I'm about to publish a "retrospective" written from the perspective of someone looking back on the period 2022 - 2025 at the end of 2025 itself. The core of this imaginative leap is the reality that the West failed to understand the existential nature of Putin's invasion and never managed to progress beyond dithering, quarter-measures, and endless vacillation. Moreover, the real problem for the coming years is that unlike the situation in the Cold War, equivalence is not achievable because each of the three major nuclear powers (China, Russia, USA) will want to match the capabilities of the other two. Thus escalation, minus any failsafe political processes, will massively increase the risk of ordinary human stupidity leading to global nuclear conflagration.