Well what you describe is not far from what i think would be the ideal situation. You just had to change Ukraine with Baltic, Poland and Romania.
See thats what i was trying to tell ya. Russia wont accept Ukraine being a NATO territory. So we should instead had fortified existing NATO member lands along the eastern european border. Let Belarus and Ukraine stay as buffer and it may actually give Putin less room to manouver his policies. Because most Russians are not dumb. Putin only echoes what is already roaming in the average Russian mind: the fear of a NATO creeping closer to their border and one day attack weapons like missilies and so on just a few km from Russian border.
So the danger here is that we should be content with letting larger and more powerful countries dictate the independence of smaller and weaker countries.
Hold on...!!! Am not criticizing your argument but stating geopolitical realities. For ease of discussion, am going to conflate government and its people into a single entity -- for now.
Americans at large cannot identify with the fear of living with a hostile neighbor. For the entirety of the US existence, the absence of that fear is politically inherited from the previous generation, and from the previous generation, and regressively back to the country's founding. Political scientists have argued that absence is critical component of why Americans tends to be an optimistic and even overly idealistic people. As a naturalized US citizen, I have experienced both worlds, one where the people is constantly fearful of a neighbor and one where the people is essentially naive. Am generalizing here.
What you are asking for America to accept -- geopolitical buffer states -- is anathema to the American ethos, and here is the kicker, immigrants who came to America and established new lives, they cannot impart what they feared to their children. No way how. They left for America so that their children would not have to live like they have. The fear of an ever hostile neighbor can only be learned thru experience, never thru academia. It is like asking Mongolians to build a navy while disregarding the fact that Mongolia is landlocked. Even a riverine boatman have a better foundation for the seas than Americans can guess what it is like living next to an ideological opposite. And no one can ask Americans to imagine Canadians and Mexicans as angry giants eager to subjugate them.
But the American problem of geopolitical naivete is separate from what
YOU and your fellow Euros must deal with, namely, how do you Euros are certain that Russia will be content with just a few buffer states? Does CONEUR history supports your contention that Russia will be so satisfied? You cannot dismiss history because all tyrants with expansionist dreams looked to history to support whatever might be their claims. That Ukraine resists should be seen as a challenge to history. Given technological progress, how far away is your Norway from Russia's expansionist threat? Not very, according to the map. If NATO is a shield, does it mean it is the only one? Or should it be the only one? Strengthening NATO is good, but several countries, including major France, have contemplated leaving NATO. What if NATO disband due to lack of interests? The US will be safe from Russian's aggression, but not your Norway.
In this little corner of the internet, you are willing to sacrifice Ukraine to Russia. So do many others. But their countries are far from Russia. Yours is not.
