THE Dutch are always nervous about the sea. But their maritime spooks have been getting especially antsy since full-scale war erupted in Europe a year ago.

This week, Netherlands military intelligence warned that Vladimir Putin’s regime was a threat to offshore infrastructure: to the comms cables, wind farms and gas pipelines on which we all depend. The Kremlin, it said, had started “activities that indicate espionage as well as preparing operations for disturbance and sabotage”.

Dutch warships, an intel general announced, had shooed away Russian vessels caught mapping energy networks. Maritime infrastructure operators have been warned to beef up security.

It is not just Nato member the Netherlands that is worried about its offshore kit. Theoretically neutral Ireland has been fretting about the safety of the subsea cables which run off its coast to link Europe and America after Putin’s navy was spotted snooping.

The UK is rattled too and has been since before Russia stepped up its war on Ukraine this time last year. Shetland got a taste of what life is like without an underwater wire to the mainland last year. Many islanders lost phone and internet when the line was cut.

There is some speculation about that incident and even more about how the giant Nordstream pipes carrying Russian gas under the Baltic to western Europe came to explode last autumn.

I am not going to pretend that I know who is snooping on what below the waves. Or who is blowing what up. But I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say an increasingly hot cold war is being waged in the chilly depths.

This matters. It matters for Scottish politics. It matters - even as public discourse focuses on culture war issues - for the current SNP leadership campaign.

Maritime infrastructure - and its security - is one of those issues that slices through all levels of decision-making. It will surely be on the desk of the next FM.

The Scottish Government has got into bother for overstating the importance of the country’s potential renewables capacity for the UK and Europe. But our country does have the ability to generate a lot of lecky. And we do want to export that. How? Well, right now the idea is to lay giant wires under the sea. And who is in charge of planning for this? Well, ultimately, whoever wins over the most SNP members.

I have no idea what the right call would be on subsea power cables, I’m just a reporter. This is a tough choice with huge numbers of variables to weigh up, local, national and global, not least a climate emergency likely to outlast any authoritarian regime.

But we have a new international context for our politics and our devolved decision-making: war in Europe. Do we want a first minister who can demonstrate an understanding of this? We damned well should.

It is only those on the braindead extremes of our politics who dismiss the importance of foreign and defence affairs to devolved government. So diehard yoons imagine Scottish politicians don’t need to worry their little heads about international stuff, that this is best left to the Ferrero Rocher munchers of Whitehall and the diplomatic corps. And the most zealous nats too often dismiss any voice from beyond our shores.

The mainstream quietly knows it is impossible to run Scotland without taking account of the rest of the world. Core devolved functions involve foreign policy: economic development, schooling, policing and health all require European and wider interactions.

And the next FM, of course, will also lead the third largest political party in the Commons and one of the highest profile pro-independence movements in the world. That means the job comes with modest but not negligible global responsibilities.

It is one thing to recognise how important international relations are for whoever replaces Nicola Sturgeon. Whether we, collectively, are capable of having a serious national conversation about global and European issues is another thing altogether.

Will world affairs come up in the leadership debates? Dunno, but they should. Does our media and political machinery have the capacity for a serious discussion? Hmmm. Are the three declared candidates capable of articulating coherent geopolitical visions? Hey, I don’t see why not.

Take Humza Yousaf. The supposed continuity candidate, as a junior external affairs minister, helped shape the SNP’s European and foreign policies, including its charm offensive ahead of the 2014 indyref, as a junior external affairs minister. His social conservative rival Kate Forbes has history degrees from Cambridge and Edinburgh (with a special interest in migration), served a brief stint at Oxfam and spent part of her youth in India. Outsider Ash Regan studied international relations at university.

They should be able to tell us some of their specific global concerns affecting Scotland.

Such as? Well, I’d want to hear from potential FMs on China and education policy. As the Middle Kingdom increasingly throws its weight around, should our schools and universities be reconsidering their relationships with its authoritarian regime? If so, how? As things stand, some universities look precariously reliant on Chinese students. They might need bailouts if Scotland falls out with the people’s republic. It is a big deal.

But the big game-changer is Mr Putin’s war-mongering, including what defence nerds call non-kinetic aggression, such as hack-and-leak or other disinformation campaigns, or cyber attacks.

Peter Jackson is acutely aware of these dangers. He is professor of global security at Glasgow University and one of the forces behind our only international relations think tank, the Scottish Council on Global Affairs. “Foreign policy is reserved but it has big knock-on effects,” he says of the SNP leadership race. The next FM, he points out, may have to make decisions on Ukrainian refugees or brace the country’s computer networks.

But above all Prof Jackson, like the Dutch, is looking out to sea. War in Ukraine means the next Scottish administration is going to have to make some tough calls on one particularly important but vulnerable offshore asset: oil. How do we protect it? And do we develop more of this climate-destroying resource because a war is raging?