U.S.-China Relations
NextFin News - At a meeting of senior European foreign-ministry officials earlier this year, a simple question was put to the room: who still believes the United States would come to their defense if they were attacked? Not a single hand went up. That silence captures the crisis now running through NATO: for the first time in 60 years, the alliance's nuclear guarantee — the ultimate backstop of European security — is no longer trusted, and the bargain that kept Europe nonnuclear is coming apart.
The Bargain That Held Europe Together for 60 Years Is Unraveling
The old bargain was elegant in its simplicity. In the 1960s, facing a Soviet Union that could now strike the American homeland, European NATO members agreed to forgo their own nuclear weapons in return for a greater say in U.S. nuclear policy and strategy. The vehicle for that say was the Nuclear Planning Group, created in December 1966, and the payoff was the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, in which every European ally except France and the United Kingdom codified its nonnuclear status. For six decades the arrangement held: Washington supplied the umbrella, Europe supplied the legitimacy and the bases, and nuclear proliferation stayed contained.
That bargain has now come undone. Washington's stated position is a new division of labor: Europeans take primary responsibility for conventional defense, and the United States continues to ensure nuclear defense. The problem, as one official at that 2026 meeting put it, is this:
If you don't believe in the United States' Article 5 commitment, then extended deterrence is effectively dead.
A nuclear guarantee that is not believed does not deter; it decorates.
The alternatives now circulating in European capitals are worse than the problem. Some officials are quietly raising the possibility of acquiring their own nuclear weapons — a path that would shatter the nonproliferation order in Europe. France, for its part, has offered to adapt its nuclear policy to help defend its European allies. President Emmanuel Macron's "forward deterrence" initiative, announced at the Île Longue submarine base on March 2, 2026, would bring European allies into nuclear training exercises, temporarily forward-deploy French nuclear-capable aircraft on allied soil, and host extensive nuclear discussions. Ten European countries have since joined through bilateral nuclear steering groups, with Finland becoming the tenth on September 14, 2026.
But the French offer has a built-in limit. In the same announcement, Macron reiterated the "four nos" that underpin French doctrine: no joint decisions on nuclear use, no joint nuclear planning, no shared definition of French vital interests, and no nuclear guarantee "in the strict sense of the term." The framework is a set of bilateral relationships managed from Paris — not a collective European or NATO solution.
Into this gap steps a fourth option: a renewed U.S.-European nuclear bargain with a real European core. That is the argument advanced by Ivo H. Daalder, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013 and is now a senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center. Led by France and the United Kingdom, NATO's European members would take on a larger role in their own nuclear deterrence while working to restore the transatlantic link. The proposal has three parts: modernize the alliance's nuclear forces, restructure consultation so France and Britain sit inside the Nuclear Planning Group with a European caucus, and adjust doctrine to expand European influence over NATO nuclear strategy while leaving the ultimate launch decision with the three nuclear powers.
The stakes are not abstract. Denis Healey, Britain's defense secretary through much of the 1960s, put the arithmetic of credibility in a single line that still governs the debate:
It takes only a five percent credibility of American retaliation to deter an attack, but it takes a 95 percent credibility to reassure the allies.
Deterrence is the easy half of the equation. Reassurance — the belief that Washington would actually risk Boston for Berlin — is the hard half, and it is the half that is failing.
Why the Crisis Is Structural, Not Cyclical
The first question is whether the current crisis is cyclical — a temporary strain that reverts when Washington's politics shift — or structural, a regime change that will not self-correct. The evidence points to structural. European governments have concluded that U.S. retrenchment is not a single administration's preference but a durable reorientation of American strategy, reflected in successive U.S. strategy documents that have shifted focus toward Asia. The conventional-defense burden shift is already policy, not a negotiating position. When a guarantor's strategic focus migrates permanently, the credibility problem does not mean-revert with the next election.
That distinction determines the remedy. A cyclical credibility dip can be papered over with reassurance visits and joint exercises. A structural one requires a new allocation of responsibility — which is exactly what the proposed bargain offers. The deal's logic is that European ownership of a meaningful share of the deterrent restores the 95 percent credibility number that reassurance requires, without handing any country a national trigger.
A second structural force sits underneath the first: the nuclear balance itself has shifted. As of January 2026, the world held an estimated 12,187 warheads, with 9,745 in military stockpiles and 4,012 deployed with operational forces, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The United States and Russia account for the overwhelming majority — roughly 1,770 and 1,796 warheads in military stockpiles respectively — while France holds about 290 and the United Kingdom about 225. Combined, the two European nuclear powers possess 515 warheads: roughly 29 percent of either superpower's military stockpile, and barely 14 percent of America's total inventory. Capability gaps of that size are not cosmetic; they shape what an adversary believes is credible.
The Mechanism: Ownership, Not Promises
The core of the proposal is a mechanism, not a slogan. It has three moving parts, and each addresses a different failure mode of the current setup.
First, force posture. The United States should replace the B-61 gravity bomb — difficult to use effectively against heavily defended targets — with a stand-off missile that can reach deep into Russian territory from NATO airspace. In parallel, European nations would develop a long-range missile that could be outfitted with a nuclear warhead developed jointly by France and the United Kingdom, financed by European nations. The point is not to add warheads for their own sake. It is to give Europe a delivery system it owns, funds, and can sustain, so that the deterrent is not entirely dependent on American platforms and American political will.
Second, consultation. France is the only NATO member that does not participate in the Nuclear Planning Group; the United States and the United Kingdom are members. The proposal calls for both European nuclear powers to join the NPG, for a European caucus to form within it, and for European input into U.S. nuclear planning to become substantive rather than ceremonial. The NPG, established in 1966, is the senior body for NATO nuclear policy, doctrine, planning, force posture, and exercises, with decisions taken by consensus. Bringing Paris and London inside converts Europe from a consumer of American decisions into a co-author of alliance nuclear strategy.
