Within 24 hours of the tense Oval Office exchange between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was ready to put “boots on the ground” in Ukraine. Such a sharp reversal of policy is shocking enough, but Starmer’s words speak to a more profound truth about this conflict — and war in general.

Despite NATO supplying Kyiv with sophisticated lethal military equipment for the last 18 months, it took more than a decade of Russian occupation and hundreds of thousands of casualties to reach this point. Moreover, it seems that if the Western world wants to repel imperialists, it may need to send its own soldiers to do so. American strategy has long recognized this inconvenient truth.

Every major war in which the U.S. participated between 1945 and 2001 was in defense of another nation’s territorial integrity, and none of those nations were NATO members. When North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel to invade their southern neighbor in June 1950, President Harry Truman sent the Eighth Army to push them back.

Despite Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s desire for total victory in Korea, the Truman administration believed such a war might trigger a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, which had just tested its first atomic bomb. In turn, limiting Washington’s goals to repelling the attack seemed logical — and it worked.

When North Vietnam threatened South Vietnam in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson sent divisions there to

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