Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, urged fellow Nato members on Thursday to meet pledges to spend two per cent of GDP on defence, saying a tougher foreign policy is needed in a world more dangerous “than most of us have ever known”.

The Foreign Secretary said that the West was being tested by Iran, Russia and China among others and nations must show courage or allow “our adversaries (to)…write our future for us”.

“We are in a battle of wills. We all must prove our adversaries wrong – Britain, and our allies and partners around the world,” Lord Cameron told an audience at the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre.

Lord Cameron said nations were not learning the lessons of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

“If Putin’s illegal invasion teaches us anything, it must be that doing too little, too late only spurs an aggressor on. This cannot go on. We need to be tougher and more assertive.”