DECODING: NATO 3.0, the E5 in Berlin and Europe Learning to Walk Alone

Berlin, June 24: Europe's five great powers at the table

On June 24, 2026, the leaders of the five largest military powers in the European Union — Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Poland, grouped under the E5 label — met in Berlin to display their unity ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara. According to their joint statement published by Agenparl, they expressed support for Ukraine, commitment to meeting defence spending targets, and determination to play a central role in the security architecture of the Alliance.

The E5 gathering is not a new format — but its timing at this precise moment, and its deliberately exclusively European composition (the United Kingdom participating despite Brexit, thereby asserting the primacy of collective security over post-Brexit divisions) sends a signal that analysts were quick to decode: Europe is preparing to exist strategically even if the United States modifies its commitment. The presence of Poland — Europe's defence investment champion — reinforces the credibility of this group both East and West.

What the Ankara summit will decide

The Ankara summit toward which these preparations converge is supposed to constitute the NATO 3.0 summit — the Alliance's third major transformation since its founding in 1949, following the post-Cold War restructuring of the 1990s and the post-9/11 era. Version 3.0 must answer a fundamental question: how does NATO function in a world where its principal funder and military partner — the United States — explicitly conditions its engagement on a "performance review" and demands that Europeans assume a far larger share of their own defence?

The target adopted at the The Hague summit in 2025 — 5 percent of GDP by 2035, with 3.5 percent for pure defence — sets the quantitative framework for this transformation. But targets are not enough: they must be met, and the timelines, investment priorities and industrial coordination between allies remain open construction sites that the Ankara summit must begin structuring operationally.

NATO 3.0 is the NATO of post-Trump-I and the American geostrategic pivot toward Asia. Europeans were slow to accept it — the idea that America might one day no longer be the ultimate guarantor of their security. June 2026 says: that moment is here, now. And the E5 in Berlin are trying to prove they have understood.

+20 percent in defence, +$90 billion in 2025

European NATO members increased their defence spending by 20 percent in 2025, amounting to $90 billion more than in 2024, according to Simon Gros's analysis of June 21, 2026. This figure is proof that years of rhetoric are finally translating into concrete investment. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Europe is massively increasing its defence budgets — not incrementally, but with an accelerated catch-up that reflects the collective realisation that the Russian threat is real, permanent, and demands a structural response.

Leading these increases: Germany, which spent $114 billion on defence in 2025, a rise of 24 percent according to DW on June 23. For a country that had long been the prime target of American criticism over defence under-investment, this shift is spectacular. The Sondervermögen — the 100 billion euro special fund voted in 2022 — has delivered on its promises, and Germany is on its way to becoming Europe's leading conventional military in terms of investment.

Mark Rutte and the "Trump Trillion" posters

Perhaps the scene that best illustrates the shift in transatlantic dynamics played out in the Oval Office, where NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte presented Trump with two posters showing that European allies had spent an additional $250 billion on defence — rebranded the "Trump Trillion" to flatter the President, according to the New York Post on June 24. This stagecraft reveals the diplomatic tactic European allies have adopted with Trump: show him the quantified results of his influence, present the European spending increase as his personal victory, and use his ego as a lever for maintaining American engagement.

This approach is cynical — but it is effective. Trump responds to numbers and personal success narratives. If Rutte can tell him "it is thanks to your pressure that Europe is spending $250 billion more," he maintains American engagement in the Alliance while allowing Europeans to progressively build their own strategic capacity. That is applied diplomacy with remarkable situational intelligence.

Rutte brandishing "Trump Trillion" posters in the Oval Office — that image says everything about the nature of transatlantic relations in 2026. The presidential ego is flattered to keep the Alliance machinery running. That may be the most effective form of diplomacy available in this context. But it is also a vulnerability: an Alliance whose cohesion depends on one man's vanity has a structural problem.

Six months to prove their worth

The most concrete threat of the period is one formulated by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: the United States is conditioning its contribution to NATO on a 6-month performance review, according to US News on June 19, 2026. This review must assess whether European allies are contributing sufficiently to their own defence to justify maintaining the current level of American presence and engagement in Europe.

