This article was originally published in Vol. 6 No. 2 of our print edition.
The Trump administration recently agreed to transfer leadership of two major NATO operational command posts—the Joint Force Command Naples in Italy and the Joint Force Command Norfolk in Virginia—from US officers to European allies, with the United Kingdom and Italy taking command and Germany and Poland sharing leadership of the Netherlands-based Joint Force Command Brunssum on a rotational basis, reflecting a broader shift to make NATO more ‘European-led’ and encourage greater burden-shifting in defence. While the United States will retain leadership of the top strategic post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe and several key component commands (air, land, and maritime), the changes are being phased in over the coming years as part of a redistribution of senior officer responsibilities within the alliance.
This move reflects broader themes in the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) and National Defense Strategy (NDS), which explicitly call for the United States to reduce its traditional role as the primary guarantor of global security and to ‘shift’ rather than simply ‘share’ defence burdens by expecting wealthy allied nations to take primary responsibility for their regional security and increase defence spending commitments; a concept the NSS frames as moving beyond decades of the United States ‘propping up the entire world order’ and setting new standards for allied contributions, and which the NDS operationalizes by urging partners to assume greater defence roles so the United States can focus on defending the homeland and countering strategic competitors like China.
This quiet Kissingerian pivot is backed by one of the sharpest realists of the administration, Elbridge A. Colby, the US Under Secretary of War for Policy. Between JD Vance, Elbridge Colby, and Andy Baker, the United States has not seen such a concentration of realist policy brains since the days of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Robert Haldeman. Colby has been quietly shaping a concept now famous as ‘burden-shifting’, originally articulated in the little-known doctrine of Dormant NATO, and has given it actual policy legs.
Burden-shifting can be understood in straightforward language, as used by Colby himself. He recently began his remarks in Brussels by grounding them in a return to strategic realism, asserting that the post-Cold War ‘unipolar moment’ had ended.1 In today’s multipolar world, marked by multiple potential theatres of conflict, he called for a clear-eyed reassessment of NATO’s force posture and burden-sharing arrangements. This approach discards the overly optimistic assumptions that dominated the past three decades, replacing them with pragmatic calculations of threats, available resources, and alliance capabilities. Colby positioned these ideas within the broader US national security framework, prioritizing homeland defence and global competition while insisting that alliances must reflect current geopolitical realities rather than outdated nostalgia or sentimental attachments.
Central to the speech was the proposal for a ‘NATO 3.0’ model that revives elements of the original Cold War-era alliance, where European allies shoulder the primary responsibility for conventional defence on the continent. ‘This “NATO 3.0” requires much greater efforts by our allies to step up and assume primary responsibility for the conventional defense of Europe’,2 Colby said. He argued that it is unsustainable and unrealistic for the United States to continue serving as Europe’s dominant conventional defender while simultaneously addressing global priorities, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. Instead, European nations must significantly enhance their military readiness, logistics, integrated command structures, and actual force generation, focusing on outputs rather than mere spending inputs. ‘The core strategic reality laid out by the NSS and NDS is this: Europe must assume primary responsibility for its own conventional defense’, pointed out Colby in his remarks. ‘It follows that Europe should field the preponderance of the forces required to deter and, if necessary, defeat conventional aggression in Europe. A strategy that pretends the United States can indefinitely serve as the primary conventional defender of Europe while also carrying the decisive burden everywhere else is neither sustainable nor prudent.’3 This deliberate shift toward greater European burden-bearing aims to create a more equitable transatlantic partnership rooted in mutual strengths: Europe leads on continental conventional defence, while the United States retains critical roles in extended nuclear deterrence, training, planning, and other specialized capabilities where its global reach is irreplaceable. Far from weakening or abandoning NATO, Colby argued that this rebalancing is essential to enhancing the alliance’s credibility, resilience, and long-term effectiveness in an era of strategic competition. As he said, ‘we will also continue, in a more limited and focused fashion, to provide conventional capabilities that contribute to NATO’s defense. Our commitment is to be candid with you, both in regard to the timeline and scale of change, and about the challenges and trade-offs we face. We will continue to train, exercise, and plan alongside our allies. And we in the Department of War will continue to ready our forces to do our part under Article V with Europe taking the lead for its conventional defense.’4
‘Europe must assume primary responsibility for its own conventional defense’
