Must Russia be defined as our implacable enemy? Unfashionable though it may be, I hope not. I would like to think that my children and grandchildren will be free to travel there which, over the years, I have done quite often and in a range of roles.

I have always found the Russians a welcoming, friendly people with their own hopes and aspirations. I doubt if they have any more interest in being at war with us than the vast majority in this country have in preparing for war with them.

It is always dangerous to confuse leaders with countries since all of the former are mortal. Trump is not America. Netanyahu is not Israel. Putin is not Russia. In every case, the channels have to be kept open to a different future, rather than entrenched in assumptions of mutual assured hostility.

Indeed, Russia offers the best possible example of that. Somehow, out of the Cold War madness, it produced Mikhail Gorbachev who saw that the system he presided over was unsustainable. That opened the way to co-existence and I feel fortunate to have lived through that interlude in history.

At the moment, such reconciliation seems a pious hope. The objectives of the strategic defence review, with talk of “immediate and pressing danger” are pretty Russia-specific. The threat may no longer be of Soviet hordes appearing with snow on their boots, but the message is much the same.

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It is difficult to dissent from the premises on which this rhetoric is based.........

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