Elbridge Colby delivers remarks during a visit to the Sejong Institute in Seoul, South Korea, in January 2026. Colby’s realpolitik argument suggesting indefinite European dependence on America falls flat for three reasons. (US Army/Sgt. Daniela Lechuga Liggio)

What Elbridge Colby Gets Wrong About the ‘Middle Powers’

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Elbridge Colby contends that Europe will always remain dependent on the United States, and should follow America’s directives for its own protection. Europe disagrees.

For all of the criticism that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has attracted, even his most stalwart opponents must admit to its one major triumph: after years of effort, he has led America’s allies to invest more in their own defense.

This is no small accomplishment. From the early 2010s onward, successive US administrations have chafed at European NATO allies’ tendency to free ride on American security guarantees and urged them to ramp up defense spending, with little success. In spite of their best efforts, neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden could ultimately shake America’s allies from the belief that Washington would always be there in the end to save them. The first Trump administration gave some NATO nations pause, but did not ultimately lead to change; as recently as 2023, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau privately told NATO officials that Canada would “never” spend 2 percent of its GDP on its own defense. What a difference one administration makes!

Trump could trumpet this as a significant foreign policy accomplishment, and indeed he has. Yet a byproduct of Europe’s growing self-reliance on defense has been an increase in its autonomy, and a newfound willingness to defy the United States. European intransigence in the face of American requests is not entirely new, of course; the 2003 US invasion of Iraq saw widespread protests, and several NATO nations prominently declined to take part. Yet many European nations did eventually, if grudgingly, throw their support behind the mission and commit troops. Two and a half decades later, European NATO members one and all have refused to support Trump’s recent campaign against Iran, provoking his ire. Even the United Kingdom, a stalwart US ally in 2003, initially refused to allow the US Air Force access to British air bases for use against Iran (it later relented). Trump’s fury was predictable, but this series of events was a natural consequence of Europe’s decreasing reliance on America.

The paradox at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy is that the president wants Europe both to be more independent—lessening the need for American assistance in a pinch—but also to remain firmly subordinate to American foreign policy wants. How can one square this circle?

Colby’s Argument: Europe Will Always Depend on America

Trump strategy czar Elbridge Colby recently made an attempt to do precisely that. In a thread on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, the “Under Secretary of War for Policy” decried the nascent formation of a European-centric “middle powers” strategy, writing that European nations did not have the power to establish an independent defense sector and would remain tied to America’s as a matter of historical inevitability. That being the case, Colby argued, Europe should abandon any plans for strategic independence and resign themselves to American leadership.

“The simple fact of the matter is that no alternative country or countries can compete with the US defense industrial base, either in quantity or quality,” Colby wrote. “The United States, as the President says, makes the best equipment, and we make it at a scale that no plausible competitor can match.”

The undersecretary went on to stress that “access to the American DIB is a privilege, not a right”—an implicit threat to cut off supplies to disobedient weaker allies who failed to support Trump’s foreign policy........

© The National Interest