Ping.
A brilliant article, I think, although I suspect Hitchens of an overly nostalgic view of the stability of the staggering Austro-Hungarian empire. Franz Ferdinand was, after all, the last best hope of the thing breaking up gracefully, and had a wall full of hopeful maps to prove it. It was not to be, and the matter had to be settled in a spray of blood inconceivable to the radicals - Princip was only a tool, after all - who envisioned another Europe without considering the price carefully enough.
I am of two minds with respect to the likely results of a German victory. On the one hand, one could hardly imagine a more autocratic approach to government than that of the Hohenzollern, and how that government would have dealt with the centrifugal explosion of its Austrian neighbor is a little hard to project ending happily. On the other, it is an interesting game to imagine the victorious government of the Kaiser left to deal with the dissolution of its principal ally's empire, an exercise left to the United States some three decades hence with the dissolution of the second British Empire and the colonies of France in Indochina. It may be charity to proclaim that we did manage to muddle through it, but we are where we are. I suppose it could have been worse.
That both Germany and Russia have, as they always have, territorial ambitions in the European arena is an observation that is as painfully obvious as it is painfully cliched. The specific ambitions seem to me to reek of Great Powers ambitions: control of the Black Sea and access to the Mediterranean on the part of the Russians; on the part of the Germans, the administrative and economic domination of its neighbors from Greece to the North Sea. Both Peter the Great and Frederick the Great would have understood. This return to the Great Powers approach to geopolitics is a direct result of the fall of the Soviet Union and the oh-so-sincerely desired retreat of United States foreign policy from accused (on the part of the Left) imperialism to accused (on the part of the Right, and with cause) incompetence and disengagement. History, or more precisely human folly, repeats itself: it is the world the radicals thought they wanted and the rest of us are going to have to deal with it.