NATO membership for Ukraine may still be a distant dream, but the US is continuing to pretend otherwise to keep Kiev in the anti-Russian camp. The question is how long it will be before Ukrainians realize they’ve been conned.
Joined-up government is not one of America’s strong points. While one arm of the system does one thing, the other arm does something different, often entirely contradictory to the first. At times, they even deliberately undermine each other. Different bits of the bureaucracy have different interests, and only the strongest of leaders can somehow push them all in the same direction.