alt Hacker NewsAgain, in a legalistic sense, sure.
But again, in a legalistic sense, even NATO Article 5 also doesn't obligate the US to do anything.
No document (Budapest memoranda or NATO treaty) can require the US to do anything, so all that matters is whether the US is signaling itself as a country that defends its partners.
If you believe that Article 5 obligates the US to do anything more than what we've done so far in Ukraine, please explain why.
If you don't believe that Article 5 does that, then I'm not sure why you seem dismissive of the idea that we're creating conditions for a nuclear proliferation spiral.
If you don't understand the basics of how NATO operates then I really can't help you. All of the signatories clearly understand that it's a mutual defense treaty, requiring more than just diplomatic or economic assistance. Which is why the US threatened to withdraw from the treaty after repeated failures of many other members to meet their defense spending targets while freeloading on US security guarantees. If the US government didn't believe that the North Atlantic Treaty obligated us to do anything then they wouldn't have bothered to threaten to withdraw in the first place.