What’s striking is that after years of deep political divisions over foreign policy and the United States’ role in the world, hardly anyone with power in Washington has suggested otherwise. Putin’s potential invasion of Ukraine has instead exposed a rare point of consensus between Democrats and Republicans: The U.S. isn’t going to war to stop him.

“There are some things we have to be clear about, and one of them is that the American people, frankly, will not support sending hundreds of thousands of Americans to Ukraine,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee who visited Ukraine earlier this month, told me. “My constituents are not going to support an Afghanistan- or Iraq-level deployment of forces, and we have to be honest about that.” Another Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, told me that to threaten war with a nuclear power like Russia would be “a huge mistake.”

Even traditionally hawkish Republicans have stopped well short of calling for a war footing. “The Ukrainians are not asking for American troops to come to Ukraine,” Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, the Republican co-chair of the Senate Ukraine Caucus, said Sunday on Meet the Press. “They’re not asking for our troops, nor is anybody talking about that.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, appearing on Face the Nation, backed a deployment of troops to reinforce NATO and urged Biden to implement more and tougher sanctions on Russia, but that’s as far as he went.