This threat has a context: the Trump administration has long expressed frustration with NATO members failing to meet the 2 percent GDP target. With the new European increases, many allies are approaching or exceeding that target — so the target has been raised to 5 percent by 2035. Hegseth's logic is that of a client who pays and demands measurable results from its partners. It is a transactional vision of the Alliance that shocks committed Atlanticists but reflects the political reality of Washington in 2026.

What the performance review can and cannot measure

Hegseth's performance review has a fundamental limitation: it measures spending figures, not actual capabilities or strategic value. As US News noted on June 19, the review "appears out of step with what NATO allies are already doing." The United Kingdom maintains an independent nuclear force, a globally power-projecting navy and the world's finest special forces. France holds nuclear weapons, a global strike capability and an exporting defence industry. These capabilities cannot be measured purely in GDP percentage.

The real risk of the performance review is not its outcome — Europeans will likely pass the quantitative criteria. The real risk is its political signal: by conditioning American engagement on a formal evaluation, the Trump administration introduces uncertainty about the Article 5 guarantee that had until now been treated as unconditional. This uncertainty, even if temporary, encourages NATO's adversaries — notably Russia — to test the Alliance's limits and calculate whether American guarantees are truly credible in a crisis.

Making Article 5 conditional on performance, even implicitly, means playing with something that has kept the peace in Europe for 75 years. Deterrence only works if it is unconditional and credible. The moment it becomes conditional, adversaries start testing. And testing NATO is precisely what Putin has been doing since 2014.

Madrid refuses the 5 percent and pays the price

A revealing aspect of the E5 meeting in Berlin is what it reveals through its exclusion: Spain is not part of it, precisely because it refuses to commit to the 5 percent of GDP in defence target, according to Brussels Signal on June 25. This exclusion illustrates the tensions between member states that have accepted the new geostrategic reality — and the investments it requires — and those that, for domestic political reasons, resist this pace of defence spending increases.

Prime Minister Sánchez's Spain faces real domestic political constraints: a left-leaning coalition that resists massive military investment, social priorities that compete with the defence budget, and a historical tradition of relative distance from NATO's military structures. But by standing apart from the E5, Madrid risks marginalising itself from the strategic decisions that will determine Europe's security architecture for the coming decades.

The spending divide within the Alliance

Spain's exclusion reveals a wider fracture. Among European NATO members, the situations are highly varied: Poland already spends close to 4 percent of GDP on defence, making it the most engaged member of the Alliance outside the United States. The Baltic states and Finland have massively increased their spending since 2022. Germany is catching up. At the other end, Spain, Italy and several other Mediterranean members remain below the targets.

This heterogeneity creates an operational problem: an Alliance whose members contribute so unequally has difficulty maintaining coherent defence planning and sufficient interoperable capabilities. The 5 percent target for 2035 has more than an accounting value — it aims to create a common baseline of capabilities that makes NATO 3.0 credible against the combined threats of Russia, China and other hostile actors.

I understand Spain's internal political difficulties. But when you look at the map — Ukraine holding for four years on limited resources, the Baltic states investing massive shares of their GDP for their security, Poland re-emerging as a major military power — the argument that one cannot afford to invest in one's own defence rings hollow. It is a question of priorities, not means.

From collective defence to systemic competition

What Simon Gros calls NATO 3.0, in his analysis of June 21, 2026 on transatlantic defence rebalancing, is an Alliance transitioning from a paradigm of collective defence against an identified threat (the Soviet Russia, version 1.0; terrorism, version 2.0) to a paradigm of permanent systemic competition against multiple simultaneous adversaries — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — across all domains: military, economic, technological and informational.

This transformation requires more flexible command structures, faster decision-making processes, capabilities in new domains such as cyber, space, AI and economic warfare, and a burden-sharing between members that reflects their comparative capabilities. Europe, with its advantages in diplomacy, trade and regulation, can contribute to dimensions of this systemic competition that pure military capabilities do not cover. That is the most ambitious vision of NATO 3.0 — and the hardest to operationalise.

Defence ministers in Ankara: intensive preparation

According to NATO.int on June 18, 2026, Alliance defence ministers made "good progress" in preparations for the Ankara Summit. These advances cover several areas: reinforcing regional defence plans for Eastern and Northern Europe, interoperability capabilities between allies, ammunition production targets, and formulating a clear Alliance commitment toward Ukraine without settling the sensitive question of formal membership.

