Will today’s Cold War confrontation end auspiciously, the way the first one did, or will it slide through strategic miscalculations on both sides into a third world war?

Adolph Hitler’s misjudgments before World War II could be matched by Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s today. At each step in Hitler’s preparations for war against Nazi Germany’s neighbors, the international community wavered, convinced itself that his assurances of peaceful intent were sincere, and simply wished the problem away. Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” proved evanescent.

Until the last few years, the West made the same mistake regarding the hostile intentions of Russia and China. Even now, after Putin’s third invasion of a neighboring country with the aim of reconstituting the former Soviet Union — Georgia in 2008, Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, Ukraine again in 2022 — some Western leaders still seem to believe they can deal with him as a normal leader in a normal time.

Commercial factors and profit-seeking constantly skew national security considerations on Russia, just as they did with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. On China, America’s most dangerous adversary, business interests in the United States press political leaders to weaken or eliminate punitive measures to counter China’s economic aggression. They seem intent on validating the observation attributed to Lenin that “capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.”

There are other disturbing parallels between........

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