NATO should be built on partnership rather than dependency, Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby said Thursday in Brussels before talks with the alliance’s defense ministers.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is not attending the meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, with Colby, who holds the Pentagon's No. 3 post, representing the U.S. instead.
Hegseth’s absence marks the second time in a row that a top Trump administration official has skipped a NATO meeting, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio missed a gathering of the alliance's foreign ministers in December.
Those absences and repeated tensions between U.S. President Donald Trump and European nations – most recently over Greenland – have prompted fresh questions from European officials and commentators about Washington's commitment to NATO, which for decades has been the foundation of the continent's defense.
Trump has repeatedly called on European nations to increase their military spending and take more responsibility for their own security, reducing their reliance on the U.S. NATO leaders responded last year by agreeing to spend 5% of their GDP on defens and security-related investments.
Colby, however, offered some words of reassurance for European allies, declaring that "we have a really strong basis for working together" as European nations had agreed to lead the conventional defence of the continent.
"Now it's time to march out together, to be pragmatic,” he told reporters, calling for an alliance "based on partnership rather than dependency, and really a return to what NATO was originally intended for."
In a sign of the shifting balance in the alliance, NATO announced this week that the U.S. will turn over two of its major command posts – in Naples, Italy and Norfolk, Virginia – to European officers.
At the start of Thursday's meeting, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said allies were stepping up to take more responsibility.
"We are already seeing significant increases in allied defence spending," he said. "Investment is up by tens of billions."