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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

NATO isn't a defensive alliance, period. It is a mutual security pact.

Here is the actual treaty:

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.ht...

Article 4 is quite deliberately vaguely worded. And the treaty also explains why NATO only got involved in Libya after the UN requested it to.

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I can’t tell if you’re being pedantic here or if you actually substantially disagree with the characterization that it is primarily about the security of Europe against Russian aggression.

That may have been what it was about a long time ago, and I think in light of the current developments that probably will be what it is about again in the present, but in the intermediary that was less strongly a factor than that it was 'The affluent West' against 'the rest'.

Even the Yugoslavian war did not - though it almost happened - ended up pitting NATO against Russia, and I believe that if Russia had followed through on the reforms instead of turning into a Dictatorship/kleptocracy that they just might have joined NATO at some point.

Putin did ask to join NATO in early 2000s, was laughed out of the room.

Rightly so. Dictatorships have no place in modern NATO.

Except it wasn't a dictatorship back then. https://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/russia/16293

Yeltsin named Putin as his successor, the writing was on the wall for much longer, besides little details such as the Chechen war.

Putin was overall very open to the West early on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ

"ask" is quite overstating the case. There were some informal conversations between individuals.

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