Hardly the actions of an aggressive alliance. In fact, Putin rightly saw all these measures as signs of weakness.
If you want to argue the Europeans should take care of themselves, even my European relatives would agree. It's not that they won't, it's that they can't: despite the EU, Europe is still a set of squabbling nations that can easily be split against one another as Putin well knows.
So the question the US faces is whether it is worth it to keep making the defense commitment to Europe as it has been doing. I think allowing Europe's vast financial and technical resources to fall under the control of Russia and China would be a disaster for the US. But I also think we need penalties against NATO members who do not pull their weight like Germany: for example, tariffs on their imports to support US military commitments.
As far as any grifting involving Ukraine, I always chuckle about that considering they just passed a $1.7 trillion porkulus spending package that include more than $600 million in pork just as Richard Shelby's "retirement" gift.
They don't need Ukraine: they steal our money in broad daylight because they know there's not a darn thing we can do about it.
NATO was an anti USSR alliance and should have ended with the USSR. Our footprint should have gone to zero in Europe. I don’t give a rat’s caboose about Europe. They got along fine without us for centuries and can go back to settling their own problems. I posit that we should not continue to be the World Police while our country crumbles. As for chuckling about the grift, I am dead certain it is going on at an accelerated pace because of the billions of borrowed dollars we are dumping into Ukraine. Ukrainian corruption was already very bad before that infusion of cash. If that makes you chuckle, the whole Ukraine/FTX/uniparty money laundering operation for the 2022 midterms must have you rolling.