From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Thanks for listening. If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Please leave us a nice review. This week,

on the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we're going to take stock of the conflict.

America's role as the leading supporter and supplier of Ukraine's struggle and the larger

questions the war raises for American global strategy and national security, with one of our

leading historians and foreign policy

commentators Robert Kagan. President Biden's unannounced visit to Kiev this week was an emphatic

public statement of America's commitment to continued support of Ukraine. The spectacle of a U.S.

President visiting a country at war is intended to signal to friends and foes alike that the US is in this,

as Biden now repeatedly says, for as long as it takes. And in a meeting in Poland with NATO allies

and others, Biden framed US support for Ukraine more directly than before as part of a vital

struggle between the forces of democracy and freedom and those of violent autocracy.

Is this rhetorical escalation, along with promises of more aid on top of the $100 billion

the US has already committed, wise. The war itself looks increasingly to be locked in a stalemate,

despite big Ukrainian gains in recent months. But Russia's mobilizing more forces, and this week we learned

that China may be about to start supplying Moscow with weapons. So what's at stake for the US now?

Does the continuing focus on this war in Eastern Europe distractors from the much larger strategic

challenge of China, as some argue? Or, with Russia and China now seemingly locked in a tightening embrace,

is the war in Ukraine, in fact, a proxy battle in a burgeoning wider conflict? Well, as I say,

I'm delighted to talk about all this with Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,

...