Mr. HITCHENS: Yes. Well, there was a big argument about this about a decade ago under the Clinton Administration, about NATO expansion. And the underlying principal difference was this. Some said, if you expand NATO, you will provoke the Russians. They'll think they're being encircled. And the other, opposite case was, they are going to try and regain their temporarily lost influence in Eastern and Balkan Europe, in any case. So the quicker we can get as many members as we can under the protective umbrella in this period of Russian - what shall we call it - eclipse, the better.
I think the second view was the more intelligent one. The Russians are going to be expansionist whether we provoke them to it or not. For example, the Russians keep saying that we're trying to encircle them. In what sense does the independence of Kosovo, a land-locked province, former Yugoslavia, with no common border with Russia, threaten Russia with encirclement? In what sense does the independence of the Baltic states - which the Soviets gained as territory in a deal with Hitler, a direct bargain between Stalin and Hitler - would it constitute an encirclement? This is insulting. In what sense does the independence of Georgia constitute an encirclement? What we are facing, and we may as well give it its right name, is what I called it earlier, a chauvinistic, theocratic in part, xenophobic Russian imperialism.
