Is NATO even really an “alliance"

Debatable, they’ve never used their military power for collective defence of a member(libs will debate this as article 5 was invoked to ‘protect’ America by the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, but imo that doesn’t count as a defence since it wasn’t fighting on American soil and was essentially a ‘pre-emptive strike’ to prevent further Al-Qaeda attacks(accepting the official 9/11 story, and ignoring the Taliban’s over to hand bin-laden over to a neutral country for evidence-based prosecution, and taking the US’s casus belli as legitimate) despite the Al-Qaeda cell allegedly responsible operating out of Germany and having no Afghan members ), only for aggressive military acts that support the US’s geopolitical ambitions

‘An alliance led by the US to enforce its empire’ maybe accurate, but I guess ‘organisation’ or something similar better describes the unequal nature of member states as ‘alliance’ suggests members are equalish peers