Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon policy chief, delivered a speech at the Feb. 12 NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels that stated that “we are now living through a period of profound strategic change,” and that “power politics has returned, and military force is again being employed at a large scale.” Colby said that this means that NATO must become more like the NATO of the Cold War.
The profound change “requires clear-eyed realism and fundamental adaptation by all of us,” he said. “The world that shaped the habits, assumptions, and force posture of NATO during the so-called ‘unipolar moment’ following the Cold War no longer exists. Power politics has returned, and military force is again being employed at a large scale,” Colby declared. “In this environment, the United States is prioritizing the most consequential threats to Americans’ interests, especially the defense of the U.S. homeland and interests in the Western Hemisphere, as well as reinforcing deterrence by denial in the Western Pacific.”
Colby assured the gathering that “this is not an abandonment of NATO. To the contrary, it is a return to and validation of its foundational purpose.” He called for “NATO 3.0”—NATO 1.0 was the NATO of the Cold War, whereas NATO 2.0 was the NATO of the post-Cold War, with its out-of-area deployments and dependency on the U.S. NATO 3.0 would be a return to the dual track approach of hard-nosed defense, on the one hand, and diplomacy on the other, which is represented today “by President Trump’s efforts to both strengthen NATO and negotiate an end to the tragic war in Ukraine.”
