Sara Tahir
In December 2025, Pentagon officials delivered a blunt message to European diplomats: the continent must assume leadership of NATO by 2027. The implication was unmistakable, the transatlantic alliance, the bedrock of European security for over seven decades, may be coming to an end. Less than a year later, at the July 2026 NATO summit in Ankara, the concept of “NATO 3.0” took centre stage. Under this framework, European members would assume primary responsibility for their own conventional defence, while the United States shifts its strategic weight toward homeland defence and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.
This is not burden-sharing. This is burden-shifting. Europe now faces a choice that will define its security for a generation: it can embrace this transition as an opportunity for genuine strategic autonomy, or it can allow rhetoric to outpace reality, leaving the continent dangerously exposed. The evidence from Ankara suggests Europe is moving in the right direction, but not nearly fast enough.
The numbers are impressive on paper. European NATO members and Canada announced an increase in defence spending of more than $139 billion in 2026. Five NATO members—Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and Greece- are projected to meet or exceed the alliance’s new 3.5 percent of GDP core defence target already this year, nearly a decade ahead of the 2035 deadline.
Overall, European NATO members are projected to spend an average of 2.53 percent of GDP on core defence. The European Union, meanwhile, has forged new defence pacts and is working to reduce extra-regional procurement, primarily from the United States, Israel and South Korea—by approximately half.
Money alone does not buy security. The gap between financial commitment and tangible military capability remains wide. Europe’s defence industrial base, hollowed out by decades of underinvestment, is struggling to translate higher budgets into delivered weapons. Procurement delays, fragmented national programmes, labour shortages and strained supply chains are raising doubts about how quickly Europe can rebuild.
The Eurofighter programme, emblematic of Europe’s fragmented multi-state defence logistics, is facing a worsening crisis. In the European Union, 27 member states remain fiercely protective of their national defence industries, undermining the scale and efficiency that collective security demands.
More troubling still is the planning disconnect. NATO’s Defence Planning Process—the cornerstone of defence planning in Europe, still assumes that the United States will provide 30 percent of capability by 2032, including critical command-and-control and force integration functions. This expectation is increasingly at odds with stated US intentions.
The next NDPP cycle, beginning in 2027, risks being based on unrealistic assumptions that could direct European focus and resources towards non-priority areas while leaving deterrence gaps unaddressed. As the EU Institute for Security Studies has warned, Europeans need a realistic assessment of what they must do to take the lead in deterring Russia, and current structures are ill-suited to that task.
The capability gaps are not abstract. While European allies have largely filled most of the holes left by US troop reductions, the main gap NATO is still struggling to plug is in strategic bombers, where the United States has said it will make only one aircraft available instead of two. More fundamentally, no European state can replace American capabilities in airlifts, air-to-air refuelling, battlefield intelligence and precision deep strikes. These are not luxuries; they are the sinews of modern warfare.
Russia is watching this transition closely. President Vladimir Putin is rejecting calls to negotiate peace with Kyiv, with Ukraine’s recent drone strikes on Russian oil refineries and ports strengthening his resolve to keep fighting. Sources close to the Kremlin describe a “high probability” of escalation in the coming months. Russian forces may be advancing at a crawl, an average of 164 feet per day around Kostiantynivka, but they are inflicting devastating damage and suffering casualties at a rate of nearly eight to one compared to Ukrainian forces. Moscow is prepared to absorb extraordinary losses to achieve its objectives.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Western intelligence services have warned that, if current military rearmament continues, Russia could have the capability to launch a larger conflict with NATO before 2030. British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has echoed this assessment, stating that “there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030”. The threat is not hypothetical—it is a planning assumption.
Europe’s response has been significant but incomplete. The Ankara summit declaration pledged €70 billion in military equipment, assistance and training for Ukraine in 2026, with intentions to sustain at least equivalent levels in 2027. This demonstrates that NATO no longer treats assistance to Kyiv as an emergency response but as a sustained commitment.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are accelerating work on joint defence capabilities, including plans for missile defence, satellite reconnaissance and European long-range weapons as a future alternative to US Tomahawk missiles.
German Bundeswehr units will participate for the first time in France’s flagship nuclear exercise this autumn. Macron has reiterated France’s willingness to provide EU countries with a “nuclear umbrella”.
Even these landmark steps carry an expiration date. Macron is a lame duck, with French presidential elections just nine months away. Marine Le Pen, whose far-right National Rally has very good chances of scoring a major win, is sceptical about deploying French nuclear weapons in other countries. A far-right French presidency could scrap many of these projects. The Franco-German partnership that has driven European integration for decades could fracture.
The deeper challenge is political. European strategic autonomy is not merely a military project, it is a political one. As Mario Draghi has argued, Europe needs to make a qualitative leap in integration to the point where the continent can “act more and more as if it were one state”. This requires crafting common EU policies on artificial intelligence, defence and energy. Germany, as the only country with the political strength to push the bloc in such a direction, must seize the moment and take the lead.
But the political headwinds are fierce. Far-right parties are gaining ground across the continent, seeking to return power from Brussels to national capitals. Populist forces are undermining the EU’s collective will, making it even more difficult for Europeans to assume responsibility for their own security.
The EU’s foreign policy architecture is itself in disarray, with the European Commission accused of overstepping its treaty powers in diplomacy and defence, creating confusion over who speaks for Europe on the world stage. Repeated paralysis over Ukraine funding, Iran and Russia is reigniting fights over the EU’s veto system.
NATO 3.0 is not a finished product, it is a work in progress, and one that could easily fail. The concept carries the risk of creating capability gaps in Europe’s defence that will be difficult to close. It envisages a substantial reduction in US forces and assets assigned to Europe’s defence, with European members assuming primary responsibility for conventional deterrence while the US nuclear umbrella remains in place. This hybrid arrangement may satisfy no one: Americans may see it as insufficient burden-sharing, while Europeans may find themselves bearing the costs without the strategic control.
The irony is that Europe has the means to deter Russia with much less US support. What it lacks is the political will and institutional coherence to turn those means into credible deterrence. The challenge in the months ahead is to give momentum and coherence to Europe’s defence build-up, transforming political commitment into genuine European leadership in defence.
Europe stands at a hinge of history. The United States is no longer the reliable partner it once was, and may never be again. The choice is not whether to assume greater responsibility for its own security, but whether to do so deliberately and effectively, or to have that responsibility forced upon it in the midst of crisis. NATO 3.0 offers a framework, but frameworks do not defend borders. Only capabilities, commitment and political will can do that. The question is whether Europe possesses enough of all three.
Sara Tahir is a BS International Relations student at Air University, Islamabad. Her academic interests include international security, geopolitics, European affairs, cyber security, emerging technologies, and global governance. She writes on contemporary international affairs with a focus on evidence-based policy analysis.
