Regarding the above, I'm not sure the 'empire argument' is linked to the former USSR. Is it not linked to some former period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It seems that there is an empire argument, a NATO argument and a denazification argument. Of the three, I suspect that latter has been stretched a bit. Behind the NATO argument seems to be a rationale that the US strives for global domination and that NATO is merely a tool of that aim.
Russia's sheer size makes her both powerful and vulnerable at one and the same time. The Continental United States does not have this problem as she is out of the way with good natural defences - the Atlantic Ocean, the Isthmus of Panama, and Chukotka and Canada. While Russia does have some natural defences, she can easily be surrounded, save for her northern Arctic coast. Thus, Russia has to be interventionist, to an extent, whereas the United States does not have to be.
Yet the United States has gone to great efforts to limit the geographic Russophere and surround Russia with pro-NATO and pro-US countries. What we might call 'strategic encirclement' became a particular problem for the former USSR with the advent of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The US has worked to ensure that a US military presence and missile bases surround Russia on three sides. Part of the reason for the US-led invasion of Afghanistan was to set up a pro-US regime on the southern border of CIS (pro-Russian) states. To this end, NATO is unquestionably a tool of the US. Certainly since NATO's expansion from the 1990s onwards this has been the case, as the smaller eastern European states will look to the United States in particular to provide the political guarantee of a nuclear shield and defensive support against what they perceive as an expansionist Russia. In exchange, the US - oh, sorry, NATO and the EU defence partnership - carries out 'military exercises' in eastern European and Baltic states. In fact, the United States now has missile bases in eastern Europe. Significantly, the United States includes Britain, as she is dependent on the United States entirely for her nuclear deterrent, which in effect makes Britain a client state of the US. Not all other NATO member states will toe the line faithfully, but generally-speaking, Britain will do as the Americans say with few questions asked.
In short, what I am telling you so far is that NATO has evolved. It began as a US-led alliance to counter the nuclear and conventional threat from the former USSR and its client states. This is a defensive posture. When the USSR fell, NATO should perhaps have been disbanded or reformed. Instead, it expanded to an aggressive posture against the Russian Federation and the CIS. That is the crux of it.
For a long part of its history in the 19th. and early 20th. centuries, the United States' geographical isolation led to a strong and popular domestic movement calling for strategic isolationism, with support from mainstream politicians. During this period, Britain was the interventionist power in the world. The counter position was typified by presidents like Woodrow Wilson, who was strongly interventionist, partly perhaps motivated by a wish to supplant Britain and its Empire with an American global hegemony. The undercurrent of the United States keeping out of world affairs is still popular in provincial America and mainstream American politicians give lip service to it now and then. For instance, George W. Bush ("We'll smoke him out of his cave") during the 2000 presidential election campaign seemed to lean towards isolationism in his foreign policy. He can't have meant it, but it's popular among small 'c' conservative American voters, so American politicians often say it. Trump said much the same things and at points in his 2016 presidential election campaign threw the whole future of NATO into doubt due to his rhetoric.
Given the United States has an abundance of resources and has no need to intervene anywhere, one has to ask why is this just campaign rhetoric and not serious policy? The reason I would suggest is simple: pure greed, along with a general wish to be 'top dog'. There is also the subsidiary motivation of ideology. The United States was founded on aggressive liberal idealistic principles, whereas its Mother Country, Britain, was a calmer society with a deep-rooted organic national history in which a more consensual - though not democratic - body politic had developed, and this was reflected in Britain's more commercial approach to Empire. But there are also factors that it would not be politically-correct to discuss here. The people who dominate the Washington Beltway are not 'Americans'.
Potsdam can be seen as a continuation of Versailles. The aim was to hobble Germany, as Germany was perceived as Europe's aggressor. A subtext to Potsdam was that the USSR was also seen as a threat. This perhaps had its roots in what is now called the 'Soviet offensive plans controversy' (see Suvorov' book, Icebreaker). In regard to that controversy, I think it is fair to say that the truth is somewhere in the middle: Stalin did want to take his chances and seize territory in the East, and Hitler wanted the same, and to an extent Hitler also wanted to pre-emptively counter a Soviet invasion threat, which explains Barbarossa. And here we come to a distinction I make between Russian aggression and Western aggression.
The Soviets never formally annexed territory in the East, whereas Hitler's plan was to conquer and annex the eastern territories to Germany. Putin is not Hitler and a 'Hitler template' for his actions is wrong. The simple fact is that Russia is already a vast territory but with a relatively low population and a stretched military and creaking infrastructure. Putin's aim is not to conquer but to project power. The invasion of Ukraine is one way of doing this by forcing a resolution of the Ukraine Question in Russia's favour.
