The world is watching the unfolding disaster of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation. We have no idea where or how far this will go — although there are no good possible outcomes and a full range of very bad ones.

And as we take stock of the situation facing our nation and the world, three critically important dimensions jump off the page.

National defense. By far the most effective way for our nation to avoid war in a dangerous world is to maintain an unquestionably superior military capability AND to convince our adversaries that we will employ it if needed.

That’s counterintuitive to many who believe that projecting military strength — saber-rattling — is provocative and conveys hostile intent. Nothing is further from the truth. The most committed pacifists among us are the senior military commanders who’ve been to war and have personally faced its horrors.

President Joe Biden’s unwillingness to commit our military to the Ukraine crisis is proper, but saying so in advance is not. Putin already knows that we are reluctant participants — our protracted history of timidity speaks for itself. But right now, Putin is very confident that the obstacles to annexing Ukraine do not include direct confrontation with America’s Armed Forces.

That’s our mistake and his. At every step, Putin should be terrified at the prospect of U.S. military intervention. We must recalibrate his thinking on that score, right away.

Existential threat. In recent years, we’ve carelessly adopted the adjective “existential” to convey the importance of various potential threats. Climate change has been number one, asserted to be a crisis so compelling that we must be willing to pay any price and endure any hardship to keep it at bay. The pandemic is another supposedly existential crisis — an unquestionably serious one, although so far claiming just a tiny fraction of the world’s population.

But the single truly existential threat facing our planet and everyone on it is the presence of thousands of nuclear warheads in the hands of reckless leaders who just might use them (with Vladimir Putin front and center). Today’s nukes make the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 look like peashooters. A nuclear attack by Russia could eradicate large chunks of civilization before breakfast.

Intellectually, we’ve known this for decades, but the mere existence of arsenals full of nuclear weapons is one of those issues that is so grave, and with so few practical solutions, that we tend to just look away — literally whistling past the graveyard.

The threat of nuclear war is suddenly closer than it has been in a very long time. Averting it is priority #1.

Energy independence. Self-sufficiency is a basic survival skill. We live in a complex, interactive world, and none of us can indefinitely survive any crisis by ourselves. But as a nation we made huge strides over the past decade in achieving energy independence, a critical component of national self-sufficiency.

Our success in that achievement was both fortuitous, thanks to our country’s vast natural resources, and the result of successful technological development of methods to produce and transport natural gas. And in parallel, the U.S. for years was the world leader in nuclear power technology, another major component of our reliable energy supply.

In our unwarranted and shortsighted panic over global climate change, we consciously and carelessly tossed aside our priceless bulwark against the global energy shortages that now seem unavoidable. It’s not too late to reverse course, but we’ve already dug ourselves into an unnecessarily deep hole.

We need a comprehensive, fast-track reboot on U.S. energy independence using both clean fossil fuels and nuclear power. It will take time to get back on track, but the sooner we wake up and start, the better.

We are a resilient, resourceful, and highly capable nation, and I’ve no doubt that we can navigate whatever treacherous waters are ahead. At this point we can only guess as to Putin’s mindset and intent. But as we confront him — and whoever comes next — we must keep laser focus on the three central issues outlined above. Survival of our nation, and the free world, is in the balance.