The US once thought it needed to prevent Soviet nukes from appearing on Cuba, almost started WW3 over it and got what it needed.

That's what I mean by backward-looking. Putin is so obsessed with his perceived stature and "correcting" past humiliations that he's willing to create a completely fictional crisis and drive his country into a never-ending meatgrinder war just to prove some abstract geopolitical point.

Perhaps you don't know that the US in turn had to remove its nukes from Turkey and Italy.

This just goes to show how incomparable the situation is with the Cuban missile crisis. The US has nothing to remove, because their nuclear weapons stand where they stood 40 years ago.