Is This Where Trump’s Nato Ideas Are Coming From?

A top Pentagon policy official went to Munich this week to deliver a wake-up call to America’s NATO allies. Elbridge Colby, an under secretary of defense, warned them that the days when the U.S. served as the primary guarantor of European security are gone: “The core strategic reality …. is this: Europe must assume primary responsibility for its own conventional defense.”

It’s a message that President Donald Trump himself conveyed in his own brash way to America’s allies across the Atlantic, and which his administration has forcefully underscored in its latest strategic documents. But it’s still an idea that leaves Europeans scratching their heads: Where is Trump’s aggressive new stance toward the NATO alliance coming from?

One answer can be found in an unexpected place: a 2023 white paper authored by the British academic and conservative historian Sumantra Maitra. In the paper, published by the Trump-aligned think tank Center for Renewing America, Maitra sketched out a theory of what he called “Dormant NATO” — a radically re-imagined Western alliance in which America plays a much more minor role relative to its European allies. This new NATO would be “dormant,” Maitra wrote, kept in a kind of cryogenic sleep unless a “hegemonic” threat to Western security emerged.

Maitra’s paper — which he later turned into a much-talked about essay in Foreign Affairs — was reportedly handed around among Trump’s inner circle of foreign policy advisors, and his major policy recommendations have since been incorporated into the administration’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. Both documents stressed the importance of “burden shifting” between the United States and its European allies — a term that Maitra has pushed in lieu of the gentler “burden sharing” advocated by past administrations.

As this year’s Munich Security Conference got underway, POLITICO Magazine spoke with Maitra about the rationale for Trump’s new policy and what Europeans should expect as the U.S. pushes the alliance into this more “dormant” posture. “If I were advising a European government, I would say to sit down with the U.S. and ask for a timeline and an outline of a troop drawdown,” Maitra said. “That is inevitably going to happen someday, so they might as well prepare for it.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is “Dormant NATO?” 

Dormant NATO is a theoretical doctrine which deals with the concept of burden shifting. It tries to find a middle ground between complete U.S. retrenchment from Europe on the one hand and the continuation of the current U.S. strategy of forward defense and forward positioning and complete primacy over the European continent.

Essentially, it has three components, which are very similar to the kind of thing that you’re going to find in the National Security Strategy — but Dormant NATO said it first. First, it has “burden shifting,” a phrase I helped coin. The debate was about “burden sharing,” but now it is about“burden shifting” — the United States can keep the nuclear umbrella or the naval power in Europe, but most of the logistics, the intelligence, the army and the infantry are going to be in the hands of the Europeans.

The second thing is that the Europeans will have commands. Right now, the United States is the head of the combatant commands in NATO, and that will transfer to the hands of the European generals and European admirals.

And the final phase would be a pledge to have no new expansion of NATO. NATO needs to be finite, because you cannot have a grand strategy of an entity if it’s constantly mutating and shifting. NATO, the way it is now, is going to be a closed club, and that is it.

Why is this shift in posture necessary? What problem is it trying to solve?

The foreign policy of any country is determinant on structural factors, and the structural reality of the world that we live now is this: On one hand, you have the rise of China as a peer rival in Asia, which is in a different league compared to pretty much every other great power rival the United States has faced in his entire history. The second thing is the Global War on Terror that went on for 20 years, and it’s decimated American coffers. The U.S. is in massive debt, and people are unhappy about forever wars.

So I think the best way to move forward would be to radically change the grand strategy to an offshore balancing of position. That means that Europe is extremely important to us, but fundamentally we are going to be a Western Hemisphere power. We will obviously go to Europe if there is a hegemonic threat, but if there is no hegemonic threat, Europe is stable, it’s rich, it’s powerful, and they’re allied to us, so they can take a lot more burden when it comes to continental security.

How are you seeing these ideas reflected in the administration’s policy? 

There is a lot of overlap. I don’t speak for the administration, but I know the administration has read Dormant NATO, and if you look at the policy suggestions coming out of the administration, you know you’re going to see a lot of similarity between the two doctrines — even using the phrase “burden shifting.”

So there are quite a few things that are happening. Secretary of Defense [Pete] Hegseth gave a speech in Brussels last year where he talked about no NATO expansion [into Ukraine]. Obviously the NSS and the NDS talk about burden shifting and they talk about no NATO expansion. The NSS specifically mentions that there shouldn’t be any NATO expansion. You have seen combatant commands being handed over to the British, to the Germans, the Poles and the Italians — so that is another pillar of Dormant NATO that is being utilized in the American strategy.

The administration is signaling a major pullback from Europe, but at the same time it’s announcing relatively minor troop withdrawals. How do you square the ambition of its rhetoric with the relatively small-bore nature of its with troop withdrawal commitments?

The troop withdrawal could do a little bit more, if I’m being honest with you, but I also don’t think that troop withdrawals are the be-all-and-end-all of the administration strategy. At the end of the day, troop deployment is completely in the hands of the president, depending on the president’s will, so that is not the big part of it. The bigger shifts are happening in two directions: One, we are handing over the combatant commands and the Joint Forces commands to the Europeans. That trains the European officer class to be in a position where they are going to have a lot more power and commanding interoperability, and where they can do things in Europe without the Americans having to spoonfeed them every single detail. That itself is a major change.

