I agree with you on "now" but NATO expansion and treating Ukraine as a proxy war certainly was aggressionHindsight is 20/20, Assigning blame does no good at this point and the dye is cast. This could have been avoided. We are in another Cold War for at least as long as Putin is in charge.
But yes negotiating with Putin would have been far better than what we have now.
Trump was right in hindsight.
NATO states it is strictly a defense alliance in it’s charter . No NATO country has ever invaded a former Warsaw Pact country and even the one country they did invade, Iraq, we at least withdrew and allowed them to govern themselves as they saw fit. Afghan was a different story, a knee jerk reaction to a gut punch.
Russia has quite a different history.
Jam up Putin? NATO has no choice but to do so now. More countries are now justified in considering NATO now.
The best thing that could happen would be splitting up Ukraine -say at the Dnieper -and Keeping Kyiv as the capitol of the new state west of Dnieper with Odessa and some port cities in the west.
Having NATO on Russian border especially a land border is a recipe for future war