The sudden increased awareness of Nato, and support for it due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is welcome

Next month is the 73rd anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Nato.

The military alliance is a famous one, yet it has come in and out of public consciousness since it was founded in April 1949.

For a while, at the height of the Cold War, involvement in Nato was so widely accepted in Britain that left wing politicians who queried membership of the international security body were typically deemed to be too radical for high office.

Latterly Nato has had a lower profile, because it seemed to lose one of its key reasons for being after the collapse of communism and the spread of a western capitalist model across the former Soviet Union. Nato did not, for example, seem to offer much in the way of a solution to a modern day threat such as the rise of Islamic extremism.

Still, though, advocates of Nato said that Europe and America continued to face the peril of a conventional east-west war. This point has been dramatically underlined by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Nato seems not only relevant, but insufficient in its scope, given that Ukraine had never in fact joined (for various reasons).

There is now some media and political focus on opponents of Nato, for example in Northern Ireland.

This is appropriate in the sense that representatives who have called a major foreign policy issue wrongly deserve scrutiny if they are seeking elected office.

At the same time, however, there is only so much to be gained from examining past failures of judgment.

One of the most important facts of the current crisis is the solidarity of feeling across western and central Europe, and in north America, against the Russian invasion.

It might have been the case that people far from Ukraine thought of it as a distant problem, of no consequence to us. On the contrary, there have if anything been unrealistic idea about what Nato can do in this current crisis.

But for now, the fact that there is a sudden acceptance of the need for such defensive alliances is highly welcome.

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