I'm confused from how we got to "USA potentially had the ability to prevent the war if they had..." to "This means long before we can talk about Russia maybe feeling threatened by NATO expansion they need to stop the war they started."

USA/west could have made concessions that weren't really concessions (taking Ukraine NATO off the table) before the 2022 invasion. Those concessions may or may not have worked. We're now just supposed to ignore that fact and pretend that it never happened until some point in the future that may never take place?