NATO’s European allies are adapting their defences at a time when it is becoming increasingly crucial to pursue strategic integration with the Eastern Flank. While Ukraine operates at the forefront of developments in defence, Georgia offers opportunities to exert influence over crucial trade routes.
October 13, 2026 –
Nikoloz Khatiashvili
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Articles and Commentary
Georgian Coast Guard patrolling the shores of the Black Sea near Batumi. Photo: Shutterstock
Inside this article
The emerging concept of NATO 3.0 aims to transition primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense to European allies while the United States maintains a more limited, supportive role.Ukraine has become a major producer of European security through battle-tested armed forces and a rapidly developing military-industrial complex that can enhance European industrial capacity and strategic autonomy.Georgia’s democratic backsliding and confrontational rhetoric toward the West threaten its national interests and risk pulling the country into a vulnerable Russian-dominated grey zone, weakening wider regional stability.
Every security order contains a dangerous interval between the moment when the old system begins to retreat and the moment when the new one becomes capable of defending itself. Europe is now approaching precisely such an interval.
The emerging concept of “NATO 3.0” seeks to transform the transatlantic alliance from a system disproportionately dependent on American military power into one in which European allies assume primary responsibility for the continent’s conventional defence. The United States would remain indispensable, particularly through nuclear deterrence, intelligence, strategic mobility and other high-end capabilities, but its conventional role would become more limited. This direction is explicitly reflected in the 2026 US National Defense Strategy, which calls on NATO allies to take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defence with “critical but more limited” American support.
In principle, the logic is understandable. Europe possesses the economic, technological and demographic resources necessary to defend itself. A stronger European pillar could ultimately make NATO more balanced, resilient and politically sustainable. However, resources on paper are not the same as deployable military power. Budgets do not immediately produce combat-ready divisions, integrated air defence, long-range firing capacity, ammunition stockpiles, intelligence networks or functioning command structures. The central danger of NATO 3.0, therefore, does not lie in its destination. It lies in the journey.
The strategic danger of the transitional gap
For decades, the American presence in Europe has been more than the sum of US troops, aircraft and military installations. It has served as the connective tissue of European defence: providing command and control, intelligence, logistics, aerial refuelling, satellite support, strategic transportation, missile defence and the political certainty that an attack on Europe would immediately engage American power.
Replacing this conventional presence will be extraordinarily difficult. European governments may increase defence spending, but military capacity requires time, industrial depth, trained personnel and political endurance. A factory cannot be constructed by a summit declaration, and an army cannot be rebuilt within a single electoral cycle.
This creates a transitional gap: a period in which the United States may reduce elements of its conventional role before Europe becomes fully capable of replacing them. Russia will regard this gap not as a temporary administrative problem but as a strategic opportunity.
Moscow does not need to defeat NATO in a conventional war to improve its position. It can expand its influence incrementally through political interference, economic dependency, disinformation, corruption, covert operations, manufactured instability and support for authoritarian forces in neighbouring countries. It can pressure states that remain outside NATO’s formal security guarantees while testing the political cohesion of the Alliance itself.
Russia’s preferred environment is not necessarily one of open war. It is the grey zone between war and peace, sovereignty and dependency, democracy and authoritarian control. During Europe’s defence transition, Moscow most probably will try to enlarge that grey zone along NATO’s eastern and south-eastern frontiers.
The success of NATO 3.0 will consequently depend not only on how Europe protects its present borders, but also on whether it prevents strategic vacuums from emerging around them.
Ukraine is not merely a beneficiary of European security
No country is more important to this transformation than Ukraine. European discussion still too often treats Ukraine primarily as a state that requires protection, weapons and financial assistance. This perspective is increasingly outdated. Ukraine is not only a consumer of European security. Instead, it has become one of its principal producers. The real strength of the military is increasing during real battles, not during military drills.
Ukraine possesses the continent’s most battle-experienced armed forces. Its military has accumulated practical knowledge of large-scale conventional war, drone operations, electronic warfare, battlefield innovation, air defence and military logistics under conditions no existing NATO army has faced in recent decades. These are not abstract lessons taught in staff colleges. They have been acquired at immense human cost against the very adversary around which NATO’s European deterrence is being rebuilt.
