No. of Recommendations: 2
Yeah, NATO helps keep the peace. It's not a threat. It helps keep the peace because attacking a NATO member is suicide, and -to my knowledge- two democracies have never gone to war with each other. At least one player is an autocracy in every case (possibly excepting civil wars, like the US Civil War). Which feeds back into the "suicide" angle of NATO. Putin isn't going to attack Finland -for example- because he'll face the full weight of NATO. Meanwhile, unless Finland can make a good case, NATO wouldn't support them attacking Moscow. They could do it, but that wouldn't automatically bring in NATO.
He only dared attack Ukraine because Ukraine was NOT in NATO. So a lot of countries are sending materiel, but no one is sending troops and air superiority (which we could do easily...but we aren't, and probably shouldn't). If Ukraine was NATO, we'd be obligated to send in the Marines (and SAS, and USAF, and the RN and everything else from everyone else).
I note that a lot of Russians don't support the conflict either. On the order of a million Russians have fled Russia-proper, going to Georgia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and other neighboring countries, as well as coming to Mexico to apply for entry into the USA. Read an interesting article just today that the former Soviet republics are experiencing a surge in economic growth because most of those Russian refugees have skills (like IT), and they're applying those skills in their new homelands.