Colby’s remarks echo his earlier speech in South Korea that also articulated the US policy in the Indo-Pacific through the lens of ‘flexible realism’, a pragmatic, clear-eyed approach that discards illusions of unipolar dominance or reliance on diplomatic platitudes, economic ties alone, or optimistic assumptions about perpetual stability.5 He contends that lasting peace in the region demands a durable, favourable balance of power rooted in credible deterrence and tangible military strength rather than abstract ideals. This perspective aligns with his broader strategic thinking by insisting that security arrangements must adapt to contemporary geopolitical realities instead of clinging to outdated frameworks. A key focus is equitable burden-sharing, with Colby criticizing longstanding imbalances in which Asian allies have underinvested in their defences while depending excessively on US forces to uphold regional security. He underlined that ‘such adaptation, such clear-eyed realism about the situation that we face and the need for greater balance in the sharing of burdens will ensure that deterrence remains credible, sustainable, and resilient in this changing world. This is, again, common sense.’6
Colby applied the same principle of shared responsibility to Asia as to Europe, urging partners like South Korea to shoulder greater conventional defence burdens through increased spending, enhanced indigenous capabilities, and demonstrated resolve. He commended South Korea’s commitment to raising defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and assuming more direct responsibility for its own defence as an exemplary model of alignment between national interests and collective security needs. This shift moves alliances from dependency toward genuine partnership, with allies building real military capacity not merely to meet US requests but because it serves their own survival and prosperity. By framing the United States as a supportive partner rather than an unlimited guarantor, Colby sought to distribute risks and responsibilities more evenly among capable actors, fostering a resilient regional order that sustains deterrence, prevents dominance by adversaries, and aligns incentives for long-term stability and mutual benefit.
These documents build on the quiet revolution in US strategic thinking, which found clear expression in the Trump administration’s NSS released in November 2025 and NDS issued by the Pentagon in January 2026.7 The 2025 NSS represents a marked pivot toward a pragmatic, realist foreign policy that discards earlier approaches, which have been criticized as diffuse, overly ambitious in pursuing global dominance, and excessively reliant on multilateralism. It abandons aspirations of perpetual hegemony, instead emphasizing the defence of the homeland and safeguarding critical supply chains, with notable attention to regions like Venezuela and Greenland, preventing adversarial control over vital areas, and providing allied security assistance only when it delivers concrete benefits to the United States rather than chasing idealistic aims such as the worldwide spread of democracy. The 2026 NDS likewise complements this shift by adopting a more disciplined and selective posture for US military forces, establishing a clear ordering of priorities: homeland defence remains paramount, followed by strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific region—focused chiefly on countering China—while Europe and other areas occupy a secondary though still important position. This reflects a deliberate move toward strategic restraint, greater burden-sharing with allies, and the redirection of resources away from broad, open-ended global engagements.
China is singled out as America’s foremost long-term rival, having been described as the world’s second most powerful nation and the strongest relative challenger since the nineteenth century. Yet the tone is measured and non-ideological, stressing realism about China’s military expansion without framing it as an existential menace or pushing for confrontation. The goal is straightforward: to forestall any power, including China, from dominating the United States or its allies by establishing the military conditions for a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, enabling a ‘decent peace’. Drawing from Colby’s advocacy in his book The Strategy of Denial,8 the strategy prioritizes deterrence through robust military capabilities, resilience, and denial approaches to block Chinese regional hegemony or coercive influence, while steering clear of explicit references to Taiwan, encouraging diplomatic and military dialogue to mitigate escalation risks, and treating conflict as avoidable rather than predestined in a context of enduring great-power rivalry.
Realist scholars have long maintained that Europe’s historical national rivalries have not been eradicated but merely suppressed, largely through the mechanisms of NATO and US military predominance rather than through the integrative processes of the European Union. The EU functions primarily as an economic and regulatory entity; genuine security provision has historically derived from US troop deployments and strategic leadership, which enforced stability across the continent. Washington’s preponderant role was instrumental in mitigating the so-called ‘German problem’—arising from Germany’s demographic weight, economic centrality, and geographic position—thereby preventing the resurgence of traditional security dilemmas among European states. As the United States increasingly reallocates resources away from Europe, these latent tensions risk rapid re-emergence.
This dynamic is already manifest in the escalating frictions between Berlin and Paris. On key issues—including strategic autonomy, mutualized European debt instruments, and collaborative defence procurement—German positions have consistently aligned more closely with US preferences than with those of France or other continental partners. Realist theory posits that durable political unity in Europe is improbable absent a single preponderant military power capable of imposing cohesion, whether through overwhelming coercive capacity or outright conquest.
