‘Deride and fool’ becomes ‘divide and rule’. By splitting the European NATO pillar, the Trump administration is deliberately sabotaging Europe’s unity, a fragile thing to begin with.

In late September, an invitation arrived at the defence ministries of six NATO members. Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands were asked to gather in Poland in October for a Pentagon-led meeting on the alliance’s future. No invitation arrived in London, Paris, Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius.

The omission was not an oversight. It is a strategy.

The meeting is to take place under a format known as the Bergen Group. Spearheaded by US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, it is the latest move in a sustained American effort to shape European defence on Washington’s terms. It aims to ensure that Europe’s rearmament does not produce European unity.

The five excluded nations (i.e., the United Kingdom, France, and the three Baltic states) are among NATO’s most consequential members. Their absence may be, as Scotland-based US analyst Phillips P. O’Brien wrote on his Substack newsletter, “rather brutally effective”.

A deliberate exclusion

The confusion among excluded capitals was genuine. “We’re doing everything that is being asked of us,” an official from one excluded country was quoted as saying by Kyiv Post. “We’re trying to understand what the criteria is and what the purpose of these meetings are. Not much has been passed on to us yet.”

Mr Colby has offered an explanation that raises more quesiton than it answers. He previously described Bergen Group participants as NATO members that were quickly fulfilling their defence-spending commitments, possessed sufficient military scale, and were prepared to focus on practical decisions.

By that logic, the Baltic states feature among the highest per-capita defence spenders in Europe and, as such, should qualify. So should France and the United Kingdom, which maintain the continent’s largest and most capable independent military forces.

(US approach) fuels splits between Franco-German strategic autonomy advocates and eastern and front-line states. — Hélène Masson, frstrategie.org

The real criterion appears to be different. Mr O’Brien puts it plainly: “The Trump administration is trying to keep these five out of this discussion because they are vital to European defence being more united and less reliant on the USA.”

Even invited members have their doubts. “If they try splitting NATO into the good ones and the bad ones, it is dangerous for the US,” another diplomat intimated to Kyiv Post. “But for Europe, this is existential.”  

The architect of American euroskepticism

To understand the Bergen Group’s logic, one must understand Mr Colby. The Pentagon’s policy chief is, as Peder Schaefer wrote in The Parliament Magazine, “the geopolitical realist in the Pentagon who has played a crucial role in the American pullback from the continent”.

Mr Colby’s worldview is rooted in classical realism — states compete for power, regions must not fall under hegemonic control, and China is the defining threat of the age. He views the EU not as an ally bound to the US by shared history and values, but as a vehicle for Washington’s interests and a roadblock to the US pivot to Asia.

As Mr Schaefer reported, Mr Colby sees the EU, in a worst-case scenario, as “a possible continental hegemon that could deny the US access to European markets and military bases”.

That logic has direct policy consequences. Mr Colby wrote in his 2021 book The Strategy of Denial that the EU must be denied state-like control over Europe. A united European defence pillar (with common procurement, shared command structures, and strategic autonomy) would be precisely the kind of regional consolidation this school of thought treats as a threat.

Wess Mitchell, a former colleague of Mr Colby’s who served in the first Trump administration, captured the broader disposition. “The European Union, in many ways, has strayed from its original purpose,” Mr Mitchell said. “US policy should be based on the actions that the European Union takes, whether it is economically or otherwise vis-à-vis the US and our chief interests, rather than being based on nostalgia or some kind of gauzy transatlantic spirit.”

A break with every predecessor

What makes the Bergen Group episode historically remarkable is not the pressure it places on allies. American presidents have always pressed Europeans to spend more on defence. What is new is the instrument: selective exclusion designed to prevent European strategic coherence.

Every previous US administration—realist, liberal, or neoconservative—treated NATO cohesion as a non-negotiable asset. Dwight Eisenhower pushed burden-sharing but never questioned Article 5. Ronald Reagan wanted a stronger Europe, even if within a US-led framework.

Even George W. Bush, who clashed bitterly with France and Germany over Iraq, never sought to fracture the alliance’s core commitments. Trump II is the first administration to treat European division as either acceptable collateral damage or a deliberate instrument of leverage.

The European Union, in many ways, has strayed from its original purpose. — Wess Mitchell, former US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs

The structural difference runs deeper than policy preference. All previous administrations, whatever their school, sought to shape and manage the international system in ways favourable to US interests over time. US President Donald Trump’s administration treats foreign policy as a series of bilateral transactions, each evaluated on its immediate material return, with no overarching systemic logic.

