The Trump administration is excluding several key allies from a meeting of NATO members next month.
According to six diplomats familiar with the plans, the planned meeting in Poland, which is being organized by State Secretary Elbridge Colby, is essentially a working group on the future of NATO. Colby is responsible for policy planning at the US War Department and advises Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
Some of the countries that didn't receive an invitation - such as Britain, France and the Baltic states - invest heavily in defense and play key roles in the alliance, leaving their diplomats wondering why they are being left out. They raise the question of whether the US government is engaging in favoritism that could further divide the alliance, which is already struggling with increasing Russian aggression and depleted weapons stocks.
“We are doing everything that is asked of us,” said a representative of an uninvited ally. "We're trying to understand what the criteria are and what purpose these meetings are supposed to serve. So far we haven't been told much about that." The White House did not respond to a request for comment and the Pentagon declined to comment.
President Donald Trump and his closest aides have continually criticized NATO since returning to power - from individual members' refusal to support the Iran war to some countries' failure to spend 5 percent of their gross domestic product on defense.
“I have always viewed NATO, where we spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year to protect these very countries, as a one-way street – we protect them, but they do nothing for us, especially in times of need,” Trump railed in a post on Truth Social this year.
Last month, he alienated another ally, South Korea, by abruptly canceling a planned joint military exercise while complaining that Seoul did not want to take part in the war against Iran.
In April, as Politico, which, like WELT, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, first reported, the White House put together a kind of positive and negative list as it looked for ways to punish allies who did not comply with Trump's wishes. War Minister Hegseth took up this vision. He has praised “model allies” and warned that those who do not support U.S. interests will face consequences.
Although the details of the new NATO working group are still vague, it follows the pattern of rewarding some allies at the expense of others. Colby has already held two similar meetings with the invited states Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Germany and the Netherlands.
“NATO allies who are quickly implementing their commitment to increase defense spending, have the capacity to contribute and are ready to focus on practical business,” Colby wrote on social media after the meeting. This month, at a conference in Washington, he noted that "the idea is to bring the entire alliance along."
He added that this would lead to a "better, stronger and more sustainable NATO" that would give Europe more military self-reliance. The countries involved in the meetings - known as the Bergen format - emphasize that they are not intended to split the alliance, said a diplomat from one of the invited states. Instead, the group wants to develop ideas that it can then bring to the overall alliance for further testing.
“This can be a driver for change in the entire alliance,” said the diplomat, who like others wished to remain anonymous to discuss internal deliberations. But he acknowledged that some allies were frustrated by the exclusion — particularly because many of them have met or exceeded spending targets demanded by the Trump administration.
Next, the United States could add Denmark to this exclusive circle after both countries agreed to expand the American military presence in Greenland. This was reported by another source familiar with the plans.
Colby has long been interested in smaller-scale discussions between NATO states. In recent years, he has focused on revitalizing Germany as a military power to contain Russia and providing U.S. troops to deal with the rise of China.
But even invited allies question why Colby and other War Department officials select participants and leave out some of the continent's biggest military powers, such as Britain. “If they try to divide NATO into the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, that is dangerous for the US,” said another of the six diplomats. “But this is existential for Europe.”