The second thing that’s happening is that, at the end of the day, a country’s strategy is dependent on the documents that it puts out — so, for example, if the National Security Strategy comes out and includes burden shifting, the Europeans will take that as the grand strategy of the Republic, and they, in turn, develop their forces depending on that strategy. We have seen that before with George H.W. Bush’s New World Order, or George W Bush’s War on Terror, or Biden’s “autocracy versus democracy” framing. The NSS shapes how European powers position their military and their capability, so I think the fact that we are pretty openly talking about burden shifting will in itself shape the European capability in a way. They are going to be like, “Fine, these guys are moving out, and we have to do something about it,” and that will create a snowballing effect in Europe.

Some of your critics charge that a dormant NATO will inevitably become a “dead NATO” because it would neuter the Article 5 commitment. How do you respond to that? In what type of scenario would a dormant NATO reactivate and wake up?

For pretty much the entirety of its first phase [between 1949 and 1991], NATO was essentially a dormant NATO. It was a defensive alliance which was only there in case of a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency scenario. And if you actually read Dormant NATO, you will see that at no point does it suggest a complete withdrawal, and at no point does it suggest that we shouldn’t be part of the common defense or Europe.

NATO Article 5 says one single thing: if one of the countries is attacked, it has the right to call the other countries and they’re going to come to the table. And depending on the kind of threat, they’re going to decide on what kind of participation they’re going to have in the future. That isn’t changing with Dormant NATO. If we are called to the defense of Europe, and if we foresee a hegemonic threat, the U.S Congress still has the power to decide that we are going to go there and defend.

The question then becomes what kind of threat Europe is facing. If it’s genuinely facing something like the Third Reich or something like the USSR, that’s a whole different thing. At that point of time, clearly the United States has to go and defend, because the U.S. grand strategy has forever been to oppose a unified Europe under one single hegemon. That hasn’t changed. Other than that, I think Dormant NATO is essentially how NATO was in its first phase.

There is a revanchist power in Europe at this point in Putin’s Russia, so how do you respond to the counterargument that now is simply not the time for the U.S. to carry through on this strategy? 

I think Colby is completely right in his assessment that Russia is a regional nuisance. It is a power, but it’s also a very odd kind of power. It can be revanchist, but, like, I can want to be James Bond, but I’m not capable of doing that. Putin’s Russia is not capable of being a hegemonic threat to the European continent. Under no military scenario can one foresee Russian tanks rolling through Poland or Germany or France.

Russia is, though, a big power with 6,000 nukes, so we have to figure out a way that Russian interests are sort of satiated without them being any kind of genuine revanchist threat. So we have to talk to the Russians and to the Germans and say, “Hey, by the way, you guys have to talk too, and we can only do so much from this distance.” And if this is not the time, when will it be the time? If Russians are a revanchist threat to Europe, does that not push the Europeans to rearm rapidly? If that doesn’t push the Europeans to rearm rapidly, what would?

In his speech, Colby said there’s nothing “anti-European” about this strategy, but other administration officials have made some rather pointed comments about Europe, and the NSS openly criticized Europe for overseeing “civilizational erasure.” What do you make of the administration’s rhetoric around this sort of civilizational politics?

Personally, I’m a military historian and a realist, so let me put it this way: Historically, there is no evidence that kinship or culture is solid ground for any kind of solidarity or alliance. Alliances are built on interest. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who’s ruling Western Europe — Germany, France or the U.K. Those are the countries which will be the most important to us purely because of geography and because of manpower and production capacity. So I don’t really buy some of those civilizational arguments, and I think some of that is basically rhetorical.

But is it counterproductive? Does it make it harder to effectuate this change in military strategy if America’s political leaders are privately and publicly casting aspersions on European political leadership? 

If it were me, I would probably be a little bit more disciplined when it comes to rhetorical extremes about Europe. But that being said, one has to differentiate between a private chat, for example, and the actual grand strategy. I might hate my neighbor, but if their house is on fire, I’m still going to try and save it.

So spin this forward a bit. What moves in this direction should Europe expect next from the U.S., and how should they best prepare for them?

If I were advising a European government, I would say to sit down with the U.S. and ask for a timeline and an outline of a troop drawdown. That is inevitably going to happen someday, so they might as well prepare for it. The way that they have reacted to the combatant command change to and the burden shifting is pretty optimistic. They were expecting that, and they saw it coming, so that was fine.

I think they have to figure out two things. One, they have to accept that it is the U.S. that is ideally positioned to provide the nuclear deterrence to Europe, so any idea of a European nuclear weapon is completely dead on arrival. That is not going to happen, and they are just wasting time if they keep on talking about that nonsense. Second, I think they need to sit down among themselves and figure out the nitty-gritty details of basic things like troop movements and logistical movements. They need to talk to Americans and say “Fine, we understand that you want to shift some of the logistical burden on the infantry, so give us a timeline, and let’s decide on when you’re going to do it.” For example, if the U.S. wants to move back the surge of 20,000 troops that happened after the Russian invasion [of Ukraine] under Biden, the Americans should just tell the Europeans, “By the way, this is 2026, and by 2028 we’re moving that out, so figure it out.” That kind of simple logistical conversation is going to be very helpful.