FIVE years ago, a still relatively new and painfully gauche American president barged past a foreign dignitary at a summit.

At a meeting of Nato leaders Donald Trump – as a I think many of us will remember – shoved the then prime minister of Montenegro out of his way. His victim, Duško Marković, quickly gained his diplomatic composure and smiled. The boorish “45” ignored him.

A year later Mr Trump – an isolationist sceptical about the future of the Atlantic alliance – heaped more abuse on the small Adriatic nation.

Montenegrins, he told Fox News rightist shock-jock Tucker Carlson, were a “very aggressive people” who could drag the United States in to a Third World War.

Yikes.

Mr Trump, of course, has been replaced by a more avowedly Atlanticist administration. But there are still “America First” voices nervous about the nations of eastern and central Europe which have joined Nato over the last two decades.

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Indeed, there are also those in Western European foreign ministries whose perspectives – for example – on Vladimir Putin’s land-grabbing war on Ukraine are subtly but importantly different to those of new members of the bloc closer to Russia.

There are still a few people – such as the Kremlin strongman himself – who portray Nato as purely a vehicle for US hegemony or the EU as a Franco-German-led club. And it is absolutely true that the big countries of the old Cold War-era West still pack a real punch, with hard power and soft, with weapons and with money.

Yet these alliances, military and economic, have been changed by their new members, even small ones. So much so that some Americans fear their dog is being wagged by its tail.

That, clearly, is overstated. What is more plausible is that, Mr Trump’s Montenegrin shove aside, it is not always easy for America and its traditional allies to push around smaller Nato members, especially when they club together.

In some circle, including Scottish ones, there has been a failure to understand that the new democracies of Europe have agency and are ready to use it. They are not mere pawns in great power games.

Take Ukraine.

Earlier this month Prime Minister Mario Draghi, President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Olaf Scholz rocked up in Kyiv to meet their Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Cue a cheesy photo op to illustrate news stories and think pieces about the rights and wrongs of French, German and Italian stances on the conflict in the east.

The leaders dutifully lined up for snaps, all but Zelensky in suits.

Newspapers, however, cut out another statesman at the meeting, the towering figure of Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.

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The 192cm Transylvanian German is hard to miss if you see him. So he was consigned to the cutting room floor, virtually at least.

Romania is no great power. But in a Ukrainian context, it is pretty damned important. The EU and Nato member is sheltering refugees, supplying weapons and could offer crucial ports for grain exports.

So erasing or downplaying the presence of the giant Mr Iohannis was, well, weird.

Nato is “expanding” again. Sweden and Finland have asked to join and will most likely do so despite hostility from the alliance’s least democratic member, Turkey. This will change the bloc too.

Will Swedes and Finns nudge Nato to a firmer grip on the threat posed, for the time being, by Putin’s imperialism? And less on interventions outside Europe of the kinds seen in Libya.

What about Scotland? We have no idea if there is going to be another meaningful independence referendum any time soon or who would win it. But I do think it is worth asking ourselves some hypothetical questions about how a Scottish state would change Nato, not least because this kind of inquiry helps us understand the dynamics of multi-national groupings.

Scotland is not geopolitically irrelevant. So global stakeholders fret about independence and, especially, The Bomb. Arguments about the future of Trident, albeit rarely very edifying, are well rehearsed. But we rarely zoom out to take a more conceptual look at what a new northern European member would mean for Nato, and its balance of power.

Last week, the SNP produced its latest take on the future of Nato. The alliance, it said, should be more euro-centric, avoid extra-continental entanglements and think more widely about societal and economic as well as military resilience.

Obviously, we do not know what ideology would prevail if Scotland were ever to take the plunge to full sovereignty. But we have clues, for now, from the country’s ruling party. And we know something of the traditional pooling and sharing values of the SNP’s unionist opponents. Both point to a firmly multi-lateralist national worldview. That might make Scotland a natural ally of some of those Nordic, Baltic and central European members jostling to have a say.

This, of course, is all moot for now. Scotland’s influence and role in Nato, moreover, will also depend on more mundane considerations, such as how much it has to spend on defence. And that, depending on circumstances, might not be very much.

The EU has been growing too. This week it gave Ukraine and Moldova candidate status. Again, much of the conversation around this has centred on the two countries concerned.

I am not sure even the keenest Brussels watchers have fleshed out how two new former Soviet states would recalibrate the bloc, not least on farming. This is certainly beyond my ken. Have they thought through what a Scottish outpost would mean for them? Hmmm.

I’d say just this: neither the EU nor Nato are empires. And the days of pushing around the Montenegros of this continent have passed.

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