 Since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world has benefited from a largely peaceful status quo among all of the major world powers. Today that stability is being challenged in each of the three most critical areas of the world. In East Asia, China is aggressively asserting claims over maritime areas on its periphery, claims that conflict sharply with those of its neighbors. And the Beijing regime gives much indication of believing that its natural destiny is to be the dominant power in all of the Western Pacific, which would mean over all of the nations on its periphery. In the Persian Gulf, Iran aspires to establish Persian hegemony over the region. And the organization that styles itself the Islamic State is seeking to overturn the entire order in that region. But in some ways most troubling of all have been Vladimir Putin's actions in Ukraine, which have violated one of the most fundamental post-Cold War security agreements. The 1994 agreement under which Ukraine agreed to surrender its nuclear weapons in exchange for commitments by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Commitments to Ukraine's independence and territorial integrity. Moreover, Putin has done so by invoking a rationale of protecting ethnic Russians in other countries that could be applied elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe with results that could be extraordinarily dangerous and destabilizing. Some 20 years ago, when Boris Yeltsin is president of the Russian Federation, made his first visit to Washington, I was in his meeting with then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. I have never forgotten Yeltsin's response when the subject of Soviet plans to increase defense spending was raised. To increase Soviet defense spending, he said, would be a crime against the Soviet people who have already suffered enough under 70 years of communism. What a different view of Russia's past from Putin's declaration to the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster. These two very different perspectives on Russia's past are each connected to very different visions of Russia's future. The one perspective welcomes the escape from Russia's dark tyrannical past and welcomes the vision of a free and truly democratic Russia as a part of Europe. A Europe to which Russia has contributed some of its greatest writers and composers and artists and scientists. A Europe which Russia had been approaching even under the czars before the tragedy of World War I and the subsequent communist takeover drove a wedge between Western and Eastern Europe that endured for seven decades. The other perspective sees Russia with a distinctly Eurasian identity and views democracy from a perspective that would be comfortable for Asian autocrats. Putin's aggression in Ukraine is as much about cementing his hold on power in Russia as it is about the interests of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. The prospect of a Ukraine that had thrown out a corrupt dictator and might become a successful democracy integrated with Europe was threatening to Putin because the appeal of Europe is still powerful in Russia itself and because it threatens him when Russians are able to think about the wealth being accumulated by Putin and his friends. But when the issue becomes instead one of raw nationalism, Putin's popularity increases. That appeal to raw nationalism has been a pattern since the beginning of his national career, whether in Chechnya or in Georgia or in Abkhazia or in South Ossetia, and now again with Crimea.