Just one day after Donald Trump's productive meeting with European leaders at the G7 summit in Évian, America's European allies have been dealt another blow from Washington. This time from defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
Addressing the refusal of some European countries to support the United States in its war with Iran — and their public criticism of the conflict — Hegseth branded the behavior of America's allies as “shameful” during a meeting of defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday.
He also seized the opportunity to echo Washington's previous indictments of Europe's trajectory, arguing that allies have misdirected their focus to issues like gender equality, climate change and defense austerity. "Europe's borders flew wide open; welfare states expanded, defense budgets cratered, along with Europe's belief in itself and its civilization," he said.
Against that backdrop, it came as little surprise when Washington announced a Pentagon review of NATO's force posture over the next six months. In practical terms, the review will examine the forces and capabilities the U.S. would commit in a crisis — including under Article 5, the alliance's famous defense clause.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has sought to reassure allies, insisting that the U.S. nuclear umbrella remains intact and that most of the affected capabilities have already been offset by other European contributions, even if some technical details still need to be resolved.
For some allies though, Thursday's announcement landed like a cold shower given that several of the capabilities under review are precisely those that European allies still lack. Yet despite these challenges, the Europeanization of NATO — or NATO 3.0 — will continue apace.
Next month's NATO summit in Ankara is precisely about that: demonstrating that allies are delivering on the commitments they made to Trump one year ago in The Hague.
Rutte has called it “implementation” time. Hegseth was even more direct. In the era of NATO 3.0, U.S. support is not only more limited, it also comes with conditions attached.
“Our annual NATO dues will be contingent on other countries meeting their defense spending targets,” he said on Thursday. “Whether other allies do not spend with urgency our due contributions will go down.”
Rutte, for his part, said on Wednesday that European allies and Canada have increased defense spending by roughly $90 billion over the past year. But he also made clear that, at the Ankara summit, governments will be expected to present “clear, concrete and credible plans” to meet the alliance's spending goals.
The summit is now only three weeks away, and countries including Slovenia, Albania and the Czech Republic have yet to reach the pre-Hague benchmark of spending 2% of GDP on defense. Others — including Hungary, the United Kingdom and Italy — face difficult fiscal and political trade-offs if they are to reach the 3.5% target for core military spending in the coming years.
For Rutte, then, timely implementation may prove challenging. After all, NATO's credibility now rests not on spending targets, but allies’ ability to meet them.
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The second EU-UK bilateral summit is set for July 22 in Brussels.
Both sides are expected to finalize talks on the food & drink (SPS) deal, the linking of their Emission Trading Systems and a youth experience scheme — the latter having emerged as a main sticking point in efforts to reset relations with the bloc.
A UK government spokesperson told The Parliament that both sides are working to establish a balanced youth experience scheme that would allow young people to live, work, study and travel more freely. "Any final scheme must be time-limited, capped and will be based on our existing youth mobility schemes."
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