That's nice and all but that doesn't respond to anything I said, which was that NATO expansion isn't so much US Empire building as it is Russia's neighbors all having every right to consider Russia an utterly untrustworthy existential threat, and that the modern Kremlin does nothing to suggest otherwise.
The U.S. War Machine is the biggest in the world, with over 700 military installations worldwide and a budget that's greater than that of multiple military powers combined. It has been engaged in decades of mayhem worldwide, and joined by its NATO allies:
The Costs of War Project is a team of 35 scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners, and physicians, which began its work in 2011. We use research and a public website to facilitate debate about the costs of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
watson.brown.edu
Hence, military adventurism with NATO in Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. That expansionist views have reached a point that they even considered opening shop in Asia:
Japan and NATO are already working together on new technologies and on efforts to safeguard the new domains of cyber, outer space and other vectors.
www.japantimes.co.jp
One has to be utterly naive not to see this as encirclement.
It considers not only Russia but China as a threat because they together with BRICS and the Global South are creating a multipolar global economy. The U.S. wants a unipolar one, where it remains top dog:
en.wikipedia.org
and that's been going on since the early 1990s.
Before that was the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, which called for support for authoritarian regimes that side with the U.S.:
en.wikipedia.org
and it's connected to the previously mentioned doctrine plus others because they are based on realpolitik, which is the main driver of the U.S. empire.
The gist is that the U.S. needs to protect the dollar in order to maintain decades of borrowing and spending, and the only way to do that is to ensure that the value of the dollar remains high. To do that given a lot of dollar creation, it has to keep other countries weak. And the two policies needed to ensure the latter are the military industrial complex and structural adjustment via the IMF and WB.
But the Global South has become stronger,
Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty but can the middle class continue to grow?
www.bbc.com
leading to a multipolar world that is becoming less dependent on the dollar and on the U.S., including G-7, and that's something that the 10 pct of Americans that own 70 pct of the the country's total wealth
The wealthiest Americans control a growing slice of the wealth pie.
finance.yahoo.com
can't afford to see happen.