If a European member of NATO invokes the military alliance’s call for help, will the White House pick up the phone? Has the United States suddenly become less hawkish on China? Is a world carved up into spheres less or more safe for countries? I had a chance to ask those and other questions to Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy—essentially the top policymaker in the Pentagon—on the main stage of the Munich Security Conference. You can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or listen to it on the FP Live podcast next week. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: I’ve been speaking to many European leaders here who wonder how strong the trans-Atlantic alliance is, and more specifically, how robust the NATO alliance is. They often ask if Article 5—the clause that says an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all—still works. So, I have to ask: Let’s say Russia attacks a member of NATO, and that country invokes Article 5. Will the United States definitely come to that country’s defense?

If a European member of NATO invokes the military alliance’s call for help, will the White House pick up the phone? Has the United States suddenly become less hawkish on China? Is a world carved up into spheres less or more safe for countries? I had a chance to ask those and other questions to Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy—essentially the top policymaker in the Pentagon—on the main stage of the Munich Security Conference. You can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or listen to it on the FP Live podcast next week. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: I’ve been speaking to many European leaders here who wonder how strong the trans-Atlantic alliance is, and more specifically, how robust the NATO alliance is. They often ask if Article 5—the clause that says an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all—still works. So, I have to ask: Let’s say Russia attacks a member of NATO, and that country invokes Article 5. Will the United States definitely come to that country’s defense?

Elbridge Colby: Well, let me be clear from the perspective of the Department of War. The United States is committed to NATO. It is committed to Article 5. The administration from the president on down has made that clear.

The frame that we often hear from our European friends is almost a theological frame that’s asking about the purity of heart, if you will. It was very important to the administration in 2025—starting with Vice President [J.D.] Vance, and the president, Secretary [of Defense Pete] Hegseth—to reframe NATO. The way we think about it is: You had a NATO 2.0, which was kind of a post-Cold War NATO, very focused on these abstractions that Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio talked about very eloquently this morning—the liberal rules-based order. And it became very dependent on the United States. Some of that, to be honest, was the fault of the political establishment in the United States. So we’re not putting the fault all on our allies; it’s shared.

But what we’re looking for and what we’re pushing now is a NATO 3.0. The good news is that, as [NATO] Secretary-General [Mark] Rutte has eloquently said, thanks to President Trump, NATO is actually stronger than ever. That involves a couple of things. It involves the kind of flexible realism, sort of brass-tacks, practical, results-oriented mindset, in a sense, going back to what you can think of as NATO 1.0: NATO as a military alliance. When you think of it that way, I think it’s very compatible with the zeitgeist, if you will, of [German] Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s speech yesterday, which is, “Let’s get down to business.”

The main thing that we want to do looking forward with this NATO 3.0 approach is to come to a much more equitable and thus sustainable model that’s focused on an effective, rational defense of NATO, with Europe taking primary responsibility for its conventional defense, backed up by meeting those spending pledges led by President Trump with Secretary-General Rutte and the European leaders. That will enable that. And if you look over time, that is a really promising vista where we’re going to have a Europe that is strong, that is populous, that is wealthy, that is able to field really serious military force. I see friends of ours from the Indo-Pacific, and we’re asking the same thing. I was in South Korea, the first non-NATO ally to commit to 3.5 percent, the new global standard, as the National Security Strategy has said. That’s where we see not a retreat of the United States from its alliances, but a kind of moderate approach that puts it on a much more sustainable path.

RA: That was a great answer, but it was a yes-no question. Even if everyone buys that this is where NATO 3.0 is headed, the reason why the question is, as you call it, “theological,” is because it could be real. For example, take the Russian-speaking town of Narva in Estonia. Russia could attack and say, “We take this territory.” Estonia then could invoke Article 5, which, as you know, only the United States has ever done. You can’t give a NATO 3.0 answer to that. It has to be a yes-or-no answer.

EC: No, I think the NATO 3.0 answer is the answer to that. I’m a government official; we don’t engage in speculation. When I was in a think tank, I might have given you a different answer. The president has shown in places like Venezuela and in Operation Midnight Hammer that he is prepared to use military force decisively to back up his pledges to work with our allies, like our model ally Israel. We train, we ready our forces, we think intimately, and we have discussions about these practicalities. This is the spirit at the Department of War, but I would say throughout our administration: We are more in the delivering-results-and-readiness business than in the........

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