The Ankara summit, scheduled after the G7 and the E5 meetings, takes place in a context where the war in Ukraine continues, tensions with China in the Indo-Pacific are rising, and Iran is playing a complex game between the Hormuz agreement and maintaining its regional destabilising capabilities. It may be the most geopolitically loaded NATO summit since the end of the Cold War — and the ministers arriving in Ankara do so with an acute awareness of the historic weight of the moment.

Ankara 2026 — a Turkish city, a NATO summit, in a country that has navigated for years between the Alliance and its own interests with Russia and Iran. The choice of Ankara as the summit venue itself says something about NATO 3.0: an Alliance that must hold together members with sometimes contradictory interests, in a world where geography matters again. That is the challenge of complexity.

The debate between Atlanticists and Europeanists

The rise in European defence spending reopens an old but now urgent debate: is European strategic autonomy a desirable objective, or should it remain subsidiary to NATO under American leadership? Atlanticists — a majority in Eastern and Northern European countries — fear that European strategic autonomy would weaken NATO by creating redundancies and signalling to the United States that Europe no longer needs them. Europeanists — more present in France and among some German decision-makers — argue that eternally depending on Washington is a political vulnerability that the Trump era has made impossibly risky.

The reality of June 2026 partially settles this debate through facts: Hegseth's performance review, the conditions placed on American engagement, and the E5 meeting in Berlin are all signals that Europe must invest in its own capabilities — not to replace NATO, but to carry enough weight to influence its decisions, avoid being sidelined if American engagement fluctuates, and contribute credibly to collective defence rather than passively consuming it.

The timelines and industrial realities

The major obstacle to European strategic autonomy remains the defence industry. After decades of under-investment and post-Cold War rationalisation, Europe's defence industrial base is not sized for the demands of modern war of attrition, as illustrated by the conflict in Ukraine. Artillery factories, ammunition production lines, military shipyards, combat aircraft plants — all have been reduced, rationalised, sometimes shuttered. Rebuilding them takes years, sometimes decades, and requires massive capital and skills investments that European governments are beginning to plan but which have not yet produced their effects.

According to DW on June 23, European defence ambitions are "hitting a reality check": delivery delays, skilled labour shortages in the defence industries, and supply chain lead times for critical raw materials are slowing the build-up even when budgets are in place. That is the paradox of June 2026: the cheques are signed, but the factories are not yet built.

Europe has the budgets. It does not yet have the factories. And in a war of attrition, factories win wars. Germany's $114 billion in defence spending is only worth something if behind it there are production lines running 24 hours a day. That is where the real problem lies — and that is where the next few years will be decisive.

Membership refused, support maintained

The question of Ukraine's NATO membership remains one of the most delicate issues at the Ankara summit. Since the Vilnius summit in 2023, the Alliance has offered Kyiv a membership promise "in time" without a precise timeline — something Zelensky has called "an open door without a lock." In June 2026, allies' positions remain fundamentally the same: massive military and financial support for Ukraine is maintained, but formal membership is deferred until the end of hostilities or until a moment politically acceptable to the most cautious members, notably the United States.

This position is pragmatic but painful for Kyiv. Ukraine wants security guarantees that do not depend on the goodwill of an unpredictable American president or a European government that changes after elections. The debate over bilateral security guarantees — modelled on the agreements that the United Kingdom, France and others have signed with Kyiv — illustrates this tension: Ukraine is given something, but not everything it demands. And in a war of attrition, the difference between "something" and "everything" can be existential.

The cost of ambiguity for deterrence

The ambiguity over Ukraine's NATO membership carries a direct strategic cost. Moscow continuously calculates the limits of the Western reaction. Every time the Alliance sends a mixed signal — massive support but no membership — the Kremlin draws the conclusion that the red line is not absolute. That is the perverse logic of deterrence through ambiguity: it attempts to discourage escalation but encourages testing from an adversary that has demonstrated its willingness to take risks. Clarity would have been more deterrent, even if politically harder to achieve within the Alliance.

The Ankara summit must find wording that sustains the support dynamic for Ukraine while managing internal divergences over the membership timeline. It is the most complex diplomatic balancing act NATO has had to perform since the end of the Cold War — and the outcome will determine whether Kyiv feels it can count on the Alliance or must seek other forms of long-term security guarantees.

