If anyone had any doubt that Ukraine has its own national identity, the early days of the Russian invasion should have eliminated it.

There’s been the stiff resistance of Ukraine’s fighters, the former president giving interviews in the streets of Kyiv in battle gear, the ordinary men and women insulting and defying Russian soldiers, and above all, the comedian-turned-president, the now legendary Volodymyr Zelensky, refusing to leave his capital as Russian forces bear down on the city seeking to capture or kill him.

Russia wants to absorb Ukraine and rule its people. China wants to absorb Taiwan and rule its people. The two powers isolate and degrade their much smaller neighbors at every turn and invoke stale grievances to justify conquering them outright. They have served notice on the world that they are prepared to make war to impose their will. Frantic countermeasures are under way, focused for the time being on averting an invasion of Ukraine or a Moscow-backed coup.

China has a long history of focusing on the political education of new generations. Under the guidance of President Xi Jinping, however, the Chinese Communist Party has turned to social media and cartoons to instill sympathetic attitudes in the nation’s children.

Pro-China propaganda has become the norm in recent years. A multi-pronged effort to spread nationalistic sentiment across the internet has found great success through appealing imagery and sheer scale.

Foreign policy was for years the great point of agreement between the paleo Right and the radical Left, with the familiar polemicists from those respective camps insisting that the United States acts as an “empire.” Patrick Buchanan wrote a big foreign-policy book called A Republic, Not an Empire, with the romantic subtitle Reclaiming America’s Destiny. Noam Chomsky published angry essays with titles such as “Modern-Day American Imperialism: Middle East and Beyond,” in which he observed that, “Talking about American imperialism is rather like talking about triangular triangles.”

Peter Navarro is a loser. Literally.

He has run for office five times and never won. He has never gained approval from the Senate to occupy an official cabinet post. He started a trade war that may not technically be lost yet, but it hasn't been a roaring success by any account.

And yet, somehow, he's become one of the most powerful people on the planet.

President Trump said he would sign an executive order on Thursday to "promote patriotic education" through an effort called the 1776 Commission, while denouncing a New York Times' project that investigated the impacts of racial injustice for Black Americans.

The big picture: The 1619 project dug into the personal histories of Black Americans in the U.S. who have faced present-day systematic inequality in housing and farming, as well as how the legacy of slavery altered health care access for Black Americans and fueled the country's early economy.

Opponents of economic globalization often point to the ways it has widened inequality within nations in recent decades. In the United States, for instance, wages have remained fairly stagnant since 1980 while the wealthiest Americans have taken home an ever greater share of income. But globalization has had another important effect: it has reduced overall global inequality. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades.

KATHMANDU, Nepal—In Nepal, Muslims, who make up about 4 percent of the population, have lived peacefully alongside the majority Hindu population for centuries, arriving as immigrants from elsewhere but establishing strong communities. Nepalis pride themselves on a history of religious tolerance, even in a region where faith has often had bloody consequences.

But India’s right-wingers are trying hard to change that.

Democracies have a way of bringing problems back to the political process until a suitable settlement is found.

Jonah Goldberg writes with some astonishment — and maybe a wry grin — about how nationalists and their sympathizers blew their chance. A favorable wind was about to lift up the sails of national conservatism in the United States, but the crew and captain seem to have dropped the anchor directly through the hull.

Speaking before the largest inauguration crowd in human history, Donald Trump made a bold prediction.

“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First,” he declared.

“I will fight for you with every breath in my body – and I will never, ever let you down. America will start winning again, winning like never before.”

And so it came to pass that America is indeed winning like never before. First among nations, to be sure. With all the new vision that an ostrich has while examining the sand from below.