Elbridge Colby: ‘NATO Is Actually Stronger Than Ever.’

Foreign Policy · Feb 14, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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If a European member of NATO invokes the military alliance’s call for help, will the White House pick up the phone? Has the United States suddenly become less hawkish on China? Is a world carved up into spheres less or more safe for countries? I had a chance to ask those and other questions to Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy—essentially the top policymaker in the Pentagon—on the main stage of the Munich Security Conference. You can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or listen to it on the FP Live podcast next week. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript. Ravi Agrawal: I’ve been speaking to many European leaders here who wonder how strong the trans-Atlantic alliance is, and more specifically, how robust the NATO alliance is. They often ask if Article 5—the clause that says an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all—still works. So, I have to ask: Let’s say Russia attacks a member of NATO, and that country invokes Article 5. Will the United States definitely come to that country’s defense? Elbridge Colby: Well, let me be clear from the perspective of the Department of War. The United States is committed to NATO. It is committed to Article 5. The administration from the president on down has made that clear. The frame that we often hear from our European friends is almost a theological frame that’s asking about the purity of heart, if you will. It was very important to the administration in 2025—starting with Vice President [J.D.] Vance, and the president, Secretary [of Defense Pete] Hegseth—to reframe NATO. The way we think about it is: You had a NATO 2.0, which was kind of a post-Cold War NATO, very focused on these abstractions that Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio talked about very eloquently this morning—the liberal rules-based order. And it became very dependent on the United States. Some of that, to be honest, was the fault of the political establishment in the United States. So we’re not putting the fault all on our allies; it’s shared. But what we’re looking for and what we’re pushing now is a NATO 3.0. The good news is that, as [NATO] Secretary-General [Mark] Rutte has eloquently said, thanks to President Trump, NATO is actually stronger than ever. That involves a couple of things. It involves the kind of flexible realism, sort of brass-tacks, practical, results-oriented mindset, in a sense, going back to what you can think of as NATO 1.0: NATO as a military alliance. When you think of it that way, I think it’s very compatible with the zeitgeist, if you will, of [German] Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s speech yesterday, which is, “Let’s get down to business.” The main thing that we want to do looking forward with this NATO 3.0 approach is to come to a much more equitable and thus sustainable model that’s focused on an effective, rational defense of NATO, with Europe taking primary responsibility for its conventional defense, backed up by meeting those spending pledges led by President Trump with Secretary-General Rutte and the European leaders. That will enable that. And if you look over time, that is a really promising vista where we’re going to have a Europe that is strong, that is populous, that is wealthy, that is able to field really serious military force. I see friends of ours from the Indo-Pacific, and we’re asking the same thing. I was in South Korea, the first non-NATO ally to commit to 3.5 percent, the new global standard, as the National Security Strategy has said. That’s where we see not a retreat of the United States from its alliances, but a kind of moderate approach that puts it on a much more sustainable path. RA: That was a great answer, but it was a yes-no question. Even if everyone buys that this is where NATO 3.0 is headed, the reason why the question is, as you call it, “theological,” is because it could be real. For example, take the Russian-speaking town of Narva in Estonia. Russia could attack and say, “We take this territory.” Estonia then could invoke Article 5, which, as you know, only the United States has ever done. You can’t give a NATO 3.0 answer to that. It has to be a yes-or-no answer. EC: No, I think the NATO 3.0 answer is the answer to that. I’m a government official; we don’t engage in speculation. When I was in a think tank, I might have given you a different answer. The president has shown in places like Venezuela and in Operation Midnight Hammer that he is prepared to use military force decisively to back up his pledges to work with our allies, like our model ally Israel. We train, we ready our forces, we think intimately, and we have discussions about these practicalities. This is the spirit at the Department of War, but I would say throughout our administration: We are more in the delivering-results-and-readiness business than in the cheap-talk business. That distinguishes us from our predecessors. I will say that directly because you challenged me on this point. President Trump and his administration under his historic leadership are doing more, and we are going to be ready. But we’re putting things on a more sustainable basis. I think that’s the best answer I can give. That’s an answer that Europeans should—actually, that’s a credible, honest, candid, realistic answer. You can have all the shibboleths, the recitation of the shibboleths, you can have all the promises, but if you can’t practically and realistically back it up and make it worthwhile to the American people, that’s an empty promise. RA: I don’t defend the Biden administration here, but words do matter, signals matter. As far as that goes, there is a sense of fear in Europe that Article 5 doesn’t matter as much anymore. EC: Can I just say one thing on that? I think words do matter. What we’re saying is we are going to make sure that we and our allies are making commitments and we’re following through on it. We’re about delivering results, and I think the last administration was a lot of overpromising and underdelivering. We’re in the opposite camp: being strong and clear but quiet, not looking to peacock, if you will, but really focusing on building up strength. President Trump has committed to pursuing a $1.5 trillion military budget. We have a historic attempt to overhaul our laggardly and in some cases moribund defense industrial base to get it fit for purpose. National mobilization of our defense industrial base—that’s what our allies should actually want. That’s results. RA: Fair enough. Again, Mark Rutte, when he was asked this question at Davos, said very clearly, “Mr. President, we will come to your defense.” But let’s move from Europe to the Indo-Pacific because you’ve been arguing for a while, and now the administration does as well, that shifting burden sharing in NATO allows the United States to have more of a focus on Asia. Talk to us about what that has meant in the last 14-odd months of this administration. EC: What we say in both the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy is that we’re going back to a commonsense, pragmatic focus on Americans’ interests and mapping our overall strategy onto where our interests are most impinged upon and most threatened and where our contributions make the most difference, but also, critically, where we think our allies’ interests lie realistically and also where they can make the most material and relevant contribution. So this is a very different model from the last administration’s one-theater approach, which was a non-military, non-realistic, much more normative, rules-based-international-order approach. Ours is saying that we’re going to meet our allies where they are. We’re saying that we’re going to work with the warp and weft. We’re going to work with the current of those interests, and that’s where countries will be willing to put up. Then we’ll take where our contribution is going to make the greatest difference and where our interests are most engaged, relatively speaking, and that’s where we’re going to focus. It doesn’t mean we’re going to do nothing in those other areas. But if you look at our strategy, it says homeland and hemisphere. We need to refocus the military as a critical part of that. Secondly, the first island chain and stability there; deterring China through strength, not confrontation. We have a very similar approach to our allies and partners there. In other theaters, we’re looking at Europe and NATO vis-à-vis Russia, looking to our wealthy allies. Chancellor Merz made this point eloquently yesterday, saying that Germany alone is a larger economy than Russia. This is a viable, tractable problem. Similarly, South Korea is saying, “North Korea is our primary threat,” and they’re willing to take the lead for conventional defense on the peninsula. That’s what we’re seeing. We’re going to get the force back to a focus on lethality and readiness. Secretary Hegseth has made a historic approach to get back to the basics there. On the industrial side—we see this tragically in Ukraine—these modern conflicts are going to be wars of production, so we need to have a defense industry that can produce for ourselves and for our allies. We’re also very supportive of our allies growing their defense industrial base. We’re confident that this will be the recipe for stability but also deterrence and defense. RA: Let’s talk about China now. There’s a sense that between, say, 2016, the start of the first Trump administration, and, say, 2024, there was a real ascendance of China hawks in D.C. writ large, but also in the White House and in two administrations. There’s a sense now that that trend has reversed a little bit, and I’ll just cite a couple of things that suggest so. One is pulling back from some of the tariff policies from early last year after China imposed export controls on rare earths and critical minerals. There’s also the United States pulling back on chip restrictions for the highest-end chips. There’s a growing sense that when y