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“Hold on a minute,” I hear you say. What about the critical role that U.S. diplomacy played in organizing the Western response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, not to mention those lopsided United Nations General Assembly votes condemning Moscow’s actions? Doesn’t that prove that America is back and its diplomats are doing their jobs with consummate skill?

Yes and no. On one hand, Biden and his team have led a coordinated Western response to the invasion, and this hasn’t always been easy. But it ain’t over till it’s over, and the ultimate result of this effort is uncertain. The cruel reality is that a protracted war that ends with Russia in control of some or all of the Donbass and Ukraine depopulated and heavily damaged will not look like a grand foreign-policy achievement. We all hope that does not happen, but it is certainly not an outcome one can rule out.

The sad fact is that the Biden administration has done an excellent job of responding to a problem that was at least partly of its own making. The roots of the Ukraine war predate Biden’s inauguration, but neither Biden nor Blinken saw the war coming soon enough. They did not recognize that Russia saw the trends in Ukraine as an existential threat, nor did they do everything they could have to head the war off. U.S. officials (both past and present) have gone to great lengths to deny that U.S. or Western policy played any role whatsoever in causing this tragedy, but a dispassionate look at the evidence—such as the recent account by British historian Geoffrey Roberts in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies—shows otherwise. As I’ve put it before, “Putin is directly responsible for the war, but the West is not blameless.”

We will probably never know if the war could have been avoided had the United States and its European allies made a more serious and creative attempt to address Russia’s security concerns, and dropped their stubborn insistence that Ukraine would one day join NATO. I’m not letting Russia off the hook for starting a preventive war (an illegal act under international law) or for the way it has waged it. But when one thinks about the consequences of the war for the world—and for Ukraine most of all—the United States’ failure to do everything within reason to head it off deserves more critical scrutiny than it has received to date.