It's not Russian propaganda to oppose Ukraine joining NATO

Josh Hawley.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

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.

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As for Hawley, he's no stranger to controversy. But weighing whether it advances any American national interest to take on a commitment to go to war over Ukraine is no hot take or wild conspiracy theory. Pledging ourselves to Ukraine would do more rather than less to make our peace and security dependent on Russian President Vladimir Putin's whim.

There are some marginal Putin fetishists on the right, and every anti-war movement contains voices who go too far in whitewashing the bad behavior of targeted foreign governments. But there's also rampant threat inflation among the real decision-makers in Washington and an inability to learn from the mistakes of the last two decades of futile wars, leaning on analogies to older conflicts instead.

However you label them, on this issue, Psaki is wrong, and Hawley is right: Admitting Ukraine into NATO would either be dangerous or reduce the alliance to a paper tiger at the expense of the American taxpayer — and, perhaps, the expense of our soldiers, too.

W. James Antle III

W. James Antle III is the politics editor of the Washington Examiner, the former editor of The American Conservative, and author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?.