Does the name, Dmitry Medvedev ring a bell? If not, let me remind you. He was president of Russia from 2008 to 2012.

Perhaps you'll recall that, in 2012, President Obama told him that their disagreement over American missile defense in Europe could be resolved.

On a hot mic, Mr. Obama added: "This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility."

Mr. Medvedev replied that he would "transmit this information to Vladimir."

Vladimir Putin was then Russia's prime minister so, constitutionally, Mr. Medvedev was his boss. But Mr. Putin had preceded him as president and would succeed him as president. There was never any question about who was the top dog and who the lap dog.

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Thomas Jefferson was not enthusiastic about either foreign wars or military spending. But he sent the nascent U.S. Navy to the shores of Tripoli because he understood that paying tribute to the Barbary pirates was more expensive than fighting them.

The Barbary pirates were jihadis on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa who seized American merchant ships and took their sailors hostage. Today, the rulers of Iran, modern jihadis, have been attempting to hold the global economy hostage.

A fifth of the world's seaborne oil used to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The theocrats have laid claim to that international waterway, demanding tribute from ships that pass through.

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I remember the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. But perhaps you do not. So let me tell you what happened, and what should have been learned.

It was a perfect late summer morning in Washington; in the 70s, no humidity. I was in my office, television tuned to a news channel.

A little before 9 a.m., there were live reports that American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the World Trade Center in New York City minutes earlier. The plane had flown through a clear blue sky into the North Tower. Flames and smoke were billowing from a hole between the 93rd and 99th floors.

My phone rang. "Accident or terrorism?" asked a friend and former Pentagon official. I said I hoped it was an accident.

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Dwight Eisenhower is said to have counseled that if a problem can't be solved, you should enlarge it.

Is Vladimir Putin now applying that maxim perversely? I'll bet you a ruble the CIA thinks so.

The problem Mr. Putin can't solve is, of course, Ukraine. In 2014, the Russian strongman invaded, occupied, and annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. The "international community" merely tut-tutted.

In August 2021, Mr. Putin witnessed President Biden's shambolic and shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan. I'm convinced that led him to believe the U.S. was in retreat and posed no obstacle to his neo-imperialist ambitions.

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Carlos the Jackal is 76 years old and has been in French prisons for three decades. When Joby Warrick went to see him, the old communist had an explanation for his long survival: "Allah has protected me all these years."

Marxists, Islamists, and those who fuse the two insist that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Still, discredit where discredit is due: It was Reuters' global head of news who invoked that phrase in a memo to his staff following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been President Reagan's ambassador to the U.N., rebutted such moral equivocation. "No cause and no grievances can justify the murder of other people's children," I recall her telling me.

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