One hundred years after a spark in Central Europe ignited a conflagration from which the world has not yet recovered and from which Europe will never recover, armed forces have crossed an international border in Central Europe, eliciting this analysis from Secretary of State John Kerry: "It's a 19th-century act in the 21st century. It really puts at question Russia's capacity to be within the [Group of Eight]."

Although this "19th-century act" resembles many 20th-century (and 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century) acts, it is, the flabbergasted Kerry thinks, astonishing in the 21st century, which he evidently supposes to be entirely unlike any other.

What is more disconcerting — that Kerry believes this? Or that his response to Putin's aggression is to question Russia's "capacity" — Kerry means fitness — for membership in the G-8?