Third, doctrine. The ultimate decision to use nuclear weapons would remain with the three nuclear powers — France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Those decisions cannot be delegated, and national deterrents would remain guided by national doctrine, not NATO control. France could retain its one-warning-shot escalatory doctrine even after joining the NPG, though it would need to explain how that doctrine reassures allies. The trade is explicit: Europe gains influence over strategy and a European-owned delivery capability; the nuclear powers retain the trigger.
This is where the proposal differs fundamentally from both a purely American guarantee and a purely French one. The American guarantee fails on credibility when Washington's commitment is doubted. The French offer fails on structure: bilateral steering groups, the "four nos," and a doctrine that explicitly refuses a guarantee "in the strict sense of the term." The bargain splits the difference — European ownership of the means, national retention of the decision — and in doing so attacks the reassurance problem at its root.
The Second-Order Risk: Fragmentation, Not Drift
The first-order consequence of a failed bargain is obvious: Europe remains under-deterred. The second-order consequence is what should worry policymakers, and it is the one the debate has not fully priced. If the transatlantic nuclear bargain cannot be renewed, Europe does not simply drift. It fragments.
The fragmentation path runs in two directions at once. One direction is proliferation: if major European states conclude that neither Washington nor Paris will credibly defend them, the logic of the nonproliferation treaty — forgo weapons in exchange for a guarantee — collapses country by country. That bargain held in Europe for nearly six decades precisely because the guarantee was believed. Remove the belief, and the bargain unravels.
The other direction is a patchwork of bilateral arrangements — some states under French steering groups, others under national programs, the eastern flank under ad hoc assurances. That is not an alliance; it is a coalition of the anxious, and it hands Moscow exactly what it wants: a NATO whose nuclear core is divided, whose escalation thresholds differ by capital, and whose collective-defense commitment is interpreted differently in one capital than another.
This is the real value of the proposal: it is a nonproliferation instrument disguised as a burden-sharing exercise. By giving Europe a stake in a collective deterrent, it removes the incentive for national programs while keeping the ultimate authority where it must remain — with the states that already possess nuclear weapons.
The Counter-Thesis: A European Umbrella Cannot Be Credible
The strongest case against the proposal comes from the capability and credibility side. Critics argue that a French and British nuclear umbrella would lack the necessary capabilities, and that its beneficiaries would doubt its reliability in a crisis. The warhead math supports the capability concern: 290 French and 225 British warheads against a Russian stockpile measured in the thousands is not parity, and deterrence by punishment — the threat to retaliate against an aggressor's cities — works only if your arsenal can survive a first strike and still reach the far edges of the continent.
There is also a doctrinal problem. France's "four nos" are not a negotiating posture; they are the foundation of French deterrence since de Gaulle. Asking Paris to join the Nuclear Planning Group is asking it to sit at a table where it has spent 60 years refusing to sit. And even inside the group, France's one-warning-shot doctrine — a deliberate, limited escalation signal rather than an overwhelming retaliation threat — may not reassure an eastern-flank ally who wants certainty, not a calibrated signal.
This counter-thesis is serious, but it attacks a version of the proposal that its author does not make. The deal does not ask France to guarantee anyone. It asks France to join the consultation forum, to co-develop a warhead with Britain, and to let Europe finance and field a delivery system. Credibility here comes from European ownership of the means, not from a French promise. A European politician does not need to believe that Paris would trade one city for another if Europe has a meaningful voice in the strategy, funds the missile that carries the warhead, and sits in the room where the plan is written.
The capability gap is real but not decisive. Deterrence is not a spreadsheet; it is a belief held in an adversary's capital. A European-owned, Franco-British warhead on a European-funded long-range missile, backed by a U.S. stand-off capability and embedded in NATO's consensus-based Nuclear Planning Group, changes Moscow's calculation even if the warhead count remains lopsided. What matters is not parity. What matters is that escalation is no longer an exclusively American decision — and that uncertainty is itself a deterrent.
What to Watch: The Signals That Will Decide It
The short-term test of the proposal is political, not technical. France and the United Kingdom must agree to join the Nuclear Planning Group, and Washington must accept a European-owned missile and warhead program rather than treating it as a proliferation risk. The first falsifying signal is concrete: if France has not applied to join the NPG and no Franco-British warhead development framework is announced by the next NATO summit cycle, the deal is dead and Europe moves to the fragmentation path.
The medium-term test is about money and hardware. A European long-range missile program financed by European nations is a decade-scale commitment, and it requires a level of defense-industrial integration that Europe has talked about for years without delivering. If the missile program stalls at the memorandum stage, the bargain becomes a consultation exercise — better than nothing, but not enough to restore the 95 percent credibility that reassurance requires.
The long-term question is whether the alliance can hold a dual structure: a European core inside a transatlantic framework. That is the structural bet. If it works, NATO emerges with a more credible deterrent and a nonproliferation regime intact. If it fails, Europe faces the choice it has avoided since 1968 — national nuclear weapons or dependence on a guarantor it no longer trusts.
Base case: the three adjustments are negotiated over the next few years, France and Britain enter the Nuclear Planning Group, and a European missile program launches with Franco-British warhead cooperation. Upside case: the deal restores European confidence quickly, conventional burden-sharing accelerates alongside it, and the transatlantic link strengthens because Europe is a partner rather than a dependent. Downside case: Paris or Washington balks, the bilateral steering groups harden into competing spheres of influence, and one or more major European states begin a serious national nuclear program.
NATO's nuclear problem was never about the number of warheads. It was about who owns the decision. The proposed bargain works only if Europe is given enough of the decision to believe in it — and the United States is willing to let go of enough of it to make that belief credible.
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