US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth renewed his criticism of NATO this week, announcing that Washington will conduct a formal review of its military presence in Europe. The move, reported by the BBC, was not entirely unexpected — Hegseth has questioned the alliance’s value proposition before — but it arrived with greater institutional weight than previous statements. According to the same report, the announcement follows a concrete prior decision: the United States has already scaled back its commitments to the alliance’s high-readiness force, the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), which was established in 2014 directly in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The review comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s recent Iran diplomacy and a broader foreign policy pivot that appears to place negotiated settlements above alliance maintenance. Russia’s war in Ukraine continues.
The received wisdom
The mainstream foreign-policy community — centred in the Atlantic Council, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the opinion pages of most serious broadsheets — will treat this as one more act of reckless Trumpian disruption. The argument runs as follows: NATO is the most successful military alliance in history, having kept the European peace for eight decades; American forward presence is the credible deterrent that prevents miscalculation; European defence spending has in fact risen sharply since 2022, with most members now meeting or approaching the two-percent-of-GDP target; and pulling back now, while Russia is actively prosecuting a war of territorial conquest on the continent, validates Vladimir Putin’s strategic bet that Western cohesion would eventually fracture under domestic pressure. Under this reading, Hegseth’s statement is not burden-sharing realpolitik — it is an unforced gift to Moscow delivered in full view of every potential aggressor on the Eurasian periphery.
There is substance to this critique. It should be heard seriously before being qualified.
A different read
The problem with the received wisdom is not that it is wrong about outcomes — it is largely right about outcomes — but that it uses the threat of bad outcomes to foreclose any serious engagement with the underlying question. The underlying question is this: for how long, and at what cost, should the United States provide the primary strategic guarantee for a collection of wealthy democracies that together have a larger economy and a larger population than the United States itself?
This is not a Trumpian invention. It is a question that Henry Kissinger raised, that James Baker raised, and that Barack Obama raised — privately, at least — when he complained to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg about European “free riders.” The logic of burden-sharing is not inherently isolationist. It is, or can be, a rational response to the fiscal and demographic constraints facing a superpower that also maintains commitments in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and the Korean Peninsula. The case for European strategic autonomy — Europeans defending Europeans, with American backing rather than American leadership — is a principled one, and some serious European strategists, from Charles de Gaulle to Emmanuel Macron, have made it themselves.
But here is where the Trump administration’s instincts, however legitimate in principle, collide with the reality of how strategy actually works. Strategy is not just about the right end state — it is about sequencing and signalling. Consider the analogy of the Nixon Doctrine, proclaimed in Guam in 1969. Nixon and Kissinger were right that the United States could not sustain open-ended troop commitments across Asia. Their framework — American matériel and air support, but Asian boots on the ground — was strategically coherent in the abstract. But the execution of that doctrine in South Korea, combined with the visible humiliation of American withdrawal from Saigon in 1975, sent a signal of declining resolve that Park Chung-hee read with alarm. South Korea’s subsequent flirtation with a domestic nuclear programme was a direct consequence of uncertainty about the American guarantee — a guarantee that, ironically, Nixon had not actually withdrawn.
Or consider the Eisenhower administration’s “New Look” defence policy of the early 1950s, which sought to replace expensive conventional forces with the cheaper deterrence of massive nuclear retaliation. The logic was fiscally compelling. The problem was that massive retaliation was not credible in scenarios short of full-scale war, which is precisely where adversaries probe. You save money on conventional forces; you gain nothing in deterrence value at the margins where deterrence actually matters.
Hegseth’s review risks a structurally identical error. The moment to press European allies on burden-sharing is not while Russia is occupying large swathes of Ukraine and running intelligence operations across the continent, including alleged arson campaigns on infrastructure linked to Western governments. The moment to renegotiate the terms of an alliance is from a position of demonstrated strength, as part of a deliberate diplomatic process — not as a rhetorical accompaniment to a force drawdown already underway. The sequencing is backwards. European defence spending has risen; the leverage for a productive conversation exists. Using it as a moment for a unilateral strategic review announcement squanders that leverage and creates a perception of retreat that adversaries will exploit.
There is also a subtler point about what Hegseth’s statement does to European domestic politics. The most consequential effect of American ambiguity about NATO is not what it does to Russian calculus in the short run — it is what it does to the political feasibility of European rearmament in the medium run. Governments in Berlin, Warsaw, and Paris are asking their populations to spend more on defence. The argument they make is that this is necessary to complement the American guarantee, not replace it. When Washington signals that it may be leaving regardless of what Europeans spend, it simultaneously removes the “complement” rationale and raises the terrifying spectre of genuine strategic independence — which European electorates are not prepared for and which European industrial capacity cannot yet sustain. Ambiguity is not neutral. It distorts every downstream calculation.
The burden-sharing argument is right. The timing and manner of making it are close to catastrophic.
What to watch
Watch whether European NATO members — particularly Poland, which has the alliance’s largest ground force proportionally — respond to the Hegseth review by accelerating bilateral security arrangements with the United Kingdom and France, effectively creating a sub-alliance that does not depend on Washington. Watch whether Germany’s new defence spending trajectory survives its own fiscal coalition politics; Berlin’s commitment to two percent is politically fragile. Watch how Trump’s negotiating posture on Ukraine evolves: if a ceasefire deal emerges that freezes rather than resolves the conflict, the case for reducing American presence becomes fractionally easier to make — but the precedent it sets for Taiwan will be watched very carefully in Beijing. The review, once announced, has its own momentum.
— J