‘A strategy that pretends the United States can indefinitely serve as the primary conventional defender of Europe…is neither sustainable nor prudent’
The enduring pertinence of Kissinger’s oft-cited query—concerning the absence of a unified interlocutor for Europe in international affairs—underscores this structural limitation. For the EU to evolve into a supranational great power capable of autonomously guaranteeing the security of the entire continent, it would need to satisfy several stringent preconditions: (1) the establishment of an integrated European army under centralized command; (2) a domestic European gendarmerie or internal security force empowered to suppress dissent against supranational authority; (3) the formation of a depoliticized, pan-European officer corps and intelligence apparatus; (4) comprehensive control over information flows, narrative construction, and emancipation from external (particularly American) technological, media, and free-speech influences; and (5) the implementation of a unified European technological, industrial, and financial policy, including shared sovereign debt mechanisms. At present, none of these elements appears feasible in the short to medium term. Consequently, the EU, in its current institutional configuration, lacks the capacity to serve as Europe’s autonomous security guarantor.
Historically, this reorientation constitutes a partial reversion to an earlier US tradition of offshore balancing. Prior to the Second World War, American involvement in European affairs was predominantly driven by the objective of preventing the emergence of a continental hegemon capable of undermining US economic, military, and geopolitical primacy. The post-war order supplanted this approach with institutionalized American leadership via NATO and the promotion of European integration—a framework that effectively stabilized the continent but simultaneously fostered long-term European military dependence on the United States. Over subsequent decades, this arrangement engendered structural asymmetries, whereby Western European states benefited from extensive American security guarantees without commensurate resource contributions. In the contemporary context, growing domestic scepticism regarding protracted foreign military engagements—coupled with China’s rapid advancements in naval and nuclear capabilities—has created compelling incentives for Washington to pursue a corrective course. By sustaining US bilateral alignments with Germany, Hungary, and Türkiye to underpin extended deterrence, the strategy mitigates the risks of nuclear proliferation while capitalizing on intra-European divisions to forestall the rise of any single hegemon. A rearmed and more autonomous sovereign Europe leading conventional European security not only alleviates the American strategic burden but also bolsters transatlantic stability, thereby serving enduring US interests in an increasingly multipolar international order.
WASHINGTON, DC РMARCH 4: US Vice President J.D. Vance introduces Elbridge Colby, nominee to be Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, at Colby’s nomination hearing in front of the Senate Committee on Armed Services in Washington, DC on March 4, 2025. Nathan Posner / Anadolu (Photo by Nathan Posner / Anadolu via AFP) PHOTO: AFP News
The evolving structural imperatives are thus increasingly compelling the United States to recalibrate its posture within the European security architecture. This involves delegating primary responsibility for conventional defence to capable European allies, while preserving unilateral American authority over nuclear deterrence. The principle of burden-shifting, now formalized by Colby, envisions individual European states assuming enhanced obligations in areas such as logistics, ground forces, armoured capabilities, and intelligence. This transition is to be facilitated through accelerated rearmament programmes and industrial capacity expansion, with Central Europe positioned as the pivotal actor in this reconfiguration. This strategic adjustment is intended to avert American overextension amid the relative diffusion of US power and the intensification of strategic competition with peer competitors, particularly China. The policy orientation is grounded in classical realist reasoning.
NOTES
1 ‘Remarks by Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby at the NATO Defense Ministerial’, 12 February 2026, U.S. Department of War, www.war.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/4404801/remarks-by-under-secretary-of-war- for-policy-elbridge-colby-at-the-nato-defense/.
2 ‘Remarks by Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby at the NATO Defense Ministerial’.
3 ‘Remarks by Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby at the NATO Defense Ministerial’.
4 ‘Remarks by Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby at the NATO Defense Ministerial’.
5 ‘Remarks by Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby at the Sejong Institute in South Korea’, 26 January 2026, U.S. Department of War, www.war.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/4389207/remarks-by-under- secretary-of-war-for-policy-elbridge-colby-at-the- sejong-insti/.
6 ‘Remarks by Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby at the NATO Defense Ministerial’.
7 ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, The White House (November 2025), www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf; and Department of War, ‘2026 NDS. National Defense Strategy’, 23 January 2026, Media.defense.gov, https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/2026-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY.PDF.
8 Elbridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (Yale University Press, 2022).
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