In February 2022, Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In doing so, the Russian president committed, in the words of one senior western diplomat, “a breach of civilisation” as he sought to remove Ukraine’s right to exist. He also brought Nato back to life.
Defending Europe against Soviet aggression is why the military alliance was created in 1949. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, Nato had lost its way. It had struggled to find fresh purpose as a UN-style task force operating “out of area” in the Balkans, Libya and Afghanistan. It had also been variously criticised by its members.
The veteran US diplomat George Kennan, architect of the west’s policy of Soviet containment, described Nato’s eastward expansion in 1997 as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era”. In 2016, US president-elect Donald Trump called Nato “obsolete” and complained it cost the US too much money. Most damning of all, French President Emmanuel Macron described the alliance as “brain-dead” in 2019.