US Vice President JD Vance used his speech at last year’s Munich Security Conference to chastise Europe for complacency in its security commitments. This year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby delivered the same message, wrapped in friendlier language but anchored in the same hard‑power America-first logic. The United States remains committed to its allies, but it expects sacrifices in return.
Despite the praise lavished on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the Davos World Economic Forum on the ‘rupture in the world order’, conversations in Munich were surprisingly driven by a search for reassurance: reassurance that the rules‑based order still holds and the transatlantic alliance remains intact.
Rubio appeared to offer this in his keynote address where he emphasised shared historical and cultural roots. He received applause for affirming the US’s commitment to European security. Yet his remarks echoed the same critique that provoked controversy when Vance voiced it a year earlier—that Europe is living through ‘delusional times’, allowing mass migration and deindustrialisation to erode the Western way of life.
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi took the chance to repeat Beijing’s familiar themes: an invitation to join in President Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative and China’s continued support for UN‑centric multilateralism. When pressed on China’s backing of Russia’s war in Ukraine, he deflected, saying China was not a party to the conflict, that ‘root causes’ must be addressed and ‘all parties’ legitimate security concerns must be observed’. Europe, he said, should assert itself as an autonomous pole in a multipolar world.
But it was Colby’s interventions—both in Munich and days earlier at the NATO defence ministerial—that offered European allies the clearest roadmap. The US demands that Europe assume primary, not merely greater, responsibility for its own conventional defence. The continent, he argued, is wealthy, populous and technologically capable enough to deter Russia.
Having committed to spending 5 percent of GDP on defence, European allies must now make ‘hard choices’ on force structure, readiness, stockpiles and industrial capacity. The US, meanwhile, will focus on theatres ‘where only American power can play a decisive role’—namely, the Indo‑Pacific.
Colby framed the recent alignment of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran as evidence of deterrence failure under previous administrations. Even though the US is not seeking bloc confrontation with China, Indo‑Pacific allies should expect to meet what he calls a ‘new global standard’ of defence spending: 5 percent of GDP on broader defence spending, of which 3.5 percent is to be on core defence and a further 1.5 percent on defence-related capabilities.
Sending Colby, rather than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, to the NATO ministerial was itself a signal: Euro‑Atlantic security has slipped down the Pentagon’s pecking order. It also reflects an endorsement of the Colby doctrine, which prioritises confronting China as the pacing threat and reallocating US force posture accordingly.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles’s attendance at Munich underscored Australia’s determination to stay plugged into these alliance dynamics. Alongside New Zealand and Japan, he highlighted the complexity of the unprecedented scale of China’s conventional military buildup in combination with a lack of strategic reassurance accompanying it. Canberra continues to work with the US to push deterrence forward and—in Marles’s words—to ‘be a better ally’.
Elements of what ‘being a better ally’ may look like were visible in several NATO decisions publicised last week. European forces will assume leadership over all three joint forces commands responsible for crisis response on the northern, eastern, and southern flanks. Previously they led only one. The US, meanwhile, will expand its grip over NATO’s land, sea and air commands, which oversee readiness, interoperability and the mobilisation of NATO’s firepower in a crisis.
NATO also formalised its Arctic Sentry initiative. Under the command of the British‑led but US‑based Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, all Arctic security and defence efforts of individual allies and partners will be coordinated.
But better allyship is not a one-way accommodation of US demands; it also involves standing up for one’s dutiful contributions. At the Oslo Security Forum, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Store recalled how he needed to remind the White House that Russia’s nuclear arsenal sits within 100 km of Norway’s border—aimed not at Europe, but at the US. And that it’s Norway that is an indispensable intelligence collector on Russia’s nuclear moves for both Washington and NATO.
These developments mark the beginning of a recalibrated alliance: still centred on the US, but with stronger European nodes and a more explicit division of labour based on strategic interests, defence capabilities, and readiness.
They also consign the notion that Europe can go it alone to the realm of fantasy. Even when talks involving Britain, France, Germany and Sweden on a European nuclear deterrent are taking place, Europe remains hamstrung by political and strategic unreadiness.
A wargame conducted by the German Army in early December showed that military and political leaders were unable to read signs of an impending attack or take timely mobilisation and deployment decisions. If an invasion occurred today, Europe’s first response would still depend on the roughly 100,000–120,000 US troops stationed across 40 bases on the continent.
After Munich, the debate is no longer about whether the US will break away from its alliance security commitments—it won’t. Nor should Europe aspire to go it alone—it can’t. The real challenge all allies and partners face—in Europe as much as in the Indo-Pacific—is whether they can build defence capabilities fast and decisively enough to prepare for what Colby calls a ‘a bad case scenario’ in which multiple threats materialise concurrently.
