To be clear, NATO’s “return to factory settings” won’t automatically entail the success of the US’ grand strategy, but it must be understood in the context thereof as part of Trump 2.0’s global power play.
Andrew Korybko
Politico
reported in late February that the US wants NATO to “return to factory
settings”, something that Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge
Colby described as “NATO 3.0” earlier in the month, which they wrote
about here.
The idea is that NATO should return to focusing on defending itself
instead of overextending itself in the Indo-Pacific, West Asia, Eastern
Europe, and elsewhere. Trump 2.0 accordingly doesn’t want Australia,
Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, or Ukraine invited to this summer’s
summit.
Those five – the first four of which are the
bloc’s official Indo-Pacific partners while the last is already an
unofficial member of NATO as was argued here
– would “still be invited to side events” and cooperation will
continue, but NATO won’t focus on them as much as during its present
“NATO 2.0” phase. The guiding vision is for NATO to shoulder more of the
so-called burden of defending itself vis-à-vis Russia so that the US
can refocus its military-strategic efforts on the Western Hemisphere and
the Western Pacific.
Trump 2.0 doesn’t consider Russia to
be a major threat like the Biden Administration did, but rather a
manageable one, while the Western Hemisphere is assessed as having
drifted too uncomfortably far from the US and China still represents its
only systemic rival for shaping the ongoing global transition. This
explains his team’s proposal for reforming the division of labor between
the US and its allies within NATO, which perfectly aligns with all of
their policies that can be reviewed by readers below:
* 14 November 2025: “The Pentagon’s European Drawdown Won’t Alleviate Russia’s Security Concerns”
* 6 December 2025: “The US’ New National Security Strategy Details How Trump 2.0 Will Respond To Multipolarity”
* 12 January 2026: “The ‘Trump Doctrine’ Is Shaped By Elbridge Colby’s ‘Strategy Of Denial’”
* 24 January 2026: “The US’ New National Defense Strategy Calls For A World War-Like Military Build-Up”
* 17 February 2026: “Rubio’s Munich Speech Detailed Trump 2.0’s Envisaged New World Order”
To
summarize, the US has already begun gradually drawing down its force
presence in Central & Eastern Europe, but it’s not expected to
withdraw from this strategic space entirely since the plan appears to be
to support the revival of Poland’s long-lost Great Power status as a regional bulwark against Russia.
As for the rest of the continent, the National Defense Strategy
declares that “European NATO dwarfs Russia in economic scale,
population, and, thus, latent military power”, it just needs to be
properly managed.
Therein lies the purpose of the bloc
“returning to factory settings” as “NATO 3.0”, which is essentially
“NATO 1.0” but adapted to the contemporary geostrategic situation in
Europe. As NATO begins shouldering more of the so-called burden for
defending itself vis-à-vis Russia, the US will keep placing pressure
along its Chinese systemic rival’s periphery through trade deals and
other forms of coercion to curtail or even outright deny its access to
the markets and resources that it requires to continue rising.
The
end goal is for China to agree to a lopsided trade deal with the US
that would derail its superpower trajectory and consequently
institutionalize its new junior partner status after “rebalance[ing]
China’s economy toward household consumption” per the National Security
Strategy. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that NATO’s “return to factory
settings” will automatically entail the success of the US’ grand
strategy, but it must be understood in the context thereof as part of
Trump 2.0’s global power play.