Colby tells NATO the U.S. wants Europe to lead its own conventional defence

Elbridge Colby told NATO ambassadors in Brussels on Thursday that the alliance has to change if it is going to “survive and indeed thrive.” The Under Secretary of Defense for Policy was at headquarters to open consultations on the Europe Posture Review that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced at the June ministerial.

“This is not a narrow review about places and bases alone,” Colby said in prepared remarks published by the Pentagon. The review, he said, “will encourage, enable, and impel a transition to a more durable and powerful European-led conventional defense of the continent.” He called the destination “NATO 3.0”: an alliance built for warfighting readiness and able to hold even if the United States is busy in another theatre at the same time.

About 80,000 U.S. troops are still in Europe. Washington has already told allies it is reducing the assets it assigns to NATO defence plans. In May it said it would pull 5,000 troops out of Germany. President Trump later said he would send the same number to Poland. The review now underway is meant to decide how much further that redistribution goes.

A questionnaire, not yet a map

The Pentagon has circulated a survey asking governments how they will take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defence. Colby said consultations are “a vital part of this review” and that he wanted to hear from the allies. Diplomats described the session as positive and preliminary. No base was named for closure.

After the meeting he praised Germany, Poland and the Scandinavian countries. “We hope to see more from countries like the United Kingdom,” he told reporters. That line will travel farther in London than the rest of the speech. Britain has raised spending pledges and has been a leading supplier to Ukraine. It has not rebuilt a heavy land force on the scale Poland is building.

Hegseth’s June instruction was blunt. The review should make sure “NATO is moving fast and irreversibly toward Europe leading,” that U.S. forces are postured for America’s global needs, and that access, basing and overflight rights are “clearly delineated and assured.” Colby repeated that the goal is partners, “not dependencies.”

What simultaneity means

The word Colby used for the hard case is simultaneity: a European war and an Indo-Pacific crisis at once. U.S. planning has assumed for a generation that Washington could reinforce Europe at scale. The review asks whether that assumption still holds when U.S. attention is fixed on China. If it does not, European armies have to be able to hold the eastern front with less American weight on day one.

Allies have already agreed to much higher spending targets. The missing pieces are air defence magazines, long-range strike, logistics and the industrial lines that refill them. Those take years. A six-month posture review can move brigades. It cannot conjure shells.

Mark Rutte hosted the visit. Colby thanked him and said Europe remains a critical area for the United States. That sentence is the reassurance. The rest of the text is the demand. The written answers to the questionnaire will show which capitals treat the review as a consultation and which treat it as the start of a drawdown they have to plan around.