DEAR READER,

We have just returned from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, and we are coming back with more ideas than we know what to do with. It was great to meet readers, partners, authors and friends, and to see how newsrooms, big and small, are navigating the complexities of today's media landscape with innovative strategies.

Back to business. This week, we’re looking at how Donald Trump’s rhetoric around a possible US withdrawal from NATO is being received across Central and Eastern Europe, and why, from the region’s perspective, the alliance may be turning into something of a paradox in 2026. We asked Wojciech Michnik to take a closer look.

Enjoy reading this week’s “brief”!

— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor

“The last three months have done more damage to NATO than any other three months in the history of the Alliance,” Ivo Daalder, former US ambassador to NATO, recently observed in The Economist. That verdict may sound dramatic, but from Central Europe, it feels uncomfortably accurate. And overall it might come as a shock. Especially that NATO has undergone a positive transformation recently.

Only a few years ago, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, NATO rediscovered its purpose. It looked unified, strategically focused, and anchored in a clear mission: deterring Russia and defending Europe. Today, that clarity is fading. Not because of a lack of will within the Alliance, but rather because of growing rifts between the United States and some of its NATO partners. What is emerging in its place is something more ambiguous and more dangerous: a transactional alliance where solidarity is conditional and commitments are increasingly politicized.

From the Central European perspective, NATO in 2026 presents a paradox. Militarily, the Alliance has never been stronger on its eastern flank. Politically, it has rarely felt more fragile.

The US-Israel war against Iran has intensified divisions, as European allies refused involvement in out-of-area operations, prioritizing NATO's core European focus. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte praised the US actions as “important” for degrading Iran's capabilities but clarified that “NATO as an alliance will not join the war”. US President Donald Trump later lamented that “NATO wasn’t there when we needed them,” echoing historical rifts like those during the Vietnam and Iraq wars, but with deeper consequences for the Alliance's unity.

Trump’s recent attacks on European allies, accusing them of “cowardice” by not assisting the US in the Persian Gulf and warning that NATO will “regret” its inaction, are not heard in Poland as a distant dispute over maritime security. They are read as a test of credibility. When Trump calls NATO without the United States a “paper tiger” and suggests that US protection may depend on European participation in American-led operations elsewhere, he is not just venting frustration. He is attempting to redefine the terms of the Alliance. The message is stark: security guarantees may no longer be unconditional.

For countries like Poland, this is not an abstract concern. It is a matter of survival. Poland borders Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, hosts significant US forces, and lives next door to a brutal, ongoing war in Ukraine. For decades, Polish strategy has been built around a simple principle: keep the US deeply embedded in European security. That assumption now looks less certain.

This uncertainty comes precisely when NATO’s eastern flank has been transformed into the Alliance’s frontline. Multinational battlegroups, expanded exercises from the Baltic to the Black seas, and a reinforced US presence has turned what was once labelled as a buffer zone into a forward defence line. Poland has not been a passive beneficiary of this shift. It has driven it, spending well above two per cent of GDP on defence (currently almost five per cent), investing heavily in modernisation, and consistently pushing NATO towards a more credible deterrence posture. It has also been one of Washington’s most loyal allies in Europe.

But tanks and troops cannot compensate for wavering political commitments. If participation in operations outside NATO’s area, whether in the Persian Gulf today or the Indo-Pacific tomorrow, becomes an informal test of alliance loyalty, then NATO’s core bargain is being quietly rewritten. For frontline states, the Alliance was never about joining optional missions in distant theatres. It was about an unequivocal guarantee of collective defence against a direct and existential threat.

Turn that guarantee into a bargaining chip, and deterrence begins to erode, precisely where it matters most: in Poland’s Suwałki Gap, along the Finnish-Russian border, over Baltic airspace, and across the Black Sea region.

To make things even worse, Central Europe now confronts a far more unsettling possibility than internal disagreement within NATO: a gradual or even abrupt American military disengagement from the Alliance. Whether through reduced troop presence, weakened commitments, or, in the extreme, a US exit from NATO altogether, what once seemed unthinkable is now openly discussed. For Poland and its neighbours, this is not a theoretical debate. It is a strategic earthquake. An American drawdown would not simply “rebalance” the Alliance; it would fundamentally alter its character. NATO without the United States is not the same organisation with fewer resources. It is a different entity altogether, lacking the military weight, nuclear umbrella, and political credibility that have underpinned European security for decades. For frontline states in Central Europe, the consequences would be immediate. Deterrence against Russia would weaken overnight, and the security vacuum along the eastern flank would become all too real.

Even a partial disengagement would carry risks. If US forces in Poland were reduced, or if Washington signalled that its commitment to Article 5 was contingent rather than automatic, the ambiguity alone could invite miscalculation. Something that Russia has already been guilty of, but against Ukraine, not NATO allies. Deterrence depends not only on capabilities, but on belief. Once that belief is shaken, the entire structure becomes more fragile.

This is why the current drift towards a more transactional NATO is so dangerous. If collective defence begins to depend on political alignment with Washington’s priorities beyond Europe, then the Alliance’s core principle is already being hollowed out. The shift may be gradual, almost imperceptible at first, but its endpoint is clear: a NATO where security guarantees are negotiable.

For Central Europe, the implications are stark. The region would be forced to accelerate its military build-up, deepen regional defence cooperation, and rely far more heavily on European powers whose strategic focus has not always aligned with the urgency felt on the eastern flank. None of these are sufficient substitutes for the US.

For more than 77 years, NATO has rested on a simple and credible promise: that an attack on one is an attack on all. If that promise weakens, whether through rhetoric, redeployments, or political conditionality, the Alliance will not disappear. But it will become less reliable, less cohesive, and far less effective. For Poland and other NATO states in the region, that is the real danger: not a sudden collapse, but a slow erosion of the one guarantee that has kept peace on NATO’s eastern frontier. And that is a risk Poland and Central Europe as a whole cannot afford to take.

— Wojciech Michnik, an assistant professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a contributing editor with New Eastern Europe

The European Public Policy Conference (EPPC) is a flagship student-led initiative, bringing together a diverse network of students, policymakers, academics, and practitioners for high-level dialogue on Europe’s most pressing challenges.

For nearly two decades, students at the Hertie School, supported by funding from the IPLI Foundation, have designed and delivered this conference entirely from the ground up: from identifying the most pressing challenges in European public policy and shaping the conference’s thematic focus, to securing speakers, managing promotion, logistics, and budgeting.

The 18th edition of the EPPC will take place on 25–26 April 2026 at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics, under the theme Building a Resilient Union: Defending Democracy Against Hybrid Threats in the EU.

EPPC 2026 aims to respond to a rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape and the growing complexity of threats facing democratic systems across the European Union. The conference will feature a dynamic format, combining expert panels, participatory workshops, and roundtable discussions to foster meaningful dialogue and practical policy exchange, with three core themes:

Find out more in the programme.