Every era has a figure who strips away its pleasant illusions about where the world is headed. This is what makes Vladimir Putin the most important person of the still-young 21st century.
Over the past weeks — and over the past generation — Putin has done more than any other person to remind us that the world order we have taken for granted is remarkably fragile. In doing so, one hopes, he may have persuaded the chief beneficiaries of that order to get serious about saving it.
Putin isn’t the first individual to give the "civilized world” a reality check. In the early 19th century, a decade of Napoleonic aggression upended a widespread belief that commerce and Enlightenment ideas were ushering in a new age of peace. In the 20th century, a collection of fascist and communist leaders showed how rapidly the world could descend into the darkness of repression and aggression. More recently, no one has smashed the intellectual pieties of the post-Cold War era as thoroughly as Putin.