Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your Tuesday foreign policy edition. I’m Julia Ioffe, and there’s a reason my newsletter used to be called Tomorrow Will Be Worse.

Tonight’s main event, in addition to Abby’s report on the McConnell succession games, is Vladimir Putin’s 57th presidential inauguration.

But first…

9 Thoughts on the campus protests: People keep asking me for my thoughts about the campus protests. My main thought is: Many things can be true simultaneously. Here are a few things I believe to be true.

1. People have a right to protest. The violent dispersal of these largely peaceful protests is both abhorrent and counterproductive. Even if you disagree with the protests, you can’t not see that...

The televised ceremony had cameras catching Putin in his Kremlin office, looking stiltedly at...