18 January—First, the Sunday Republican asked readers: “Are you OK with the University of Connecticut requiring vaccines to attend their basketball games?” Fifty-eight percent thought it was, while 40 percent thought otherwise and the remaining two percent weren’t sure (or didn’t care).

My only problem with the survey doesn’t have a thing to do with whether vaccines have rights, to be sure, but, rather, how can vaccines be required to do anything at all, let alone attend basketball games? Doesn’t everything vaccines do actually depend wholly and solely upon who’s pushing the syringe plunger?

More meatily, then, Senators Richie Blumenthal and Christopher Murphy, who along with other unmentionables of both political persuasions are visiting Ukraine on taxpayer dollars, once again emphasized America’s support for that country in the face of possible—perhaps even probable—Russian aggression, which Moscow naturally laughs off. Great. So what else is new? No surprise that Joe Biden agrees.

In fact, virtually everybody agrees that Ukraine deserves our support. Over half the Americans asked would even be willing to send our troops to defend Ukraine against further Russian incursions. Sure, right now we’re sending over minimal “security assistance”—matériel, mostly small arms and ammo—but in reality we’re simply giving Kyiv (formerly Kiev, usually mispronounced, wherefore the new English spelling) lip service with no binding commitments.

All the American pols promise severe sanctions and consequences should Russia do the dirty. And they’re serious and doubtless mean what they say, however strange that may sound. But does Putin really give a bloody damn about sanctions? Consequences and sanctions aren’t going to faze him should they be invoked; and he certainly isn’t going to be scared by political hot air.

So why the hell doesn’t the United States do something substantive—or anything at all—to get Ukraine into NATO? NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—implements the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, a collective security pact in which the member states—which now number 30, up from the original 12—have agreed to mutual defense in response to attacks by any external party, implicitly the Soviet Union back then.

Simply put, the essence of NATO is that an attack against one ally is considered to be an attack against all allies. That’s enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Article 5 has been invoked only once, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Last summer, Joe Biden, on his way to Brussels for a NATO summit, promised to “make it clear that the United States’s commitment to our NATO alliance and Article 5 is rock solid. It’s a sacred obligation that we have under Article 5.” As if anybody knew what Article 5 was in the first place. Ukraine didn’t even come into the equation, of course.

And who can doubt that NATO’s current members, including the United States, want to keep Ukraine out of the equation lest admitting that poor besieged country would lead to another hot war? 9/11 didn’t, to be sure, but Russia and China weren’t the aggressors then.

On the other hand, consider that George Washington, in his farewell address, reminded us, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” And, at his inauguration four years later, Thomas Jefferson pledged: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”

So what are we gonna do? Ukraine obviously needs more than lip service and small arms . . .