NATO is dead. Long live NATO!

This week’s NATO summit is a crucial one. Some have wondered if it may also be the alliance’s last. The second Trump administration has, after all, threatened a military withdrawal from Europe, a continent for which the president and his team have displayed great antipathy. Concerns about NATO’s future are legitimate, but the doomsaying is ill-placed.

It is true that it has been a tumultuous time for the alliance. In 2022, in the wake of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, NATO united around a new strategic concept refocused on Article 5 (the collective defense clause). In 2024, it celebrated in grand style the 75th anniversary of its founding. There was much to cheer then, including the recent accession of Finland and Sweden. Fast forward to 2025, and NATO faces the specter of sudden decline.

The alliance will more likely survive even this crisis. After all, debate about its existence is not new. And transatlantic relations have always been a work in progress, even when the strategic environment was more stable, as during the era in which the United States and the Soviet Union were the clear global superpowers.

To overcome the current predicament, however, NATO leaders must rapidly adjust to new realities and adopt bold approaches to the challenges they face. More than 25 years since US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright listed her famous “3Ds”—“no decoupling, no duplication, no discrimination”—transatlantic security relations need to move on. They should now conform to new 3Ds: no dependency, no divorce, no defense market limits.

Europe Must Step Up

The first priority should be self-evident. Europe can no longer afford depending on the United States for its own security. The long-standing debate about a more balanced transatlantic burden-sharing is relegated to the past. Faced with a US administration that sees Europe as a burden, raising defense spending (military and non-military) from 2% of GDP to 5%, a decision the summit is expected to make official, is critical yet not decisive. 

Rather, European countries should aim for “Europeanizing” their common defense. This means Europe’s gradually assuming ownership of its own security by progressively reducing the transatlantic gap in key defense domains where Europe lags far behind the United States. These domains range from strategic enablers to advanced weapons systems. 

This goal, however, does not directly translate into creating a “European army”, despite assumptions on the part of some that it does. Instead, Europeans should focus on the reachable goal of strengthening NATO’s “European pillar”.

Building a stronger European leg of the Atlantic alliance would allow NATO members that are EU member states to continue and even strengthen their security cooperation with the United Kingdom and Tϋrkiye, non-EU NATO members whose strategic and military assets will be critical in any future European defense scheme. It would also allow Europe to reap the benefits of US support, where still possible, while giving Europeans time to consider initiatives in sensitive areas, particularly the development of a European nuclear deterrent.

Sticking Together

As for the second “D”, transatlantic divorce should be avoided to the greatest extent possible. Europe’s ultimate goal must assuredly be making itself capable of independent defense. Still, US ambivalence toward Atlanticism must not spur ideological and counterproductive anti-American Europeanism. European strategic agency, a necessity in the current geopolitical environment, must take precedence over European autonomy.

Should Washington abruptly turn its back on the alliance, an unlikely scenario given bipartisan Congressional support for NATO, but one not completely out of the question due to President Donald Trump’s penchant for disruption, Europe would of course face a much greater challenge. Yet, even in such eventuality, Europeans would be well advised to explore flexible and open-ended formats rather than jettisoning the alliance altogether.

On the one issue that Washington’s policy shift has been more dramatic—withdrawing strong support for Ukraine and engaging with Russia —Europeans are already leveraging a new platform that sits between the EU and NATO. The so-called “coalition of the willing” for Ukraine (led by France and the United Kingdom) still has an only vaguely defined agenda, but it represents an important pilot project should the need arise for Europe to go beyond NATO while carrying much of the alliance’s weight with it.

Playing Defense

For the third “D”, Europe (and Ukraine) must acknowledge that reliance on American military assets will continue for the foreseeable future. European purchases of US materiel may help convince Trump that NATO is a lucrative business after all. Yet, the end of transatlantic dependency requires Europe also to significantly boost its own defense production.

The EU has a critical role to play here, including by encouraging the rise of its own defense champions and by supporting the creation of a significantly more integrated and dynamic European defense market. Greater internal and external competition will be key to ensuring technological innovation, an area in which Europe sorely lags other players. 

The bottom line is that the United States and Europe must adapt the transatlantic bargain to new needs and realities. In a world in which Western interests face growing pushback, it would be a strategic mistake to break the transatlantic bond. Yet, as Washington questions the tenets of the post-World War II, US-led international order, Europeans have no choice other than to step up to meet the challenge of the moment. If they smartly manage it, this NATO summit in The Hague will start charting their new course.