In the event of another Trump presidency (or a successor in spirit) getting cut off for military purposes is probably more like expected, and in a post-NATO world Russia might get a lot more aggressive towards western Europe. That's probably what is behind most such time horizons right now, but even in the mid to long term, rocket tech will remain highly strategic (e.g. for nuclear weapon delivery), and capabilities like that need to be built up well before any conflict escalates.
If your dream is to restore Russia to its imperial greatness, there's an awful lot of EU countries that need to be gobbled up along the way, so France is quite likely to be willing to help a Russian-Estonia war even without NATO.
NATO is only a threat to Russia insofar as it poses an obstacle to Russia gobbling up its neighbors.
NATO is purely defensive, it won't invade Russia. It only threatens Putin's empire rebuilding dreams. Without NATO he is free to rebuild and expand Russia's empire.
The point is it was never going to launch an attack on that certain very large country to the East. All the rhetorical moaning and puffing of its current incredibly thin-skinned and backward-looking regime notwithstanding.
The main thing is that Russia needs to pull its troops out of all of Ukraine; return those 20,000 abducted kids; set and adhere to a timetable for paying full reparations; and re-affirm its commitment to respecting the inviolable sovereignty of all of its neighbors, permanently and irrevocably.
After that we can dissect past NATO transgressions, and fix all the poorly thought / ahistorical comments on HN.
And Germany once thought it "needed" to regain its colonies, and France once thought its very survival would be threatened if it didn't hold onto Algeria, and so on.
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.
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.
