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Hello and welcome to the Saturday edition of Coffee Hours Shorts.

I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by James Leseith and Fraser Nelson.

Early this week Finland announced that it would be applying to join NATO and Sweden is

expected to follow very shortly. Now this obviously comes after the security

pact that these countries have created with the UK to join the British nuclear umbrella.

So what is the future of NATO and the defence of Europe against transgressors?

Fraser, maybe I can start you off with that very big question. Is NATO going to get much,

much bigger in the short term? I don't really think so. I mean,

Ukraine, for example, has wanted to join NATO for some time, but it was actually vetoed by

Germany years ago. If anything, Zelensky is actually softening on his support for NATO at the moment.

The paradox is that we've seen a complete upheaval in Russian-European relationships,

the emergence of a war. We've seen alliances pop up that we never would have dreamed about.

We've seen the notion of the West being replaced by the global democratic world because now we've

got Singapore and South Korea and Japan as keen on them, this standing up to Putin as Europe is.

What we haven't really seen is NATO. Nobody has really been organising these things.

NATO, sure, I mean, you've had the NATO spokesman there, you've had the NATO summits,

but nothing has really been done through NATO. You've had a joint expeditionary force of Britain

and the Baltics. You've had other little ad hoc alliances. But the only real active

thing we've seen in NATO right now is that Sweden and Finland want to join. Now, they want to join

...