Should criticism of NATO — indeed, questioning its very existence — be taboo? The answer from most media coverage of the just-passed NATO summit and Trump’s meeting with Putin today appears to have been a resounding “yes.” In typical fashion, Trump’s actions over the past week appeared to have moved those opposed to him to swiftly embrace the opposite of whatever his position is — in this case, by rallying around NATO.

Just as Trump’s comment in early 2017 that the alliance was “obsolete” sparked an explosion of fierce, often liberal, denunciations of Trump and defenses of the Cold War-era alliance, so Trump’s veiled threats to leave NATO over the past week or so have driven much of the media to insist on its importance. They’ve done so by citing former diplomats or members of the national security community, and implying or even outright stating that Trump’s skepticism toward NATO is at last the proof that he’s working directly for the Kremlin.

This kind of talk, besides providing further fuel for the fire of Trump-Putin conspiracizing, serves to delineate the boundaries of acceptable debate. In this hurricane of pro-NATO coverage, it’s easy to come away thinking there’s no reasonable case that NATO is obsolete, outdated, part of an American project of maintaining imperial dominance, or that it should be dismantled, or at the very least radically transformed into something other than a military alliance.