From Putin’s point of view, NATO’s campaign in support of the rebels in Libya in 2011 appeared duplicitous, to say the least. The intervention exceeded what the United States had agreed to with Russia under the relevant U.N. Security Council resolution, and led to the death of Muammar Qaddafi. Then came Vice President Joe Biden’s stated opposition—declared in Moscow, no less—to Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Putin’s suspicion that the United States had backed mass protests against him in 2011 and 2012, and the occasional backhanded insult from President Obama (who has said Putin acts like a “bored kid in the back of a classroom,” and that Russia is no more than a “regional power” that threatens its neighbors out of “weakness”). Seen through Russia’s eyes, this adds up to decades of humiliation, dished out by a triumphalist United States eager to draw attention to its shrunken sphere of influence, question the legitimacy of its government, and treat the country as if it were, in Putin’s words, “vassal” of the West—not the Great Power it had been since the days of Peter the Great.

After the Maidan protest movement led to the ouster of Ukraine’s President Yanukovych in early 2014, tensions, provocations, and military maneuvers, escalated dramatically between Russia and the West, especially following the annexation of Crimea. NATO now plans to station (or, officially, rotate in and out, to avoid violating the NATO-Russia Founding Act) four battalions in the Baltic states and Poland. In May, a NATO-operated missile defense shield went online in Romania. During the Cold War, such shields were regarded as inherently destabilizing and were mostly banned. But in 2001, the United States announced plans to withdraw unilaterally from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty it had signed with the Soviet Union 30 years before. Russia considers the missile defense system a threat to its nuclear deterrent, and yet one more reminder of NATO’s encroaching military might.

It’s fair to ask why NATO, in the absence of a Soviet or Soviet-level threat, or any real public debate, has been expanding beyond its historical mandate. As far back as 1993, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar announced that NATO had to “go out of area or out of business.” After 9/11, it did indeed go out of area—to Afghanistan. By 2011, though, conservative columnist George Will was warning that, with the NATO-coordinated no-fly-zone over Libya, the alliance “which could long ago have unfurled a ‘mission accomplished’ banner, is now an instrument of addlepated mischief.” Will advised that, when this misadventure is finished, “America needs a national debate about whether NATO should be finished. Times change.”

Or they should have. A movement to abolish or reform NATO has yet to emerge; any such proposal would entail a sober reassessment of U.S. security interests and political realities. What if Russia did, in fact, attack the Baltics? Would the United States risk a nuclear holocaust and go to war with Russia over Tallinn or Riga? Most Americans would likely respond by asking where those cities are, and why they should die for them (at least one Russian security expert has credibly proposed that the Kremlin understands this, and could call the United States’ bluff). NATO’s decision to invite the Baltics to join, when we now know that Russia could seize the region in 60 hours, seems, to say the least, short-sighted, and predicated on Russia remaining as weak and passive as it was in the Yeltsin years. Far from making NATO stronger, inducting the Baltics may have turned Article 5 into a dead letter, and “the most important military alliance in world history,” as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has called it, into a paper tiger.