This right there. NATO, in its original context, was largely obsolete after 1991. The threat that it was engineered to defend against was gone. The day the t

This right there. NATO, in its original context, was largely obsolete after 1991. The threat that it was engineered to defend against was gone. The day the tricolour went up over Moscow, we should have started drafting a post-NATO organization which explicitly included Russia (and the more stable/functional/too-armed-too-ignore post-Soviet states) as equal partners. This would have been important both geopolitically and psychologically. The message should have been clear: we are now on the same team. If someone joins our bloc, we both win. Let's focus on the threats we face (i. e. perpetual Middle East instability, or retiring the Soviet weapons that ended up in unstable hands) together. Then you don't have 30 years of every NATO and EU expansion being easily interpreted as a dismantling of the historic Russian/Soviet sphere of influence.