Opinion | 3 Urgent Tasks for the West

The strategic challenges facing the West are not new and trans-Atlantic leaders must confront them with a healthy sense of pragmatism and urgency.

That’s what I tried to do a few years ago, with Russia’s escalation in Ukraine a year old, at the Munich Security Conference. I warned about the growing alignment of our adversaries, encouraged the United States and our allies to speed up weapons procurement and defense industrial production, and urged NATO to quickly approve the accession of two highly capable partners in Finland and Sweden. I also questioned whether the West could sustain the will to continue backing Ukraine and deter adversaries like Russia, China and Iran.

Three years further into Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, despite real progress in these areas, many of the same underlying questions and challenges remain unresolved. As the West’s top defense officials gather at this year’s conference in Munich, a few pressing items should command their attention:

First, at the most basic level, what are we prepared to do to counter the increasing alignment of common adversaries? The convergence of Russian and Chinese interest in the Arctic, after all, was the ostensible pretext for an especially turbulent episode of trans-Atlantic tension over Greenland last month. But how NATO allies meet shared threats has implications far beyond the High North.

Some senior Trump administration officials seem to make sense of the world by dividing it into neat and tidy spheres of influence. And from this assumption flows the familiar suggestion that Europe ought to focus on Europe so America can turn its attention elsewhere.

But increased hostile coordination suggests that our adversaries see the world less as a board game than as a web of competing interests that spans the globe. Iran, China and North Korea are willing to put their treasure, technology and lives on the line to enable Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet adventurism in Europe. And the joint Russian-Chinese patrols that rightly hold the attention of U.S. and fellow Arctic governments indicate a willingness to join forces around the globe.

The West would be foolish to treat increasingly aligned threats as isolated. The United States, for our part, ought to be less dismissive of our allies’ capabilities and willingness to project power and influence far beyond their shores. And we need to stop the practice by multiple administrations of picking trade fights with our closest and strongest allies. Our friends’ economic markets hold far more promise than Russia could ever. And we’ll need these friends to help America push back as China tries to rewrite the rules of the road.

In turn, our allies must get serious about shutting the back door to Chinese influence. There is hardly a more cynical bet to be made on the future of the West than chasing closer ties with a regime built on repression and enriched by slave labor and stolen Western technology.

Second, to the extent we’re serious about collective defense, there’s more work to be done in showing it. I commend allies for making tough choices to meet higher NATO spending targets. But when we look past the thicket of multilateral spending vehicles and special funds, more European nations still need to build increases into their annual base budgets, investing credibly in deterrence and the common defense year after year.

For the record, so must America. Congress just delivered annual defense appropriations $8 billion above the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 request. This was a compromise position: the Senate panel I lead had recommended an increase of nearly $23 billion.

As a share of GDP, U.S. annual defense spending remains stagnant, barely above 3 percent and well below the 5 percent target we set for NATO allies. Leading from behind has never been a sustainable strategy for a superpower that seeks peace or primacy.

Despite talk of European self-reliance and onshoring of defense supply chains, many of America’s friends still prefer to deter aggression with as many U.S.-made weapons as they can. But in the face of looming threats, the best weapons are the ones that can be deployed on time.

That’s why I urged America’s defense industry to expand production capacity ahead of inevitable demand, and why I pushed successive U.S. administrations to send stronger demand signals by building higher funding for critical munitions into their base budgets. At long last, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg’s interest in multiyear procurement for munitions is encouraging. But regardless of the president’s goal of a massive increase in defense spending in fiscal year 2027, the flat funding extension in fiscal year 2025 and insufficient request for fiscal year 2026 will go down as missed opportunities to breathe new life into America’s arsenal of democracy.

Today, across the alliance, are we investing enough in weapons stockpiles and defense production capacity to meet growing military requirements? Are we prepared to deliver necessary capabilities at the speed of relevance?

A third, related, conversation must clarify our commitment to partners on the front lines of aggression. The data is now quite clear: European support to Ukraine has far outpaced that from the United States. Our allies are carrying more of the burden of changing Putin’s calculus.

This is good news. But NATO’s Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) — which exists first and foremost to direct best-in-class U.S.-made weapons to the front lines — was designed for active and robust U.S. participation, if not leadership. U.S. support to Ukraine’s military provides critical leverage for President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war, and would be a necessary part of any security guarantee to maintain peace. If America no longer has skin in the game, we risk signaling that allies cannot count on us. And in time, we could expect more of our friends to look elsewhere to meet their military requirements.

If Munich is meant to be more than a platform for speeches, then representatives of allied governments would do well to devote their time together to reaching an understanding on the fundamentals: the nature of growing threats to shared interests, the military capabilities we’ll need to deter them and the investments required to re-fill our stockpiles and expand our industrial capacity.

It's natural to put one’s own country’s interests first, but it would be foolish for either side of the Atlantic to go it alone.