At a NATO defence ministers meeting in Brussels, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a review of American military presence across Europe, warning that allies who do not spend with “urgency” will see US contributions reduced. “It’s a review that some countries will fail and others will pass with flying colours,” Hegseth stated. He also accused unnamed NATO members of “free riding” and refusing the use of their airbases to US aircraft during the Iran bombing campaign. The remarks arrive in a week when Britain’s own Defence Secretary and Armed Forces Minister resigned over insufficient defence funding commitments — a coincidence of timing that sharpens the stakes. Japan’s Defence Minister Koizumi separately told the BBC that ramping up defence spending is “critical” to preventing war, a striking alignment of message from the other end of the Eurasian landmass.
The received wisdom
The mainstream European response to Hegseth’s remarks will be to frame them as evidence of American unreliability — the latest episode in a now-familiar pattern of Trumpian transactionalism undermining the rules-based international order. NATO solidarity, in this telling, is not a market transaction but a collective security commitment that the United States risks dissolving at exactly the moment when Russia is most belligerent. European commentators will note, accurately, that many NATO allies have been increasing their defence budgets since 2022. They will point to the complexities: countries like Germany emerged from World War II constrained by treaty obligations and cultural aversion to military power; small Baltic states spend above the 2% target but cannot physically host more troops; some nations refused US airbases during the Iran campaign for legitimate sovereignty reasons. The argument concludes that Hegseth’s ultimatum, however useful as a political prod, is strategically clumsy and risks spooking allies into either panic-spending or, worse, beginning to make alternative security arrangements that exclude Washington.
A different read
The difficulty is that the mainstream European defence of the status quo requires ignoring roughly three decades of evidence that the status quo does not work. The 2% GDP target was formally adopted as a NATO benchmark at the Wales Summit in 2014. It is now 2026. The majority of NATO members still fall short of it — and some have managed this achievement through creative accounting, counting pension payments for veterans and civilian intelligence budgets in ways that inflate the headline number while leaving actual military capability hollowed out.
The structural problem is not primarily about money; it is about incentive alignment. When Washington guarantees European security as a near-unconditional commitment — as it has done, with occasional grumbling, since 1949 — it removes the incentive for European governments to make the difficult domestic political choice between defence and welfare. Voters prefer hospitals to howitzers, and since the Berlin Wall came down, no European politician faced a genuine cost for choosing hospitals. The result is a continent that, outside of Britain, France, and Poland, has allowed its military-industrial capacity to atrophy to the point where it could not sustain a serious conventional war for more than a few weeks without American logistics and ammunition resupply. Ukraine’s experience since 2022 has made this embarrassingly visible.
Hegseth is a controversial and often abrasive figure, and his management of the Pentagon has attracted legitimate criticism on numerous grounds. But on the basic strategic logic — that an alliance where one member provides a disproportionate share of both capability and deterrence, while others enjoy the umbrella while cutting military budgets to fund social programs, is not sustainable — he is not wrong. The analogy that keeps recurring to anyone who studies alliance dynamics is extended deterrence in the Cold War: American guarantees were credible partly because the US had skin in the game. The question Hegseth is forcing, clumsily but legitimately, is whether Europe has enough skin of its own in the game to make the guarantee worth extending.
The basehosting refusal during the Iran campaign is particularly telling. Several NATO members — unnamed, but the geography of available airbases for operations in the Gulf narrows the candidates — declined to allow US planes to use their facilities. This is the behaviour of states that want the protection of the alliance without accepting the operational commitments that give the alliance its teeth. From Washington’s perspective, this is not merely ingratitude; it is a military problem. An alliance that fractures under operational stress is not a reliable deterrent.
The deeper irony is that European political elites understand all of this. The post-2022 conversation about “strategic autonomy” — Europe building its own defence capacity — has been accelerating. But it has been accelerating mostly in speeches, not in procurement contracts or factory orders. Japan’s pivot to higher defence spending, in a country with far more constrained fiscal space and a comparable cultural aversion to militarism, suggests that the argument that European rearmament is politically impossible is not entirely convincing.
What to watch
The most important variable is whether the Hegseth review produces a concrete timeline and list of failing countries, or dissolves into the usual communiqué language about “shared commitment to burden-sharing.” A real review with named consequences would be the most significant restructuring of NATO’s political economy since the Cold War ended. Second, watch Germany: Merz’s government has made defence commitments, but the Bundeswehr’s actual capability is still recovering from decades of neglect, and the political coalition for sustained high spending is fragile. Third, track whether Britain’s defence crisis — and the parallel French commitment to maintaining their own nuclear deterrent — accelerates any serious Franco-British bilateral defence initiative outside NATO structures. That would be the most consequential long-term outcome of Hegseth’s ultimatum, and not necessarily the one Washington intends.
— J