At the end of the cold war the smart move would have been for the US to ditch NATO (just as Russia ditched the Warsaw pact) and for the USA and the USSR to have formed a mutual defense pact. Nobody would have been able to take on both the US and the former USSR.
Instead, the “one worlders” at the State Dept. wanted to expand NATO to include just about every country in the world—which naturally meant pushing Russia into a corner. What reaction did the State Dept. expect from Russia after that?
There was no USSR to form a “mutal defense pact” with, and the idea that Russia and the U.S. would form such a pact is bizarre. Russia’s national interests have always remained keenly toward exerting control over what it feels should be its sphere of influence, and there is no possibility the U.S. would have stood for its machinations, just as it would have stood for few of ours, particularly as it regained its confidence and strength. (What tenuous, house-of-cards “strength” it has regained.)
We won and they lost so their alliance got smaller and ours got bigger. Why is that so hard to understand? Why would we shrink when we won? No, we won, so our influence grows and theirs shrinks. That's the way it works. If Russians don't like this, then they should have won the Cold war instead of losing it.