Some people in Washington are very upset that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) doesn’t think the United States should want Ukraine in NATO. This includes the White House, where Press Secretary Jen Psaki dismissed the lawmaker’s concerns — that NATO membership would make the 100,000 thousand Russian troops along the Ukrainian border a much bigger U.S. problem than it is right now — as “Russian misinformation” and “Russian talking points.”

In another climate, this might be considered McCarthyism. Now it’s just par for the course, part of nonsensical U.S. policy on Ukraine, which keeps the Eastern European nation in a weird limbo that guarantees neither U.S. defense of Ukraine nor peace for the United States.