The so-called foreign-policy realists must think the American people are stupid, or cowards.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard wants you to know something that’s, in her words, “absolutely true: Zelensky has been trying to drag the United States into a nuclear war with Russia/WW3 for years now.”

During the campaign, JD Vance claimed, “I think in reality that if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now.”

That’s ridiculous, pathetic rhetoric, of course — but it is totally in line with the juvenile thinking of Gabbard, Vance, and their sophomoric allies. It’s the same absurd “logic” that brings Vance to claim that Liz Cheney wants to “kill thousands of children” and send “other people’s children off to fight and die for her military conflicts” so that she could “get rich when America’s sons and daughters go off to die.”

It’s the same through-the-looking-glass balderdash that makes elected officials and Trump administration appointees endorse with hosannas Trump’s declaration that Volodymyr Zelensky is a “dictator” and that Ukraine started the war with Russia.

There is an entirely legitimate argument that America’s interests are best served by focusing on Asia, putting our commitments to Ukraine in the proper balance, and getting the Europeans to step up in the defense of their own Continent. It’s a view that is not only respectable, it’s one that I hold.

So why don’t Vance, Gabbard, and so many of their realist comrades make that argument, and defend it? Why must they insist on saying, out loud, that those with whom they disagree politically want a nuclear war that will kill tens of millions?

These arguments — these lies — are the very same loathsome and vile accusations that left-wingers used to hurl at Republicans and Republican voters for years. It was stupid and infantile then, and it’s stupid and infantile now.

Do you know who most certainly does not want a nuclear war with Russia? The Ukrainians! They know that any such war will be fought out on their own soil and among their own people. It would lead to the utter destruction of their nation.

Adults accept that there are trade offs to every decision. But to the Manichean realists, there is only good and evil, black and white: The Ukrainians want to drag America into an utterly catastrophic and destructive Third World War (not merely to secure a cease fire that will be worth more than the paper it’s written on). Mike Pence wants a nuclear war with Russia. The horrible neocons want “to kill thousands of children.” Vladimir Zelensky hopes the war will go on and on, so that he can get rich, or something.

(Notice that the first and last of those arguments would seem to me to be mutually exclusive.) If it weren’t so juvenile, so petty, so pathetic, it’d be laughable.

My own view is that the ideal real-world outcome for Ukraine, as of today, is that Ukraine’s post cease-fire security is built on the post-1953 armistice model of South Korea — but with deployments of Euro troops instead of Americans as the U.S. concentrates on the Pacific — to train and backstop the Ukrainians as they try to rebuild their country in the shadow of a hostile imperial power. The Russians will retain de facto control over what they currently occupy. The other five-sixths of Ukraine will be protected by Western power and resources.

Is that solution entirely without risk? Of course not. Nothing in life is without risk. Will it be entirely cost free on a resources basis for the United States? Probably not.

But presenting a plan, even if it has some drawbacks, is what adults do when confronted with a set of options that have major downsides as well as upsides, that are a mixed bag, that will make no one entirely happy.

The “realists” like JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard don’t actually believe that Zelensky and Ukraine, or their American supporters, have been trying to drag the U.S. into a nuclear war because they want one. That would be imbecilic.

But they don’t mind resorting to a little rhetorical blackmail — because they think the American people are too stupid to weigh the pros and cons of a complicated situation.