My basic understanding of NATO is that it says:

- If any NATO country is invaded by anyone, all NATO countries will go to war to defend it. This doesn't apply if the NATO country is the aggressor.

- It outlines some minimum funding commitments, but those are more aimed towards the non-US countries involved.

I think the main thing is still to deter Russia from literally invading member countries. It's hard to call that far-fetched in light of Russia literally invading Ukraine and, before that, Georgia.

That doesn’t answer the question.

Why should we draft a bunch of folks from South Dakota and Kansas (and let’s be honest here ... folks from New York or SF who write opinion pieces about this aren’t going to be the ones paying blood) to fight Russia? Why can’t these countries defend themselves?

Who is being drafted? It's a volunteer army and we are in basically no wars where our soldiers are at serious risk of wartime death. It's far more common for NATO troops to die helping us in our wars than vice versa.

NATO is a low cost way for us to maintain our geopolitical position as a leader and to maintain a reliable group of military allies in case we need them (yeah, we spend a ton on military, but that is not due to us defending NATO countries from Russia).

A war with Russia would require a draft. It’s ridiculous to think otherwise. Everyone is being evasive and not answering the question, which is: why should a guy from the Midwest die to defend Eastern Europe?

Your point about spending is ignorant and silly. We don’t buy billion dollar submarines to fight Islamists in land locked countries.

That's a meaningless hypothetical. No Americans are dying to defend Eastern Europe. History shows us that treaties are easily discarded in the face of actual war with another great power. But the value of NATO for the US right now is not hypothetical.

You don't buy billion dollar submarines because of NATO either. When the DoD talks about preparing for near-peer adversaries, Russia is not the primary concern. Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?

>When the DoD talks about preparing for near-peer adversaries, Russia is not the primary concern.

Are you kidding? Then what's Grafenwöhr for? Entire procurement strategies have been - and are - focused on countering Russian military hardware (the IAV is just one example - there are plenty of others).

>Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?

You should really reconsider that statement, and which clause follows from the other. This has nothing to do with my first point, which no one seems interested in answering. My original question was attempting to tease out why people think NATO is useful in a post-post Cold War world. I don't think it is, and struggle to understand this obsession with Russia that continues to warp people's perception of the global security situation. Instead people pivot to "well it was actually about reducing the amount of nuclear weapons" or "we would spend that money anyway", neither of which address the fundamental question of whether or not NATO in its present form is useful or whether the US should have to continue shouldering the vast majority of the security responsibility in the Western World.

Near-peer is essentially {Russia, China}. New funding is generally "counter the rise of China", especially in maritime spending, but land force "reset from the counterinsurgency back to fighting a near-peer adversary" is basically Russia.

Because defending themselves would necessarily require acquiring their own nuclear deterrent, and the US correctly realized that a world where every country had nukes was a world where they'd eventually be used. Alliances like NATO reduced the risk of human extinction while pulling countries closer into the US orbit. It's ridiculous to look at that from an ROI perspective; the ROI is not dying in a nuclear war.

I think you need to reevaluate your understanding of Cold War history if the argument you're making is "we started NATO to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons".

Would your argument hold equally for US intervention in Europe in world war 2?

Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. That wasn't a US "intervention".