That requirement became a matter of national emergency when Donald Trump returned to the White House, sent the thrust of US policy on Ukraine into reverse and left the US’s Nato allies feeling abandoned and exposed.
Trump’s endorsement of a Kremlin agenda – his characterisation of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a dictator and the demand that assistance already given be repaid in surrender of land and mineral resources – signalled the advent of a new epoch on global affairs.
Under those circumstances, the decision to ramp up defence spending makes sense both as a manoeuvre to help steer Trump away from betraying Europe completely, and as planning for the scenario where he does.
It is an existential crisis for the edifice of multilateral trade, mutual legal obligations and international institutions that, when the cold war ended, made it possible for countries such as Britain to spend less on guns and more on everything else.
It was clear already that higher defence spending was the necessary insurance premium to cover Europe against Vladimir Putin’s insatiable malevolence.
