With whom are you?

Checks and balances Mega. NATO must be kept in check as well, surely you don’t believe in giving absolute world power to a niche club where you must pay to get in.
Balance of power.
And don’t be mistaken, NATO is just United States & Company, your country doesn’t even pay the share they agreed to, you will not be protected.

You say, it's gotten to the point, where if someone attacks a member, everyone will have to defend them at all costs. Yes, that's the point. It's always been the point. It was created to defend against the spread of communism. Russia is not a communist country; the Soviet Union was. I have a couple of questions. Which NATO countries have been attacked? Which countries has NATO attacked?

I didn’t make this post

Exactly! If anything has been shown, it is that we need way more NATO.

Do you think a century of atheism makes the Russian people cold and desirable of a dictator, or do you think the dictators and marxism for 100 years makes the Russians that way?

Well a psychopath, yes. But we have both fundamental and immediate causes working together here. Fundamentally, Putin sees his southern neighbors as occupying ancient Russian land established during the Ottoman Empire.

The immediate cause is Russian counter-intelligence reporting that covert CIA operatives have spent 10 years training Ukrainian military trainers on how to teach the public to cut supply lines with home made weaponry.

You would think Putin would be less emotional and make necessary improvements to Russian counter-measures. But, his irrational paranoia kicked in. Putin will just destroy civilian targets, get bored with the situation and go home after a year and a half. This is the same shit as Beirut and Afghanistan.

Sun Tsu, the military mastermind behind Gengis Khan’s successes would be utterly disgusted with Putin’s lack of strategic thinking. I am equally disgusted as well.

By the way, although the Ukrainian government is becoming more libertarian, my humble opinion is that top Ukrainian officials are still too corrupt to be considered for NATO membership.

It's possible that Putin is "crazy" in a clinical sense, but I doubt it.

There are plenty of signs that his view of reality is adrift from the historical and current facts, but we're all guilty of that to some extent. And as the old line goes, it's not paranoia if there really are lots of people out to get you. Through Putin's entire life, there have always been people who wanted to get him in one way or another, and he's spent his whole political life getting rid of his enemies - often in permanent ways. So it's not irrational for him to feel paranoid.

National security agencies might have a fairly clear idea of what exactly is going on inside Putin's clique of gangsters, thugs and enablers, but it's difficult for us in the general public to know. For what it's worth, there have been a couple of stories that came out recently which are interesting.

The first is that Putin has fired and replaced something like 1,000 of the lowly flunkies who come into regular contact with him and his family. These were personal staff such as cooks, kitchen staff, waiters, housekeepers, and so on. For what it's worth, I've also read that Putin now has a food-taster. Given the well-known history of Putin ordering that his political enemies be assassinated by things like nerve agents and Polonium, this isn't shocking, but it could indicate that he's very aware that he's skating close to the edge of oblivion.

The other story is that Putin has had some of the senior people in the intelligence services arrested (quite possibly on bogus charges, as is the norm in Russia) and put in home detention. Apparently, these were the people who assured him that Ukraine would collapse in a matter of hours if Russia invaded. Who knows if they were incompetent and failed to correctly read the general mood and grasp the military capabilities of Ukraine, or if Putin was so fixated on taking over Ukraine that he bullied them into telling him what he wanted to hear. In any case, it seems that in Putin's mind, they're responsible for his totally stupid decision to attack.

There have been stories about other members of Putin's gang of crooks not being seen recently. Nobody would be shocked if there have been a number of completely unexpected heart attacks, accidental falls down elevator shafts and inexplicable suicides amongst that group in recent days.

Possibly the best we can hope for at this point is that Putin decides that he can trust absolutely nobody, and he starts trying to micromanage everything. Once autocratic systems reach that state, things inevitably start to fall apart, and it's common for a group of seriously disgruntled underlings to decide that their interests would be best served if the boss was eliminated.