Most summits bill themselves as “historic” and those who attend invariably talk about “forging a new consensus”. But Nato’s Madrid summit can credibly make such claims, for there is no question that a military alliance that only a few years ago was famously dismissed by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as “brain dead” has regained vitality and reaffirmed its strategic purpose.
As the alliance’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, put it, Nato’s decision to increase its rapidly deployable troops to at least 300,000 to deter any further Russian aggression “constitutes the biggest overhaul of our collective deterrence and defence since the cold war”.
