1. The thing about NATO expansion is that it provided the context for what happened in Georgia and what is happening in the Ukraine. Given this, the argument that the elimination of NATO would have prevented both conflicts is equally if not more valid than the NATO is necessary argument.
2. Great powers, including the US, always engage in state sponsored aggression in covert and overt ways. I am not sure any organisation, including the UN, can put an end to this reality at this point in time. Nationalism, after all, is a religion and it is, thanks to its apologetics and polemics (demagoguery), a powerful constructed faith which can turn even intelligent people into faithful red faced emotionally driven rageoholics. Periodic inquisitions and purges in the US point this fact up again and again.
3. One has to look at imperialism on the descriptive level. Only then can one make normative judgements. One cannot ignore the past or present behaviours of any great power, including the US, and let's not forget that the US and its groupies helped destabilise the Ukraine over the years and was involved in a coup which overthrew an "elected" (I recognise that using the terms election and the Ukraine in the same sentence is problematic in all cases) government in 2013. and 2014. Given this descriptive reality one cannot avoid, normatively, putting some of the blame on the US mame.
4. Power is a drug. And it is a drug that one can find everywhere including in the US, past, present, and, I suspect, in the future.
5. On a normative level, I think a secular Calvinism is the most realistic approach to viewing human life, all human life, including that in the US. Humans, it seems to me and as history seems to show, are pretty skanky and slaggy. Flim flam capitalism and American and Russian imperialism are just two recent examples of human skankiness and slagginess. That said, one also has to go native and understand, for example, Russian paranoia, a paranoia grounded in the realities of the two world wars. Going native shows that both the US and Russia are imperialist great powers, oligarchies, bureaucratic societies (and hence oligarchic) with cultural ideologies of exceptionalism, messianism, and global mission.
6.
By the way, I don't think that finlandisation of the Ukraine is a
problem. I doubt if the Ukraine will ever be Finland economically or
politically, but I find this proposal, one Putin has, according to
sources made, a reasonable and rational one and probably the best one
given the circumstances. It is fascinating that the US apparently dismissed this reasonable, rational, and pragmatic proposal out of hand.
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