FP: NATO 3.0 is a gamble of the Trump administration

After nearly two years of intense hostility toward European allies, the clearest signal coming from Washington is that Europe is now on its own, Foreign Policy writes.

Launched in February, NATO 3.0 is the brainchild of Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy. At its core is the assumption that the United States can rapidly wind down its conventional commitments to Europe while retaining its leading role in the alliance, so long as Europe continues to rely on the U.S. nuclear guarantee. Colby presents this shift as a rebalancing of the alliance, enticing European states to take responsibility for the continent’s conventional defense as Washington turns its attention to the Indo-Pacific.

The approach is Washington’s attempt to have it both ways — to cut back without sacrificing its influence or affecting extended nuclear deterrence. In reality, however, it would compromise Europe’s defense, diminish Washington’s sway, weaken the U.S. nuclear guarantee, and generate proliferation risks — ultimately undercutting the policy’s objectives and U.S. national interests.

Colby’s vision is already reshaping the U.S. footprint in Europe. In May, the Department of Defense announced plans to withdraw roughly 5,000 troops from Germany and cancel the deployment of a long-range strike battalion there. The U.S. rotational brigade in Romania returned home without replacement last October, and reports suggest another 25,000 to 40,000 troops could leave Europe.

A new NATO Force Model

Washington has also proposed cutting its contribution to the NATO Force Model — the pool of forces made available for NATO operations — by one-third to one-half. The United States is reportedly planning to significantly reduce the aircraft and warships available in a crisis, including an aircraft carrier, reconnaissance aircraft, dozens of F-16 and F-15E jets, and potentially half of the current U.S. armed MQ-9 drone supply currently in Europe.

As conventional forces recede, nuclear forces are expected to play a larger role. Colby has pledged Washington “will continue to provide the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent,” and there are reports that the United States is considering expanding the basing of dual-capable aircraft and the deployment of nuclear warheads beyond the alliance’s current six host countries, potentially to Poland and the Baltic states. According to two anonymous sources cited by the Financial Times, the additional nuclear presence is meant to demonstrate the resilience of the U.S. nuclear umbrella despite the conventional drawdown.

Yet convincing an adversary that the U.S. president would risk New York to save Riga has always been a tall order. Historically, Washington has bolstered the credibility of that commitment by ensuring that a conventional attack on NATO territory could trigger unpredictable nuclear escalation. U.S. troops in Europe thus serve as a trip wire: A president might hesitate to order a nuclear strike to defend Germany or Poland but calculate differently if U.S. soldiers were threatened.

NATO 3.0 would bifurcate the escalation ladder

Colby’s vision, by contrast, treats conventional and nuclear forces as separable domains, assigning responsibility for the former to Europe and the latter to the United States. Such a tidy division may make sense on paper, but it is unrealistic in practice. A hasty U.S. conventional withdrawal would weaken Europe’s ability to defend itself below the nuclear threshold while simultaneously eroding the credibility of the U.S. nuclear guarantee. It is a dangerous, double-edged experiment that undercuts both pillars of deterrence at once.

Assigning conventional responsibility to Europe and nuclear responsibility to the United States does not produce a clean split. Conventional strikes may hit strategic targets, and Moscow’s threshold for a nuclear response cannot be known in advance. NATO 3.0 would bifurcate the escalation ladder, fragmenting command, complicating allied operations, and giving Moscow new openings to exploit divisions within the alliance.

Moreover, the notion that the United States would enter a crisis only at the brink of nuclear escalation defies logic. NATO 3.0 effectively hands the president a ready-made rationale for withholding conventional support (“That’s Europe’s job.”) while requiring an affirmative decision to threaten nuclear escalation. It is inconceivable that Washington would avoid the risk of a conventional war on behalf of Europe but somehow accept the far greater risks of a nuclear war. Without meaningful U.S. forces’ involvement in conventional operations and a central role in managing escalation, credible nuclear signaling from Washington is highly dubious. After nearly two years of intense hostility toward European allies, the clearest signal coming from Washington is that Europe is now on its own.

U.K. and French nuclear protection to the rest of Europe?

NATO’s three nuclear powers — the United States, the United Kingdom, and France — all retain independent control over their arsenals and nuclear decision-making. But while Washington and London coordinate through the NATO nuclear planning structure, Paris does not. NATO has historically viewed these separate centers of decision-making as an asset that complicates Russian calculations. In reality, though, the U.S. arsenal remains the backbone of the alliance’s nuclear deterrent, giving Washington immense influence over NATO strategy, planning, and operations. As the U.K. and France strengthen their cooperation on a more explicitly European approach to extended deterrence, the United States risks losing the influence conferred by its long-standing role as the alliance’s ultimate guarantor.

The prospect of extending U.K. and French nuclear protection to the rest of Europe is already gaining traction as doubts about Washington’s reliability grow. In July 2025, the United Kingdom and France committed to independent but harmonizable nuclear forces and established a joint nuclear steering group. In March, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would expand its warhead numbers and adopt a forward deterrence framework to deepen European nuclear security cooperation. France and Germany have also set up their own nuclear steering group, and 10 European states are now holding structured bilateral discussions with Paris on nuclear consultation and potential hosting agreements.

For now, these efforts primarily serve as an insurance policy against the possibility of U.S. abandonment. But there is also a danger, albeit still far off, that other NATO states begin to consider acquiring nuclear weapons of their own. Poland is already debating exactly this question.

New European nuclear states remain a distant prospect, but if NATO 3.0 is intended to reassure allies while discouraging proliferation, the evidence suggests it is having the opposite effect.

NATO 3.0’s underlying intuition — that the United States should encourage greater European burden-sharing without encouraging nuclear proliferation—is sound. The problem is that these objectives cannot be achieved together in such a short window. There are better ways to balance burden-sharing, European security, and Washington’s position in the alliance, and if the Trump administration presses ahead with NATO 3.0, several steps could mitigate the risks.

The Trump administration is right that the traditional division of responsibility for European security was unsustainable. But NATO 3.0 rests on an unworkable and dangerous partition between conventional and nuclear capabilities, one that runs counter to the lessons of history and deterrence theory.

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