It doesn't really what what any of us think. What matters is what the people with the missiles and the H bombs think, in Moscow ans Washington. (The UK bombs are just a joke. A very dangerous and expensive joke, but a joke for all that.)

I'd like to think they are all just playing an elaborate game, as a way of keeping us all subservient, and that both sides are in it together. But I have a feeling it's a bit more complicated than that, and that some of the hostility is actually for real.

Extending NATO into former satellites, as a way of rubbing the Russians noses in it and making them feel humiliated, was really a very very stupid thing to do. And it hasn't done any favours at all to the former satellite states.