Sometimes I walk past the graves of the Johannes Cemetery. I stop by Georg Carl von Dobeln’s grave and reflect upon his motto: Honour, Duty, Will. Another Sweden, another time. It also happens that I linger at the memorial stone to the victims of Stalin's murder of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn in 1940. Also another time. The fresh flowers remind us that the time is not far away, and also that the world in our time is not the tranquil one for which we had hoped when the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union ceased to be.

It is precisely this naive vision of the future that underpins the foundation of Swedish defence and security policy, at least in terms of our part of the globe – during the hopeful 1990s acid era, eternal peace was proclaimed.

As we enter 2013, no one really counts on the EU's soft power any longer, but rather we ponder the trends towards disintegration, social unrest and nasty forms of...