Josh Hawley, the junior senator from Missouri, has fomented the ire of the American foreign policy blob and its trustees by asking them to acknowledge simple truths they have ignored for decades. First, that NATO membership for Ukraine offers little strategic advantage to U.S. national interests. The second, that the epicenter of world politics no longer lies in the Middle East or Europe, but the Indo-Pacific.

For merely asking the regime to acknowledge these realities, which he outlined in a Wednesday letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Hawley was smeared as a peddler of “Russian misinformation and parroting Russian talking points” from “Russian propagandist leaders,” by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

Other stewards of the status quo, like Washington Post Columnist Jennifer Rubin, piled on. In her latest screed for the Post, titled “Josh Hawley seeks to be Putin’s new favorite pet,” Rubin also accuses Hawley of “adopt[ing] the talking points of Trump’s favorite dictator, Russian President Vladimir Putin”:

As President Biden draws a tough stance against Putin’s designs on Ukraine and deploys troops to our NATO allies, Hawley has taken Putin’s side in the central dispute. Does Ukraine have a right to determine its alliance? Hawley’s answer: Nyet!

Rubin then quotes Hawley’s letter and suggests it made “Putin blush” before offering a few more praises to the status quo, though Rubin makes no real attempt to explain why the current bargain benefits U.S. interests.

Surely, Hawley should wear these criticisms with pride, if he pays them any mind at all. Their attempt to write off Hawley’s letter should tell you it merits serious consideration. Hawley, like other observers in recent years, recognizes that the focal point of world politics has shifted back to the Indo-Pacific, but Hawley is positioned better than most to shape the right’s foreign policy perspective in this reinvigorated domain.

Hawley writes:

The world of 2008 is gone. Today, an increasingly powerful China seeks hegemony in the Indo-Pacific. If China succeeds, it could harness that region’s resources to further propel its rise, while restricting U.S. access to many of the world’s most important markets. Americans’ security and prosperity rest upon our ability to keep that from happening, and so the United States must shift resources to the Indo-Pacific to deny China’s bid for regional domination. This means the United States can no longer carry the heavy burden it once did in other regions of the world – including Europe. To the contrary, we must do less in those secondary theaters in order to prioritize denying China’s hegemonic ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.

Hawley does not suggest that Ukrainian sovereignty is meaningless, or that its territorial integrity deserves to be violated, as his critics would have you believe. Rather, Hawley finds that U.S interests in Ukraine do not, “justify committing the United States to go to war with Russia over Ukraine’s fate.”

Yet, the regime insists on keeping military options on the table and refuses to offer the Russians a moratorium or outright veto on NATO membership for Ukraine, which would add another security dependent to the U.S.-led alliance—more so than it is already. Hawley rightly perceives the regime’s obsession with Ukraine as a stand in for their doctrinaire battle for liberal democracy as a grave mistake.

More from Hawley’s letter:

Already, President Biden has announced that the United States will send more conventional forces to Europe, if Russia invades Ukraine. Such a deployment can only detract from the U.S. military’s ability to ready and modernize forces to deter China in the Indo-Pacific. But those opportunity costs pale in comparison to what would be expected – indeed, required – of the United States, were NATO actually to admit Ukraine as a member. China’s rise has collapsed basic assumptions in U.S. foreign policy. The legacy of a bygone era, the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s prospective membership in NATO demands particular scrutiny.

As the U.S. catches up to the fact that the main geopolitical playing field has shifted further away from Washington, closing NATO’s open door policy is certainly a step in the right direction. For one, it will ease tensions with Russia, easing the United States’ shifting focus to the Indo-Pacific. While Russia has been patching up its relationship with China though settling border disputes and increased trade, this fledgling relationship is not yet a fully-formed axis against the United States. It’s not too late for America and her allies in Europe to convince Russia that China is the West’s main strategic challenger. As an added bonus, this will also incentivize European states to start meaningfully investing in their own defense.

Some Europeans have also acknowledged the need for a real pivot to the Indo-Pacific. Like Hawley, they’ve been met with condemnation. German Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach was recently forced to step down as Germany’s chief of the Navy after remarks he made to the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. China, Schönbach claimed, is “a growing hegemonic power” that presents “systemic” challenges. To meet those challenges, “we need Russia.” For this, Schönbach was fired.

For an Indo-Pacific pivot to occur in any meaningful way, it requires the liberal idealists that make up the foreign policy blob to reconceptualize America’s alliances—an unlikely development, given the current administration. One may recall President Barack Obama said he’d be “the first Pacific president,” recognizing a needed transition to the Indo-Pacific, though his administration failed to follow through. Now, Obama’s former V.P. is the president, bringing many familiar faces from the Obama administration back into power. Biden has served as a useful mouthpiece for the establishment’s status quo, though he occasionally has realist reflexes. His main foreign policy pitch on the 2020 campaign trail was to repair allegedly broken alliances with European leaders, and his administration has gone so far as to suggest these relationships are “sacrosanct.”

America’s window is closing to make an effective pivot to the Indo-Pacific that can rein in Chinese influence. If we fail, then Hawley’s China fears, outlined in a May 2020 speech on the senate floor, may come to pass:

This is China’s policy: to control Asia and to rule the Pacific. From there, the Chinese government wants to spread its influence to Africa, to Europe, to South America—a master of home and abroad. And they are well on their way.

China is well on its way, but Hawley’s fears don’t have to become reality. If they do, it will be because of conscious decisions, like wasting time on distractions in Ukraine, made by the managers of the American decline.