[Salon] Europe’s Post-American Security Future Is Now - Guest Post

Europe’s Post-American Security Future Is Now Ulrike FrankeMay 27, 2026 Danish forces participate in a NATO exercise, in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP photo by Ebrahim Noroozi) There has been warning shot after warning shot since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, and so many “wake-up calls” that European policymakers’ ears have been ringing constantly. But until last week, the changes in the Trump administration’s approach to the trans-Atlantic alliance remained mostly rhetorical, limited to impolite speeches, hostile strategy documents and threats to annex Greenland that Trump subsequently climbed down from. Now, European NATO members have finally been confronted in concrete terms with what defending the continent will look like without full buy-in from America. According to a report from the German news magazine Der Spiegel, an envoy of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with high-ranking officials from other NATO member states in Brussels on Friday to discuss changes to the alliance’s Force Model. The framework, by which each of the allies designates the components of their national forces available to NATO’s commanding officer in peacetime as well as those available in case of an attack, is crucial to the alliance’s ability to effectively respond to a crisis or conflict. The current Force Model was agreed upon at NATO’s Madrid summit in 2022 as a response to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. At Friday’s meeting, Der Spiegel reported, the U.S. envoy informed the allies that Washington will be significantly reducing its contributions of key military capabilities moving forward. It is no secret that the Trump administration has been looking to reduce its commitments to European security generally and to NATO specifically. Trump has been critical of NATO from the very beginning of his first term in 2017, and commentators have been noting the need for Europeans to defend themselves without having to rely on the U.S. for years. But the message passed along in Brussels was considerably more drastic than the Europeans had anticipated and called into question NATO’s entire organization of European defense. According to Der Spiegel, Washington intends to significantly cut its contributions to NATO of strategic bombers, refueling aircraft and fighter jets. It will also provide fewer destroyers and no longer contribute any submarines to NATO’s naval forces. The U.S. intends to significantly reduce the number of armed drones it provides, and European NATO members will be responsible for contributing all unarmed reconnaissance drones. And according to a correspondent for the Polish news outlet TVP World, the U.S. is also planning to halve its deep-strike capabilities in Europe. The exact details of America’s future contributions are of course classified, but the reported information already points to important gaps in NATO’s future force structure. For example, Europeans don’t have many of the large surveillance drones the U.S. no longer wants to provide. They rely on America for these and other intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities—what defense analysts call “strategic enablers.” After years when the main uncertainty introduced by Trump was on the political level, we are now seeing a real impact on the working level of military capabilities. As a result, the planned changes go far beyond recent discussions regarding U.S. troop reductions in Germany and Poland, and outweigh the strategic implications of Washington’s recently announced decision to abandon planned deployments of long-range strike capabilities in Germany. If these changes are indeed implemented, they represent a fundamental challenge for NATO, calling into question the alliance’s model for European defense. Because it has no standing army of its own, NATO works by organizing the member state capabilities at its disposal to maintain a credible deterrence and defense posture. Its regional defense plans, which detail the steps and resources needed to protect specific regions from attack, are based on—and depend on—the forces provided by member states. With the U.S. now cutting its contributions so substantially, all of these plans must be re-examined from top to bottom. The only element of its current European security posture the U.S. is apparently not planning to reduce is nuclear deterrence. The U.S. will continue to provide NATO’s “nuclear umbrella” through the alliance’s nuclear-sharing system, by which U.S. airborne nuclear weapons are currently stationed in five European NATO member states and can be delivered using aircraft from those states’ forces. Despite these assurances, several NATO members are slowly beginning to look for a European alternative for nuclear deterrence, namely France. The announced changes to the U.S. force posture in Europe are drastic. After years when the main uncertainty introduced by Trump was on the political level—calling into question Washington’s support for NATO and the U.S. determination to act in the event of a threat to European security—we are now seeing a real impact on the working level of military capabilities. The uncertainty is compounded by the changing messages out of Washington. Just a few months ago, at the Munich Security Conference in February, multiple U.S. and NATO representatives assured me and other European security analysts in attendance that “NATO was stronger than ever,” because despite political squabbles, the underlying military foundation was not only sound but more solid than it had been in years. It is now clear that this is simply not the case. For Europe, the only possible response can and must be to do even more for its own defense. The challenge, however, is that European NATO allies are reaching the limits of what they can do, as hundreds of billions of euros in increased defense spending are already being invested amid difficult economic contexts. The big question regarding U.S. commitments moving forward will be the timeline on which the changes will be made—assuming that the Trump administration does indeed follow through with these plans. Given the administration’s erratic decision-making to date, with some troop reductions reversed just days after their announcement, some observers might suspect this too is just a scare tactic to put even more pressure on and extract further concessions from European allies. But the reports filtering out of Friday’s meeting have given Europeans a glimpse of what it will mean to be “home alone” when it comes to defending themselves, and it is not pretty. This is a warning they cannot afford to ignore. Ulrike Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in Paris. She focuses on German and European security and defense, the future of warfare and the impact of new technologies such as drones and artificial intelligence. Her bi-weekly WPR column appears every other Wednesday.