My issue with your plan is with knowledge that behind the curtains of Ukraine, are 35-40 (Nuland gave us a number) biolabs, deep(state) ties to the CIA.
Thus, any movement vis-a-vis NATO should be ultimately towards its elimination.
If your plan embraces NATO to destroy it, then I’m all for it.
You can do your own calculations.
The addition of Crimea and the other 4 (5?) Oblasts is about 5.5% population increase for Russia. Typical growth rates for countries (usually relying on immigration) will be < 1%/yr.
5.5% is a pretty solid decade of pop growth.
That's an acknowledged issue, but fixing it requiees action in Washington DC, and that's independent of conditions local to those labs.
Thus, any movement vis-a-vis NATO should be ultimately towards its elimination.
If your plan embraces NATO to destroy it, then I’m all for it.
My own sense of it is that we've done an abysmal job managing NATO, and that has been the genesis of much of the derision of NATO that you yourself echo. I think if we managed NATO well, and I think that necessarily demands flushing all the accursed NeoCons out of it, we could make NATO work for us, and be more effective in a broader global sense. I don't really think the problem is the existence of NATO, per se, but -- what's the old song lyric? -- "It's in the way that you use it," and because of the existence of this corrupted Washington Deep State, our resulting (mis?)use of NATO has been a reflection of that corruption.
If this present Administration is successful in reversing and rooting out not only that corruption, but the mechanisms that have fostered and sustained it, then I think keeping NATO as a lever of US influence might be a reasonable move, WITH, of course, Trump's standing caveat that the other Member states pay their share.
If, however, Trump can't overcome the entrenched bad actors and really get a great deal of progress toward blowing the corruption out of FedGov, then -- yeah, I'm with you -- we shouldn't leave NATO there as a tool for that corruption to use.