Like the weather, everybody complains about President Putin and nobody does anything about him. National security is mostly absent from America’s discourse as we pick our next commander in chief. One foreign policy issue, the Mideast, occasionally crops up. Democrats and Republicans accuse each other of abetting Moscow. Meanwhile, Mr. Putin is methodically progressing on a dream he has harbored from day one: Reinstating the Soviet bloc.

Vice President Harris accuses President Trump of admiring Mr. Putin, claiming he considers the Kremlin strongman his friend. “What about the American people? They should be your first friend,” she told comedian Stephen Colbert. Yet when Trump says the Ukraine invasion wouldn’t have happened if he were president, he has a point: It didn’t. As he often notes, too, he had reversed President Obama’s denial of offensive arms to Kyiv.

Mr. Putin is watching our political disagreements with a hint of amusement. “Our ‘favorite,’ if you can call it that, was the current president, Mr. Biden,” he told an audience at Vladivostok, the Associated Press reports. He would support Ms. Harris, Mr. Putin added, as Trump imposed “so many restrictions and sanctions against Russia like no other president has ever introduced before him.” Was he sincere or, typically, sarcastic and manipulative?

While the Kremlin strongman is having fun with our democratic process, he also is making gains in central and Eastern Europe. The svengalis who run Mr. Biden’s foreign policy are flummoxed. As our James Brooke writes today, “The Kremlin, it seems, is playing chess while Washington plays checkers” while voters in two former Soviet republics, Moldova and Georgia, “are being frightened into voting for pro-Russian candidates.”

That is despite the fact that in these countries “opinion polls routinely register pro-European majorities,” Mr. Brooke writes. Using ballot manipulations, cash payments to voters, and old-fashioned street thuggery, Mr. Putin is slowly gobbling up the former Soviet Socialist Republics. Other than the Baltic states, which are already within the European sphere, the countries that once were trapped east of the Iron Curtain are back in play.             

As America focuses on the campaign trail, Mr. Putin is also gaining in Ukraine. During the election’s final stretch, he has recruited North Korean cannon fodder, and seized more ground inside the country. Since July, Russia has eaten up more of Ukraine than at any time since the start of the war, according to the New York Times. In October alone, Mr. Putin gained more territory by far than in any month since July 2022. 

Sorting out our political differences in electoral campaigns is essential for securing America as a constitutional republic. Yet, as we take a months-long vacation from world affairs, the world, like rust, doesn’t sleep. As Mr. Putin marches on, his Iranian allies are plotting their next assault. CNN is reporting that Iran could attack Israel before next Tuesday. Whether that is true or whether it’s another attempt at manipulating our voters is beside the point. 

Whoever wins the election, the next president won’t be sworn until January 20. Until then, Mr. Biden and the aides running his foreign policy will maintain a show of weakness that fuels Mr. Putin’s ambitions in Europe. The Chinese communists, the mullahs in Iran, and the Marxists at Pyongyang see this period as an opportunity. Little unites them other than a desire to weaken America’s global leadership. The Biden years emboldened them.