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Updated - April 15, 2026 at 01:55 PM.

| Brussels (Belgium)

FILE PHOTO: European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, September 28, 2022. | Photo Credit: Reuters

Europe is mulling a fallback plan to ensure that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) survives in the event of the US pulling back. Germany had been a long-time proponent of a go-it-alone approach, a report by The Wall Street Journal says.

European officials — The Wall Street Journal has learned — are referring to the plan as “European NATO”. They seek to get more Europeans in the higher ranks of command-and-control roles and supplement US military assets with their own.

The plan still floats informally through dinner meetings, and is not intended to rival the current alliance. European officials are aiming for deterrence against Russia.

An anxious Europe is scrambling for solutions after US President Donald Trump threatened to annex Greenland from Denmark, and called NATO a “paper tiger”. This particular plan was conceived last year, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

A political reversal in Berlin has also fed this plan under Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Previous leadership in Germany had preferred to keep the US as the security guarantor, ignoring France’s calls for greater European autonomy in the defence sector.

Although the challenge seems colossal, Europe is considering an uptick in taking on the responsibilities. The US is involved in almost every aspect of NATO. Secretary-General Mark Rutte said recently that the alliance will be “more European-led”, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal.

“A burden shifting from the US toward Europe is ongoing and it will continue…as part of US defense and national security strategy,” Finland’s President, Alexander Stubb, one of the leaders involved in the plans, said, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal. “The most important thing is to understand that it is taking place and also to do it in a very managed and controllable way, instead of [the US] just quickly pulling out.”

Berlin hosts US nuclear weapons, and hence had refrained from questioning the US as a guarantor of European defence. But Merz, last year, concluded that Trump was prepared to abandon Ukraine, and was confused between the victim and the aggressor in the war. The Wall Street Journal further said that as per Merz, there were no longer clear values guiding US policy within NATO.

This shift has opened a Pandora’s box within Europe, with the UK, France, Poland, the Nordic countries and even Canada supporting the contingency plan as a coalition-of-the-willing within NATO, as per The Wall Street Journal.

The plan is now tackling practical military questions, such as who would run NATO’s air-and-missile defences, reinforcement corridors into Poland and the Baltic states, logistics networks and major regional exercises if US officers stepped aside, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Published on April 15, 2026

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