Twenty years ago, Al Gore coined the phrase “inconvenient truth,” and it caught on.

Gore’s prediction of imminent climate change apocalypse was overwrought and unsupported. But his underlying point — that we can bury our heads in the sand for only so long — was solid. Sooner or later, the truth will out.

Today’s case in point is Russia’s brutal invasion of the Ukraine. We won’t wake up from this real-life nightmare and find out that it never actually happened. It is inescapably real, it gets worse by the day, and its consequences will be around for decades to come.

The grim reality of Ukraine is exposing, for all to see, some inconvenient truths that until now have been subject to unhelpful partisan bickering:

Irredeemable evil. It’s comforting — and largely correct — to think of the world as place filled with peace and goodness. But the hard fact is that there are some truly evil people out there with the capability and will to do great harm. There is no better example than Vladimir Putin.

Once again, we’ve learned the necessity of confronting evil with strength. Some believe that for now our safest course in opposing the Russian assault is to impose strict economic sanctions. Others (I’m one) believe that our dealings with Putin have been unnecessarily timid.

We don’t yet know how this chapter will end. But there is no longer any question about Putin’s capacity for evil. Nor is Putin alone on the list of international villains — along with his reckless attack on the Ukraine, we’re seeing ominously aggressive behavior in China, Iran, and North Korea.

Gone for good is the quaint notion that maintaining the world’s best military is an outdated luxury. In this dangerous age, it’s job one.

Energy independence. We are the land of plenty, blessed with abundant resources, industrial might and technological know-how. So, it is pure folly to depend on other nations (and particularly potential adversaries) to provide the fuel needed to keep our country going — an unnecessary, self-inflicted vulnerability.

Achieving American energy independence demands a balanced climate change policy. Climate change is a big deal. But it’s not the only big deal. The prevailing narrative — that abrupt cessation of fossil fuel use is needed to address long-term climate change — both exaggerates the threat and badly understates the consequences of not doing so.

However well intended, climate actions that drive fuel supplies down and prices up cause grievous harm to real people, today, in exchange for miniscule (if any) future climate benefit. Those consequences are already apparent in European nations that went too far, too fast, in scrubbing nuclear and fossil fired plants from their energy portfolios. Here in the U.S., absent dramatic policy change, we are headed in the same direction.

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry’s recent remark — that Russian invasion of Ukraine will “distract” us from the war on climate change — was both correct and stunningly nonsensical. Yes, it will, John, and it should. First things first.

A healthy economy. Inflation is the cruelest, most regressive of all taxes, paid almost entirely by the poor. For too long, we’ve based our nation’s economic and monetary policies on the implicit premise that massive deficit spending can be funded by ever-expanding GNP growth and ready availability of low-interest money. We didn’t worry about inflation; now we do.

Our elected representatives may still wish to shower their constituencies with expensive favors, but now are beginning to recognize their financial and political consequences.

The specter of nuclear war.* The one truly existential threat facing mankind is that posed by thousands of nuclear warheads in the hands of modern-day barbarians.

The threat of nuclear annihilation has been hanging over our heads for so long that we’ve learned to look the other way. We fool ourselves into believing that because the consequences of nuclear war are so incomprehensibly horrible, no one would ever set them in motion. Call it whistling past the graveyard.

Now we recognize that we cannot trust Putin or his ilk to refrain from unleashing their last, best atrocity.

Right now, I can think of no way to dissemble the nuclear threat, no way to disarm safely (unilateral nuclear disarmament would be suicidal), and no way to unlearn the nuclear technology available to anyone who wants it. But we’re out of time. The world must find a way to step back from the nuclear threshold. And I don’t believe that can happen without U.S. leadership.

Perhaps the sobering reality of ongoing carnage in the Ukraine will lead to more cold-eyed clarity in our collective thinking and less partisan myopia. Maybe we’ll even start to pull together.