There’s a basis to this fear. Democrats have unleashed dangerous forces by getting to the GOP’s right on foreign policy before. In 1992, for instance, Bill Clinton criticized George H.W. Bush for not deposing Saddam Hussein. In so doing, he helped lay the foundation for the push for regime change that culminated a decade later in the Iraq War. (A war I mistakenly supported.)

But the problem with downplaying Russian election meddling because you’re afraid it will fuel militarism is that it evades the central question: How worrisome is the meddling itself? When it comes to Russian’s interference in the 2016 election, progressives like Blumenthal are behaving the way many conservatives behave on climate change. Conservatives fear that progressives will use climate change to impose new regulations on the economy. And because they oppose the solution, they claim there’s no problem.

As with climate change, the evidence that Russia interfered in last year’s election appears quite strong. The CIA, the FBI, and the NSA all believe “with high confidence” that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016” designed to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process.” The CIA and FBI also believe with “high confidence”—and the NSA believes with “moderate confidence”—that Putin was trying to elect Trump. They claim the Kremlin did this, in part, by stealing and leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee and top Democratic officials. It also “obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.”

It’s easy to say that because America’s intelligence agencies were wrong about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, progressives shouldn’t believe them now. But there are critical differences. In 2002, the intelligence agencies faced intense pressure from the Bush White House and Pentagon to make Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs seem more menacing. They faced no similar political pressure to exaggerate the severity of Russia’s election meddling.

What’s more, officials in France and Germany say Russia has tried to subvert their elections too. And in his email to Donald Trump Jr., Rob Goldstone, who was arranging a meeting with a lawyer close to figures in the Kremlin, wrote about “Russia and its government’s support of Mr. Trump.” Blumenthal can deride a “bootlicking press and a bootlicking kind of liberal opposition that believes all intelligence agencies.” But Special Counsel Robert Mueller and four congressional committees are investigating the intelligence agencies’ conclusions. By the end of their inquiries, Americans will have a much fuller picture of Russian involvement in last year’s election than they had about Iraqi WMD on the eve of the Iraq War.

Blumenthal and Greenwald have an ideological problem. On foreign policy, they are anti-interventionists, or what Walter Russell Mead calls “Jeffersonians.” They believe that America’s empire threatens not only peace and justice abroad, but liberty at home. They want the United States to stop defending its “imperial” borders in Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East, because they believe such efforts cost Americans money, cost American lives, and create a pretext for surveillance that makes Americans less free.