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Good morning, Playbookers, I'm Rookumunovol, and it's Monday.

In today's show, a look ahead to tomorrow's State of the Union address.

This is your Politico Playbook Daily briefing.

Foreign policy crises have a way of reshuffling the priorities of a president. Joe Biden's standoff

with Vladimir Putin happened to come along just when Biden had lost some urgency in confronting

his three big domestic threats. The pandemic is becoming endemic. There's not much Biden can

actually do about inflation, and the key senator of standing in the way of Biden's

domestic agenda remains immovable.

While the war in Ukraine is just five days old, administration officials and Biden allies

are starting to grapple with the ways in which Biden's presidency may be fundamentally altered.

Here's what the Biden world is eager to talk about.

Biden is an Atlantisist who likes to brag about how he stayed in touch with European leaders

while out of office from 2017 to 2021.

He's a creature of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Munich Security Conference.

He came up in politics immersed in the debates of the Cold War, which are now newly relevant.

When he said recently that, quote, the United States will

defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power, he could have been

lifting the wine from one of his 1988 presidential campaign speeches. From this angle,

President Biden is uniquely suited for the new role that has been thrust upon him, which in

the words of Senator Chris Coons is to, quote, rally the West in the face of Russian aggression.

It was Biden and its team's patience in close consultation with European allies that has led

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