If the United States reduces its conventional role, Europe will need mass, combat experience, operational adaptability, and the ability to fight a technologically intensive war. Ukraine offers all four. Its incorporation into NATO would not simply extend western protection eastward; it would add substantial conventional strength to the Alliance and make the European pillar of NATO considerably more credible.
Ukraine’s membership is often presented as a burden or an escalation risk. Yet the opposite argument deserves greater attention: permanently excluding Ukraine may preserve the very geopolitical ambiguity that Russia has repeatedly exploited. Grey zones do not moderate Russian behaviour. They invite pressure by suggesting that aggression may remain below the threshold of a unified western response.
Ukraine’s accession would undoubtedly require careful political and security arrangements, particularly while hostilities continue. Nevertheless, the strategic objective should be clear. Europe cannot credibly seek conventional autonomy while leaving its most capable conventional military outside its collective defence architecture. NATO itself acknowledges that Ukraine’s security contributes directly to the security of the Alliance. That principle should eventually acquire institutional form.
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Ukraine as an arsenal of European security
Ukraine’s importance extends beyond its armed forces. Its rapidly developing Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) can become a critical component of European military production.
The war has demonstrated that Europe’s defence problem is not simply insufficient spending. It is insufficient production. European states must replenish ammunition, expand air-defence capacity, manufacture drones and counter-drone systems, repair equipment quickly and shorten the distance between battlefield experience and industrial adaptation. Ukraine has been forced to innovate at wartime speed, often developing comparatively inexpensive systems capable of challenging far more costly Russian platforms.
Integrating Ukrainian manufacturers into the EU’s Defence Technological and Industrial Base would connect Ukraine’s battlefield innovation with European capital, technology and manufacturing scale. The European Commission’s Readiness 2030 White Paper already identifies the integration of Ukraine’s defence industry as a European priority, while the EU–Ukraine task force describes such cooperation as contributing to European capabilities and strategic autonomy.
This integration should not be understood as charity. It is a strategic investment. Ukraine can help Europe produce faster, innovate more efficiently, and design weapons according to the realities of contemporary warfare. In return, European investment can provide Ukraine with scale, predictable financing and access to common standards.
European strategic autonomy will remain rhetorical unless it rests upon sufficient industrial power. Ukraine can become one of the pillars of that power.
The Black Sea: NATO’s unfinished security geography
The future of European security will not be determined only along the Baltic frontier or in Central Europe. It will also be decided in the Black Sea.
The Black Sea connects Europe with the South Caucasus, Ukraine, Türkiye, the Caspian basin, Central Asia and the wider Middle East. It is a corridor for energy, trade, digital infrastructure and military access. It is also the maritime space through which Russia projects power toward Europe’s south-east and seeks to restrict the sovereignty of neighbouring states.
NATO has repeatedly described the Black Sea as strategically important to Euro-Atlantic security. The three NATO allies of Türkiye, Romania and Bulgaria border the Black Sea, while Ukraine and Georgia form its exposed eastern and northern strategic edges. The region is therefore not peripheral to Europe. It is where European, Eurasian and Middle Eastern security systems intersect.
A secure Black Sea cannot be built around geography while ignoring geography. Ukraine is essential to its northern balance while Georgia is essential to its eastern balance. Without Georgia, it will be difficult to close the circle of Black Sea security.
Georgia provides access to the South Caucasus and to transport and energy routes connecting Europe with the Caspian Sea and Central Asia without passing through Russia. It occupies the geographical hinge between the Black Sea and the wider Caucasus. It is also one of NATO’s closest operational partners, having contributed to Alliance missions and developed substantial interoperability with NATO forces. NATO continues to describe Georgia as one of its closest partners. However, Tbilisi’s recent shifts in foreign policy have become an obstacle for NATO-Georgia relations.
An old geopolitical maxim captures this logic with deliberate bluntness: “If you control Georgia, you control the whole Caucasus.” No state can literally control such a complex region through Georgia alone, but the proposition expresses an enduring strategic reality. Influence over Tbilisi provides leverage over east-west connectivity, Black Sea access and the political orientation of the South Caucasus.
