...does the serious alternate to NATO look quite a lot like NATO, just called something different? Unless there is a whole new set of militarily capable countries that have appeared over the past few months that I'm unaware of. Perhaps a new US / NK axis, given all the good stuff, that definitely has no possible downside, going on at the moment?
Of all the international institutions which are basically a way of the 5Eyes community rallying round like minded potential partners, NATO is really the least problematic and least inefficient one, and Trump and his lackeys are utter ******* idiots if they seriously intend to kick it into touch. The 'threat' of NATO for the past 20 years has never been whether it could immediately produce some super force, it's been that over an extended period of time, provocation and persuasion, it could indubitably produce an overwhelming economic and military power that had no equal internationally. This is why the Russian and other strategies are to nip at the edges and test, rather than challenge it directly. The deterrent is not what it can do tomorrow, but what it can do over five years if you, an adversary, do something tomorrow. The one Article 5 call, regardless of its many inadequacies, is a good example of this: Afghanistan may not have been a strategic success due to the political idiocy surrounding it, but the Taliban government and AQ - the instigators - were ground to grist in the mill of a 15+ year NATO deployment.
Trump's approach to kicking NATO focuses entirely on what it can do tomorrow, while ignoring the rest of it, possibly because he is an incontinent child with the mental capacity of an energy-saving lightbulb.