> The western alliance has not only rebuffed Russia, it has expanded eastwards against promises made and thus provoked the current situation in Ukraine.

Every country is free to join NATO if they want, Russia has no say in it. And the reason why most Russia neighbors want to is because Russia is a bully, and NATO can protect them from being bullied.

> What would the US do if the soviets were to expand into Mexiko? Or... Cuba? We know how that went.

Well, for one the US did not attack Cuba... Also, Soviet Union was aggressor side for the whole duration of Cold War, that move was just prelude to further aggression against the West.

> If the mission of NATO was to secure peace, why would they reject Russia

Because the best way to secure peace is to keep Russia at bay.

> Russia as a white-majority christian country shares many values and culture with the others.

LOL, no. Russia does not share western values, such as democracy, freedom of speech or other human rights. They do not belong in Europe, they belong in Asia.

If Russia had reformed, they would likely have been accepted.

Instead they’ve had a string of bad actors taking bad actions and just going back to a dictatorship doing all the same things as the USSR.

Why allow them to join and give them all our strategic information just for them to use it against us?

I think there was more of a "break" in the decades since with Germany and Nazism, where in Russia, there wasn't as much of a break from the old Soviet systems and ways of thinking. Many years ago, I read this book, "The Limits of Partnership" by Angela Stent, one of the foremost US-Russia relations experts. She lays out in detail how an entire generation of Russians came up believing that the Soviet Union collapsed almost solely due to outside influence -- i.e. the United States -- and that it otherwise would not have failed without that undue influence. They want to see Russia restored to its former Soviet-era glory, encompassing all of its former territories. This is how pretty much the entire leadership in Russia thinks/believes. Putin 100% feels this way.

"If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”

-- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"