Zelensky deserves an honest answer on NATO membership. Not a vague promise, not an "open door" that looks more like an illusion than a real invitation. If the Alliance is not ready to admit Ukraine now, it should at least be clear about the precise conditions that will trigger membership — and stick to them. Ambiguity is a form of betrayal in a war for survival.

Indo-Pacific, Taiwan and Beijing's shadow over Ankara

The Ankara summit takes place in a context where China has become, officially for the first time, a NATO concern. The Madrid Strategic Concept of 2022 had described Beijing as a "systemic challenge." In 2026, as China multiplies military exercises around Taiwan, maintains technology transfers to Russia, and builds its own influence within NATO member countries through strategic investments, the Chinese threat has become too concrete to remain in the diplomatic register of euphemism. The Alliance's Asian partners — Australia, Japan, South Korea — attending summits as invited partners are pushing for more explicit recognition of the link between Indo-Pacific security and Euro-Atlantic security.

Resistance to this expansion of NATO's mandate toward the Indo-Pacific comes notably from France and several European members who fear diluting the Alliance's primary mission by adding geographically distant and politically contentious theatres of operation. But ignoring the Sino-Russian dimension of the current threat means viewing the war in Ukraine as a local conflict rather than as the first act of a systemic confrontation between two incompatible visions of the world. The Ankara summit will have to navigate this tension without resolving it entirely — but it must at least name it.

Beijing's technological support for Moscow

One of the concrete issues linking the Chinese threat to the war in Ukraine is the technological support Beijing provides to Moscow. Electronic components, dual-use technologies, drones and spare parts for military equipment flow between China and Russia, circumventing Western sanctions. The United States and the European Union have imposed measures against Chinese companies involved in these transfers, but the volume remains substantial. Beijing officially maintains neutrality while concretely supporting Moscow — what NATO allies have begun calling "the Chinese double game" in private meetings.

The Ankara summit is an opportunity to coordinate the Alliance's response to this Sino-Russian complicity — not by declaring China a NATO adversary, but by developing common strategies to reduce allied economies' technological dependence on Beijing and to counter transfers to Moscow. It is an economic and technological dimension of collective security that the Alliance has not yet fully integrated into its structures — but which has become as urgent as the traditional defence budget increases.

China is the threat NATO names cautiously but should name more clearly. Beijing does not fire directly on Ukrainians — but it supplies Moscow with the components used to build the drones and missiles that kill civilians in Kyiv. That is not neutrality: it is complicity with precaution. The Ankara summit must have the courage to name it.Europe in June 2026 is a Europe in transition — between yesterday's security dependency and tomorrow's strategic autonomy. This path will be long, costly, sometimes chaotic. But the direction is clear, and the numbers are beginning to prove it. What is still missing is not budgets or political will — it is industrial execution speed. And no summit can resolve that with a declaration.

An irreversible transformation under way

The week of June 18 to 25, 2026 confirmed a trend that is accelerating: Europe is taking its destiny in hand on defence matters. The $90 billion more spent in 2025, Germany's $114 billion, the E5 meeting in Berlin, the 5 percent of GDP target for 2035, the E5 advocating for Ukraine at the Ankara summit — all of this says the paradigm shift is real and under way. It is not yet complete, it has gaps (Spain, industrial delays, tensions with Atlanticists), but its direction is clear.

This transformation is not only geostrategic: it is also political and existential. A Europe that is rearming is a Europe that accepts responsibility for its own security, that no longer entirely delegates to the United States the task of defending it, that looks its eastern neighbours in the eye and says: we will honour our commitments. That is a strategic maturity painfully acquired under the twin pressure of the war in Ukraine and Trumpian unpredictability.

What the Ankara summit must produce

For NATO 3.0 to be more than a concept, the Ankara summit must produce concrete operational commitments: coordinated ammunition production plans between European and American defence industrialists, clarified command structures for the defence of Eastern Europe, a precise Alliance commitment on Ukraine in the short and medium term, and — perhaps the hardest — an agreement on how decisions will be made if the United States reduces its contribution. NATO 3.0 without these operational foundations will be nothing more than a fine statement of intent. And statements of intent do not deter Putin.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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