At NATO’s Ankara summit in July, the numbers told a compelling story. European allies and Canada had increased core defence investment by more than US$139 billion since agreeing a year earlier to work towards spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence and security by 2035. Leaders also announced more than US$50 billion in new procurement. NATO called the direction of travel “a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO” — the essence of what Secretary General Mark Rutte has described as “NATO 3.0”.
Washington has spent years asking for exactly this. But European rearmament carries a consequence that has received less attention: the more militarily capable Europe becomes, the less safe it is to assume it will automatically follow the United States politically — especially on China.
This could turn one of Washington’s biggest successes inside NATO into a strategic paradox. The United States may finally get the burden-sharing it has demanded for decades, only to discover that greater European capacity also gives its allies more room to make their own choices.
China is where that paradox is likely to become most visible.
NATO is already deepening ties with Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea. The alliance says developments in the Indo-Pacific can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security, and cooperation with these partners now spans cyber defence, technology, resilience and maritime security. NATO has also become increasingly explicit about the security consequences of closer coordination among China, Russia and other states challenging the current order.
Against this backdrop, Washington’s strategic logic looks straightforward: stronger European militaries carry more of the burden in Europe; the United States gains room to shift resources and attention towards the Indo-Pacific; and a more capable NATO becomes part of a wider Western response to China. The first two steps are plausible. Whether the third follows from them is much less certain.
The political debate within NATO warrants caution. I spent the year preceding the Ankara summit examining NATO-related news and social media discourse in the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Türkiye using the Meltwater media-monitoring platform. The dataset contained about 3.3 million NATO-related mentions across the five countries: 1.81 million in the United States, 616,000 in Germany, 403,000 in Britain, 276,000 in Türkiye and 203,000 in France. The point was not to treat those numbers as public opinion, but to identify when NATO became most visible, what political questions drove that visibility, and how the same alliance was framed differently across national debates.
What mattered, however, was less the volume than the pattern underneath it. The United States, Britain, France and Germany all recorded their largest surge in NATO-related attention in January 2026. Türkiye followed a different trajectory, peaking in March. Common geopolitical pressure kept pushing NATO back to the centre of national debate, but it did not produce a common political interpretation of what the alliance was for.
The differences were revealing. American discussion centred on the costs of leadership, allied contribution and strategic return. British debate was more sensitive to whether US reassurance could still be relied upon. In France, NATO was repeatedly connected to European strategic autonomy. German discourse combined the need for deterrence with concern about rearmament and escalation. Türkiye evaluated the alliance through regional security, sovereignty, defence access, autonomy and fair treatment.
The pattern points to a broader paradox: the same institution was being reaffirmed, but for markedly different reasons. I describe this as “contested reaffirmation”: geopolitical pressure can make an alliance more necessary militarily while making the political terms of membership more contested. Strategic convergence and political divergence are not opposites; they can occur simultaneously.
This matters directly for the China question. The findings do not establish how European governments will respond to future pressure over Beijing. They do, however, reveal the political conditions under which such decisions will be made: greater strategic convergence inside NATO is already coexisting with markedly different national understandings of alliance purpose and autonomy. A stronger alliance, in other words, need not produce a more uniform China policy.
That distinction matters far more for China than for Russia. Russia poses a relatively direct military threat to NATO. China sits at the intersection of security, industry, technology and trade. European governments may share concerns about Beijing while still disagreeing sharply with Washington — and with one another — about how far those concerns should shape economic and foreign policy.
This makes China a qualitatively different test of alliance politics. Deterrence against Russia asks NATO members principally how much military risk they are willing to share against a recognisable security threat. China forces them to decide where security ends and economic policy begins. Controls on semiconductors, investment screening, critical minerals, telecommunications and supply chains can all be framed as matters of national security, but extending that logic too far risks turning an alliance built for collective defence into an instrument for organising economic competition. The disagreement is, therefore, not simply over China; it is over how far NATO’s security mandate should extend into the economic domain.
The economic relationship alone sets limits on easy analogies with Russia. In 2025, China was the European Union’s largest source of goods imports, accounting for 22.3 per cent of the total. The EU imported €559.4 billion worth of goods from China and exported €199.6 billion, leaving a trade deficit of €359.8 billion. Those figures describe exposure as much as interdependence.
Europe is also trying to reduce vulnerabilities without severing economic ties. The EU’s current economic-security approach is built around resilience, diversification and targeted risk reduction rather than blanket disengagement. European trade ministers reiterated this year that decoupling from China is not the answer. The dependence in some strategic inputs remains striking: the European Commission notes that 97 per cent of the EU’s magnesium supply comes from China and that all rare earths used for permanent magnets are refined there.
That does not make Europe soft on Beijing. It makes the policy problem different. The EU is strengthening investment screening, critical-infrastructure protection, supply-chain resilience and its wider economic-security toolkit. But a strategy designed to reduce vulnerabilities while preserving trade is not the same as treating China as a military adversary.
This is why a more heavily armed Europe will not necessarily narrow transatlantic differences over China. It may even make them easier to sustain. France offers the clearest logic: in French debate, greater European defence capacity is not simply a way to contribute more to NATO; it is also a way to gain greater strategic agency. The broader implication goes beyond France. As dependence falls, the political cost of disagreement with Washington can fall with it.
The point should not be exaggerated. A stronger Europe is not about to become equidistant between Washington and Beijing, and greater European capacity is plainly useful to the United States. NATO itself argues that European allies and Canada are taking on more conventional responsibility while American power remains central to the alliance. Rutte has even said the current trajectory is moving European and Canadian defence spending towards greater balance with the United States. That rebalancing is now an explicit NATO objective.
But rebalancing military responsibility is not the same as centralising political judgment. Washington should therefore be careful not to treat European rearmament as a down payment on a common China policy. A bargain designed primarily to strengthen Europe’s defence does not settle how Germany should manage industrial exposure to China, how France should think about strategic autonomy, how Türkiye should balance relationships across Eurasia, or how different allies should approach export controls and technology restrictions.
Beijing can make the opposite mistake. Political differences inside NATO are not evidence of strategic paralysis. The same period covered by my research saw defence investment rise, industrial capacity expand and military coordination deepen even as national debates over NATO became more differentiated. Divergence can coexist with institutional strength.
The most realistic objective, then, is not a single NATO China doctrine. It is an alliance capable of organising disagreement. Cyber defence may produce one coalition; critical infrastructure another; maritime security, emerging technology and supply-chain resilience others. NATO’s growing Indo-Pacific partnerships already provide a framework for precisely this kind of practical cooperation.
Organising disagreement would require NATO to distinguish more clearly between collective defence, where solidarity must remain non-negotiable, and wider questions of economic and technological security, where variable geometry may be more sustainable. Not every ally needs to adopt identical restrictions on Chinese investment, technology or trade for the alliance to remain strategically coherent. Smaller coalitions can cooperate where threat perceptions converge while leaving greater national discretion elsewhere. Alliance strength would then be measured less by uniformity in China policy than by its ability to prevent disagreement over China from weakening commitments where collective action is indispensable.
This is less tidy than a unified Western strategy. It may also be more durable.
Washington has spent decades asking Europe to become less dependent on American military power. It should welcome the fact that this is finally happening. But strategic maturity has consequences. A Europe capable of carrying more responsibility will also expect greater political agency.
That is the underappreciated lesson of NATO’s military revival: capacity is not obedience. China may be the first major test of whether a stronger alliance can learn to live with that distinction.
