[awb]

Yes and no.

Yes, countries prefer weak neighbors. A powerful alliance on your border is a potential threat (or deterrent to expansion).

No in the sense that the US only has 90k troops in NATO countries, or about 10% of Russia’s standing military. So it’s not like troops are messing at their border or enough to threaten an invasion. It’s very much a deterrent.

Also no in that the US, Russia and China are nuclear powers. The US should have little concern of a Chinese ground assault from Mexico as it could trigger a large scale nuclear war, defeating the purpose of the invasion. Similarly with Russia, their nuke arsenal means that no one will consider attacking them or invading their borders.

[hef19898]

Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis might have word regarding enemy troops close to the US mainland.

[techdragon]

Yea, but you have to factor into your analysis the fact that at the time Soviet nuclear weapon design was leaning more towards inaccurate but with enough boom it doesn’t matter, so their weapons were on average larger and this limited their effective ballistic missile ranges. So Cuba, while a provocative encroachment, was from the Soviet side a necessary escalation of their military forces to counter things like the deployment of intermediate range ballistic missiles, such as the Jupiter, in Turkey and Italy.

Also … While the “Cuban” part of the crisis can be viewed as instigated by the Soviets, it would be awfully foolish to ignore the fact that they were reacting to the US/NATO moves to deploy missile forces in Europe… by accepting the request from Cuba for nuclear weapons to defend their country from America, which they only asked for after the failed invasion effort in the Bay of Pigs.

It’s never just as simple as “they started it”…

[hef19898]

True. Also interesting that part of the de-escalation was the quiet withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey. More often than not, there is no side starting something (WW2 is one example). The whole cold war was, it seems, a tit for tat between two nuclear powers, sometimes led by old seniles and drunks, over ideological differences. There was no Good vs. Evil.

[CamperBob2]

NATO is a defensive alliance made up of many independent sovereign nations, all of whom freely asked for and were granted membership. Don't want conflict with NATO? Easy, don't attack any of their members. Seems simple enough.

Cuba was a Soviet client state, and installing missiles there was clearly an offensive act.

[hef19898]

Well, not that Germany had much to say when the US stationed patriot missiles. That's a tangent so. Don't forget the fact that, before the USSR sent missiles to Cuba the US had mid-range missiles in Turkey. And those were, by the way, closer to the USSR than the missiles in Cuba were to the US.

Reality isn't easily divided into good guys and bad guys...

[glogla]

That was before modern ICBMs were a thing. Nowadays it doesn't matter where the missiles are.

[hef19898]

Oh, it does a lot. The closer you are the less time your enemy has to react. ICBM launches are detected, buying at least enough time to shoot at least back.