But first of all, that was US craziness, not NATO. And it was probably about Iran. Take a look at a globe and draw a line from Iran to important European or American targets, and that line will pass pretty close to Poland.

And secondly, there was no reason at all for Russia to care one bit, at least from a nuclear deterrence perspective. If Russia wants to nuke Europe or the US, no missile defence will help. The warheads will get through. They are pretty much impossible to shoot down, and even if you figure out how to do it, you can saturate any missile defence by just firing more missiles. This is because anti-missile missiles have costs of the same magnitude as nuclear missiles have, but the latter can carry a large number of warheads per missile. You just can't win an arms race against nuclear missiles with your own missile defence system.

Still, a missile defence system in Poland would have reduced the ability of Russia to launch conventional decapitating strikes with its world-class semi-ballistic missile systems, like Iskander. Being able to weaken that ability would have been a good and stabilizing factor in the theater.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.