Russia understands Georgia’s value very well. That is why it has repeatedly used military aggression, occupation, economic pressure, political influence and information warfare to limit Tbilisi’s sovereign choices. During the transitional gap created by NATO 3.0, Moscow will almost certainly intensify its efforts to finally pull Georgia away from the West and into a Russian-dominated grey zone.
Georgia’s self-created strategic vulnerability
It is precisely at this moment of heightened geopolitical danger that Georgia’s present foreign policy trajectory has become most alarming.
The Georgian government’s increasingly confrontational rhetoric toward the European Union and the broader West, combined with democratic backsliding and the gradual strengthening of political and economic accommodation with Russia, runs directly against Georgia’s national interests. The country is distancing itself from the community capable of protecting its sovereignty while becoming more vulnerable to the power that occupies its own internationally recognized territory.
This is not “pragmatic balancing”. Small states can balance among competing partners only when they preserve their institutions, international credibility and strategic alternatives. Destroying relations with the West does not increase Georgia’s room for manoeuvre. Instead, it eliminates alternatives and leaves Russia as the dominant external power.
The European Union has already concluded that Georgia’s accession process has been effectively halted amid severe democratic backsliding. European officials increasingly describe Georgia as a warning of what happens when a country is left in a grey zone and exposed to Russian coercion. If Tbilisi ultimately cuts its institutional, political and security ties with the West, Georgia will not become neutral. It will become isolated.
Neutrality without the capacity to defend it is merely vulnerability with a diplomatic title.
For Georgia, transformation into a Russian grey zone could become a strategic black hole. Once western institutions, investments, partnerships and political confidence have withdrawn, restoring them may take decades. International trust accumulates slowly but can disappear with remarkable speed. A future government may reverse hostile rhetoric, but it will not immediately reverse the consequences of lost time, weakened institutions, and deepened Russian penetration.
The cost would not be limited to Georgia. A strategically isolated Georgia would weaken Black Sea security, undermine alternative transport and energy routes, and increase Russian leverage over Armenia and Azerbaijan. It could complicate regional peace efforts by allowing Moscow to re-establish itself as the indispensable arbiter of affairs in the South Caucasus. Instead of becoming a platform for connectivity and cooperation, Georgia could become an instrument of regional fragmentation.
The result would be greater uncertainty around transport corridors, increased external manipulation of domestic politics, and a challenge for Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia’s western orientation has historically contributed to regional pluralism by preventing any single power from monopolizing the South Caucasus. Its reversal would disturb that balance.
Closing the strategic circle
NATO 3.0 can succeed, but only if it is understood as more than the substitution of European money for American forces. It must become a coherent geopolitical project.
Europe must avoid a premature reduction of American capabilities before credible replacements exist. It must integrate Ukraine’s military power and defence industry into the continent’s security architecture. It must recognize the Black Sea as a central theatre rather than a secondary flank. In addition, it must prevent Georgia from disappearing into the grey zone that Russia is working to expand.
Ukraine and Georgia are different in size, military capacity and current political direction. Yet both reveal the same strategic truth: European security cannot be protected solely at the existing borders of the European Union and NATO. Instability beyond those borders will inevitably penetrate them through war, coercion, disrupted trade, energy insecurity, migration and authoritarian influence.
The deepest question raised by NATO 3.0 is therefore not who will replace which American brigade or weapons system. It is whether Europe can learn to think strategically about its own geopolitical space.
A security architecture is credible only when it understands where its frontiers truly lie. Europe’s strategic frontier runs through Ukraine, across the Black Sea and into Georgia. If Europe integrates and protects this space, NATO 3.0 may produce a stronger and more balanced Alliance. If it leaves a vacuum, Russia will fill it.
History rarely leaves strategic spaces unoccupied. The only question is who will possess the will to shape them.
Nikoloz Khatiashvili is a former diplomat and currently serves as a Senior Research Fellow at GEOCASE, one of Georgia’s leading think tanks. He is Professor at several Georgian Universities. With over 18 years of experience spanning the public and private sectors, Nikoloz has held several senior positions, including six years at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia and eight years as the Chief of Staff of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Parliament of Georgia. His research focuses on international security, democracy, international relations and diplomacy, intelligence and counterintelligence, hybrid warfare, national security, and terrorism.
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