This reasoning doesn't make any sense. The Warsaw Pact was also avowedly defensive in nature, and of course the only countries it ever invaded were its own members. It would be absurd to allege that the Warsaw Pact was not imperialist because its charter made it clear that it was a defensive military alliance.
I know Wikipedia is not necessarily the ideal source, but it is a convenient one for a starting point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_PactAlthough an apparently similar collective security alliance, the Warsaw Pact differed substantially from NATO. De jure, the eight-member countries of the Warsaw Pact pledged the mutual defense of any member who would be attacked; relations among the treaty signatories were based upon mutual non-intervention in the internal affairs of the member countries, respect for national sovereignty, and political independence.[78]
However, de facto, the Pact was a direct reflection of the USSR's authoritarianism and undisputed domination over the Eastern Bloc, in the context of the so called Soviet Empire, which was not comparable to that of the United States over the Western Bloc.[79] All Warsaw Pact commanders had to be, and have been, senior officers of the Soviet Union at the same time and appointed for an unspecified term length: the Supreme Commander of the Unified Armed Forces of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, which commanded and controlled all the military forces of the member countries, was also a First Deputy Minister of Defence of the USSR, and the Chief of Combined Staff of the Unified Armed Forces of the Warsaw Treaty Organization was also a First Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces.[80] On the contrary, the Secretary General of NATO and Chair of the NATO Military Committee are positions with fixed term of office held on a random rotating basis by officials from all member countries through consensus.
Despite the American hegemony (mainly military and economic) over NATO, all decisions of the North Atlantic Alliance required unanimous consensus in the North Atlantic Council and the entry of countries into the alliance was not subject to domination but rather a natural democratic process.[79] In the Warsaw Pact, decisions were ultimately taken by the Soviet Union alone; the countries of the Warsaw Pact were not equally able to negotiate their entry in the Pact nor the decisions taken.[79]
So at least according to that, although maybe formally the Warsaw Pact was supposed to be a defensive alliance, it de facto differed from NATO in this respect. The Soviet Union could simply tell the Warsaw Pact what to do in a way that the USA could not simply tell NATO what to do.
There are some people (Russians especially) who like to say that European countries are US puppet states. However, this is a mischaracterization. To see that, you have only to consider that the USA never had any need to, and never did, anything similar to the Soviet invasion of Czeschoslovakia in 1968. So Czechoslovakia was de facto a Soviet puppet state in a way that Western European NATO countries were never puppet states of the USA, and European NATO countries currently also are not.
And really, he Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia is a good example of the essence of Imperialism - one country going into another country and forcibly controlling/changing its government. Unless NATO ever does something like that, you can't reasonably call it imperialist in the same way.
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