DOMINIC GREEN: Vladimir Putin is rolling over the United States.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to send troops into Ukraine. He has already achieved his strategic goals — for now.

The leading European Union powers, France and Germany, are competing against each other for Putin’s ear, while Britain is competing against them by shipping arms to Ukraine. The United States is exposed as an unreliable protector, unable to defend its overextended position on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine. NATO is divided and powerless, a shadow of imperial overreach.

A decrepit caste of corrupt leaders is incapable of managing a controlled retreat from imperial overreach. America today, or Russia the day before yesterday? Vladimir Putin witnessed the decay and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders. He is now returning the favor. He is pushing American and European influence out of Ukraine, and unpicking the already frayed bonds of NATO and the EU.

Geopolitics is not about morality. It is about the effective use of power. For thirty years, the smart opinion in Washington was that post-Soviet Russia was no threat to anyone because it had an economy the size of Portugal and its economy ran on carbon fuel exports. That these statistics were true shows how well Vladimir Putin has played his limited hand — and how arrogantly the US has mishandled relations with Russia while its experts tell each other flattering fictions.

Why, it’s as if: Biden acts much more like Putin’s puppet than Trump ever did.