Somewhere in Brussels, hopefully on a secure server, sits a draft Word document entitled “Nato Strategic Concept 2022”. It’s been years in preparation and was set to be signed off by politicians from 30 countries at a summit in Madrid, come the end of June. Over the past 14 days it is likely that a second document has been created, entitled “Version 2”.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine has upset the calculations of international relations experts, diplomats and defence ministries across the Western world. Nobody got it right, because from the realists to the idealists, no expert could discern the logic of invading Ukraine without the means to occupy it. They read Vladimir Putin’s rambling ahistorical treatise on Russian-ness as a hodgepodge of borrowed ideas, written to disguise some hard-headed negotiating move.
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