No my entire argument doesn't ignore that, I said explicitly that NATO and Obama's light touch on Putin after 2014 absolutely is a reason why we are here right now. I think that was a big test for NATO and they failed, and Putin saw that. Obama's handling of 2014 is exactly why Putin was so brazen in interfering with the 2016 election; he knew if he got caught Obama wouldn't do anything about it and he was 100% right. That was Obama's weakness.

2014 should have been a wakeup call. 2014 was Putin dipping his toe into the water to see how the world would respond to an invasion, and IMO it wasn't harsh enough. But I don't think this had given Putin enough confidence to conduct the full-on invasion that he is right now. Then 2016 happened. Before 2016 Republicans were still staunchly very anti-Russia, as had been their traditional Cold-War position. Communism and authoritarianism: bad; Capitalism and democracy: good. That was the Republican party position in 2016. Not after Trump's nomination. At that point they turned from an anti-Russia party to the "Russia isn't all that bad, let's be friends with them" party. They removed military support for Ukraine from their party agenda at Trump's behest, at a time when his campaign manager and family was secretly meeting with Russians in his home. 2016-2020 was 4 years of the American right explicitly signaling to Putin that they would rather be aligned with him than European democracies, especially and in particular Ukraine.

To summarize my entire argument, it's that because of his own personal ambitions, Trump attempted to realign America with an axis of global dictators rather than our traditional democratic allies in Europe, and in doing so severely weakened NATO's standing because America as the largest economic and military power in the world is the key to that alliance.