As our continent is beset by major state-on-state conflict, there should be reflection on what has gone wrong with Nato and Western policy. Nobody should divert blame from the dictator Putin, whose grotesque narrative about saving Russians in Ukraine from a genocide at the hand of ‘Nazis’ echoes Hitler’s justification for the annexation of the Sudetanland in 1938. Yet it’s true that there has also been a “systems failure” in Whitehall and other key Nato governments. 

Leon Trotsky is attributed with the observation: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” While Putin has been taking advantage of optimism and complacency, the free world has been too little “interested in war”, and how to deter it, and now war is interested in us.

Complacency has strengthened the confidence of dictators and illiberal regimes in the effectiveness of their autocratic systems. Autocrats never face the electoral cycle, so they can think long-term more easily than elected governments. They can impose order, suppress dissent, generate their own narrative and history. They can put their own interests ahead of their national interests. Autocracy still has to be based on a bargain of sorts: in return for your lack of freedom, you will be looked after (a bargain which the sanctions on Russia will, over time, cause to unravel). By contrast, democracies look chaotic, particularly …