No, it didn’t need to end at all. I’m surprised this bizarre argument even gets entertained.
NATO always was, from day one, a treaty-driven organisation where member states OR non-members could ask it for humanitarian, peace-keeping, or other forms of support - at no point EVER was its mission expressly limited to a Soviet or Russian context.
“[NATO] commits the Allies to democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law, as well as to peaceful resolution of disputes.”
In effect it’s just a smaller version of the United Nations, with a collective defence element.
And the ending of the Soviet Union - by Soviet hands, not NATO’s - ended ANY obligation on the part of the Alliance to keep acting as if the Soviet Union still existed.
Therein lies the tragedy - Gorbachev understood that the NATO mission AGAINST THE SOVIETS ended when the Soviet Union folded. Yeltsin got the same memo. Only Putin, and his revanchist paranoid ex-spook chums, never accepted that the end of the Soviet Union didn’t mean the end of Russia; they’ve laboured under an absurd delusion that NATO threatened Russia when IT NEVER DID.
Putin could’ve stopped being a whiny, pompous, paranoid, butt-hurt son of a bitch, and just accepted that NATO had more important things to do with its time than babysit a state of Russia. It’s his malfunction.
NATO should have been disbanded in the mid 1990’s. Globalists pushed for it to expand. Now look at the mess. Anyone with half brain knew keeping after the fall of the USSR was both stupid and dangerous.