There are two responses. The first one is the political response. We need to show that we are serious.
The biggest challenge that we face from the sovereignty perspective is the moment the Americans.... Trump, of course, is Trump, but even previous American presidents, as Richard has alluded to, have not trusted what we are doing. We are seen as a laggard. It's called a defence against help, in academic terms.
We have to be showing that we are serious moving ahead. It's almost like, do anything, but just make the decision. That's the first thing, so that we are allaying any American concerns that they have.
We then have to get the systems that we say we're going to get. In some ways, “Strong, Secure, Engaged”, back in 2017, had a lot of very promising elements, but we didn't act upon them. We also didn't act upon subsequent announcements of modernization.
Remember, the Russian war against Ukraine started in 2014 and we pretended that all it was was an illegal occupation. Territory was seized, and Ukrainians died defending it. That's a war, yet we said that it was not a problem. We have to prove that we are past that.
The second thing is that we have to get the F-35s up. We need to get the listening.
Those are the two critical points at this time, I'd say, but a third point is that we have to get the political elites taking this seriously.
We need Carney walking around with an equivalent of the American black bag. All American presidents always have the nuclear codes with them. We need to have Carney, or any successive Prime Minister, in the mindset that they have to be able to make this decision and understand it, so that when something happens, they're ready to act, so that the Americans are then able to actually respond. That's the only way you're going to convince the Russians that we can't be surprised.