The purpose NATO exists for should be abundantly clear - the future beyond Ukraine is a new Cold War

During the Cold War, NATO was to the West what the Warsaw Pact was to the communist bloc. Both sides faced off at the Iron Curtain. So when the Cold War ended, and the Warsaw Pact dissolved (mostly because once the jackboot of the Red Army had been removed, most eastern European states were full of citizens that just wanted to be liberal democracies), the question was raised as to why should NATO still exist?

Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" was proclaimed, President Bush proclaimed a New World Order, after the UN Security Council endorsed collective action to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The new Russia was, in fact, a liberal democracy, had dismantled its centrally planned economy, and was now working with Western countries. Sure there was still tension and rivalry in the Middle East, with concerns over Iraq and Iran, the simmering Arab-Israeli dispute, and of course the Korean peninsula, but in Europe, the belief was that liberal democracy had won.

Except of course, it hadn't quite. 

The New World Order declared by Bush was no nefarious shadowy view of the international system, but one which would AT A BARE MINIMUM not tolerate one state taking the territory of another.

That is what the war to expel Iraq from Kuwait was about, and it is why Saddam Hussein's regime was not destroyed at the time. The New World Order was not about regime change, it was about protecting international borders from aggression.

Much happened after that. The war in the Balkans ultimately saw NATO action to deter Serbia from engaging in genocide in Kosovo, following the genocide in Bosnia and Croatia (not all from the Serbian side of course).  Hum.anitarian intervention became an addition to the New World Order as countries were confident that international cross-border war was a thing of the past

9/11 changed all that, although the attack and overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan was justified as a response to the aggression of 9/11, the subsequent attack and overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime was not. Overthrowing Saddam was a settling of old scores and an attempt to demonstrate Western military dominance against potential threats. What it did was show the West incapable of occupying and transforming a nation state without enormous loss of life, or in the case of Afghanistan, ultimately a lack of political will to pay the price in money and lives to institute government that was closer to the ideals of liberal democracies with Enlightenment values. This culminated in the weak withdrawal from Afghanistan last year

Yet Russia had already tested the limits of the New World Order a few years ago and found it wanting. Not only had Russia effectively annexed Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia (which had started in the 1990s),  but the 2014 annexation of Crimea under the Obama Administration (after Obama famously ridiculed Mitt Romney in the 2012 election campaign for claiming Russia was a growing threat) showed the West was unwilling to enforce post Cold-War borders against direct aggression.

NATO expansion has been occurring, with all of the former Warsaw Pact nations now NATO members, and the three Baltic states, all of which had been invaded and occupied by the USSR during WW2. The expansion of NATO to defend former Soviet republics was deferred, not least because of concern of provoking Russia.  Both Georgia and Ukraine have wanted NATO membership, and the results of denying it are now seen in the destruction of Ukrainian cities.

As much as the Western nations will crow about economic sanctions on Russia, and much global unity on condemning Russia, it has done nothing to stem the bombardment and the growing occupation of Ukraine. As much as it is significant that Germany has finally unhooked itself from equivocating on Russia, by stopping the Nordstream 2 pipeline, Russia knows its oil and gas supplies keep much of Europe from grinding to a halt. This is predominantly due to the virtue signalling policies of the EU in energy and the environment which have stopped Europe from pursuing domestic sources of fossil fuels as an alternative, in favour of trying to save the world. Unlike the US which wisely enabled fracking, and is no longer dependent on oil from the Middle East, Europe in transitioning from coal has become reliant more on Russian fossil fuels whilst it inches towards renewables. Even more disturbing, the inexplicable decision of Germany to abandon nuclear power as a bizarre reaction to the Fukushima disaster (even though Germany neither has earthquakes or a risk of tsunami) has further weakened European energy security. Russia, of course, funded and supported anti-fracking activists.  

In the coming weeks and months there is a likelihood Ukraine will fall to Russian tyranny, without a shot having been fired by Western liberal democracies in support of the principles they are meant to be defending.  For the first time since 1968, tyranny has advanced in Europe.

Disturbing as this is, what will be just as disturbing is what the Western response has to be. A return to the clarity that an attack on NATO means war with all of NATO, which includes the risk of nuclear war.  A rearming of European countries, which means a reprioritisation of public spending towards defence, at least matching the NATO target of 2% but realistically needing to go for 3% and above. Permitting expansion of NATO to any liberal democracy that meets the conditions for membership.

It goes beyond Europe though. In the Pacific, a reassertion of the defence of Japan and South Korea, but most importantly a clear assertion by the United States that it will not stand by if Taiwan is attacked by the PRC. It must become too risky and too dangerous for the world's two largest tyrannies, Russia and China, to go any further.  The single biggest risk now is that Russia and China perceive that there wouldn't be any pushback if they go further.

It's too late for Ukraine, we got here due to weak US Presidents, and by that I mean not only Biden, but also Trump and Obama. We can speculate endlessly about whether Putin would have risked attacking Ukraine under Trump or not, and the answer is far from clear.  About all that is clear is that Trump was unpredictable, and that unpredictability was probably a deterrent, but Trump was also a man whose positions on issues was not consistent.

All that can be done now is for a firm redline to be set, by Biden, by NATO and all of its allies, that the West is willing to go to war to defend the borders of liberal democracies.  It is frightening and plenty of people politically on the far-left and right will oppose it, but it also means that Western liberal democracies need to spend more on defence, and less on virtue signalling, "rebalancing/levelling up/building back better" and to strengthen their economies to be resilient against dependence on Russia and China. Allister Heath outlined it starkly in the Daily Telegraph here:

For the first time in more than 30 years, we face a truly existential threat. Our enemy is a hostile state armed with nuclear weapons, a large conventional army and led by an empire-building psychopath: the danger to the European powers is orders of magnitude greater than the very real risk posed after 9/11 by al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

This new conflict will almost certainly be long, complex and extremely expensive. It won’t be like fighting the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein, or lone wolf actors. It will require us to relearn strategies, tactics and virtues at odds with the hyper-emotional performative stupidity and instant gratification of the Twitter era. Our elites will need to reprogramme themselves psychologically, economically and militarily, read some history, become more serious and austere, and knuckle down for a lengthy fight.

The implications for Australia and New Zealand from that are going to be stark. The easy ride of China buying so much, and selling so much back is about to come to an end.

There is some hope, but as Heath wrote:

Yes, Russia is staggeringly weak, a decaying nation with a population much less than half that of the US, and a GDP far lower than that of New York state. But it has nuclear weapons and needs to be deterred and eventually defeated. We must also send a signal to China, a country that is immensely richer and more sophisticated than the Soviet Union ever was, that the West is serious once more. This is a new Cold War, and we must urgently contain the authoritarian powers at war with liberal democracy.