The Bergen Group is a case in point. By convening a select group of compliant allies, Washington signals that defence cooperation is a reward for bilateral compliance. That is hardly a collective good. Denmark, reportedly, may receive an invitation after agreeing to expand US military access to Greenland. The message is transactional to its core.

How it works

The Bergen Group is the visible tip of a broader strategy. Beneath it lie three interlocking instruments of fragmentation.

The first is bilateral defence procurement. Large foreign military sales, such as F-35 fighters, HIMARS rocket systems, or Abrams tanks, are negotiated country by country. This locks buyers into US sustainment chains and sidelines joint European programmes such as the Franco-German Future Combat Air System. This approach “fuels splits between Franco-German strategic autonomy advocates and eastern and front-line states“.

The second is industrial policy. The Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits, limited to North American content, pit EU and US subsidy models against each other. European firms weigh relocating investment across the Atlantic, prompting intra-EU rows over counter-subsidies.

The third is selective diplomatic pressure. It rewards compliant governments, expresses sympathy for Eurosceptic movements, and bypasses Brussels in favour of bilateral deals with individual capitals.

Taken together, the three instruments produce a Europe that spends more on defence but coordinates less — precisely the outcome Mr Colby’s framework requires.

Europe’s options

Europe is not entirely without recourse. Several instruments already exist within EU law. The Common Security and Defence Policy, enshrined in the Treaty on European Union, provides a framework for joint military missions and operations. Permanent Structured Cooperation, established under Article 46 of the same treaty, allows willing member states to deepen defence cooperation through joint projects.

The European Defence Fund finances collaborative research and development. The EU Global Strategy, adopted in 2016, provides the political architecture for aligning national strategies with collective objectives.

The Trump administration is trying to keep these five out of this discussion because they are vital to European defence being more united and less reliant on the USA. — Phillips O’Brien, University of St Andrews

Europe’s dependence on US Foreign Military Sales, however, remains a structural vulnerability. As a Bruegel policy brief on the subject concluded, bilateral procurement locks member states into US sustainment chains in ways that are difficult and costly to reverse.

These instruments are real but underused. PESCO has produced dozens of projects of modest ambition. The EDF’s budget is a fraction of what individual member states spend on nationally siloed procurement. The CSDP has never been tested against a serious peer threat. Scaling these frameworks to meet the current moment would require political will that has, until recently, been in short supply.

A new law?

Several gaps cannot be filled by existing legislation alone. A mandatory EU defence-spending framework would require member states to meet collective capability targets, not merely national GDP thresholds. That would necessitate a new regulation or, more likely, a treaty amendment. The current framework is voluntary; free-riding remains structurally possible.

A European procurement preference directive, analogous to US Buy-American provisions, would redirect defence contracts toward European suppliers and reduce dependence on US sustainment chains. This would require new secondary legislation and would face resistance from member states already locked into F-35 contracts. The transatlantic implications of the Inflation Reduction Act offer a template for what such a directive might look like in reverse.

A reinforced cybersecurity directive, integrating military and civilian frameworks, would address a vulnerability that bilateral US intelligence arrangements currently fill (and that Washington has threatened to withdraw). An energy security regulation, accelerating renewables and supply diversification, would reduce the leverage that energy dependence has historically given external powers over individual member states. The economic logic of such diversification has been well documented.

Most ambitiously, a European strategic autonomy framework (e.g., a new treaty instrument establishing a permanent EU military planning staff, common operational command, and a joint defence budget line) would require unanimous agreement among member states. That threshold has never been reached. The shock of US unreliability may, for the first time, make it politically achievable.

The existential arithmetic

The Bergen Group’s exclusion list is, in a sense, a gift to European strategists. It identifies, with unusual precision, which countries Washington most fears seeing at a common table: the two nuclear powers with independent command structures, and the three front-line states with the most urgent interest in collective defence and the least appetite for bilateral accommodation with Moscow.

Mr O’Brien’s assessment of the stakes was unsparing: “The US is trying now to divide European NATO for its own purposes and has already spent months putting its plans into action. This is just the most recent step in an American strategy.” Whereas elsewhere, Mr Trump’s policies appear disorganised, his anti-European NATO does not. In other words, what appears to be a ‘deride and fool’ approach may, in fact, become an effective divide-and-rule tool.

We’re trying to understand what the criteria is and what the purpose of these meetings are. Not much has been passed on to us yet. — an European diplomat for Kyiv Post

Whether European governments treat that observation as a warning or an instruction manual will determine whether the Bergen Group will jumpstart the engines of transformation. Otherwise, it risks becoming a monument to a moment when Europe had the means, the threat, and the legal architecture to act, and hesitated.