.

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” he remarked. And “Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasure.”But Churchill added that, after sharing that moment of pleasure, we will have to “turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”