Washington will reportedly make fewer jets, warships, and drones available to the bloc’s European members
The US has told NATO’s European members that it will reduce its military contributions to the bloc as Washington’s military planners set their sights on China, Der Spiegel reported on Tuesday.
Delivered by senior Pentagon adviser Alexander Velez-Green at a confidential NATO meeting in Brussels last week, the message from Washington marks the latest step in US President Donald Trump’s slow disengagement from Europe.
Trump has reportedly drawn up a “naughty and nice” list of NATO members based on their support for his policies, and earlier this month announced that he would withdraw 5,000 US troops from Germany.
According to Der Spiegel, Velez-Green told NATO members that the US will drastically reduce its commitments to the ‘NATO Force Model’ – the contingent of troops and equipment that the bloc can deploy on short notice.
The US will cut the number of fighter jets available to NATO by a third, and significantly reduce the number of strategic bombers and warships, the newspaper reported. NATO will also receive no American submarines or drones, leaving its European members to provide this hardware themselves, Velez-Green reportedly said.
It is unclear how many – if any – US troops will be pulled from the NATO Force Model.
The announcement reportedly shocked the Europeans at the meeting, who had predicted more minor and gradual cuts. Now, Der Spiegel claimed, the US expects them to have a plan in place to fill the gap before the bloc’s annual summit in Türkiye this July.
However, the move comes amid a broader scaling back of the US military presence in Europe, where more than 80,000 US troops were stationed in 2025. The US has maintained a permanent presence there since the end of World War II, but Pentagon sources told Der Spiegel that they want to scale this presence back in preparation for a potential conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific region.
At a meeting in Sweden last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NATO foreign ministers that “there are going to be eventually less US troops in Europe than there have historically been.
“We have obligations in the Indo-Pacific; we have obligations in the Middle East; we have obligations in the Western Hemisphere,” Rubio told reporters, adding that the US wants to position its forces to fight “a two-front conflict” if necessary.
While Rubio maintained that “these are not political decisions,” Trump has explicitly politicized the deployment of US troops in Europe. After pulling American service members from Germany amid a spat with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the US president announced that he would send an additional 5,000 troops to Poland, “based on the successful election” of conservative President Karol Nawrocki.
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