The Pentagon has begun withdrawing American personnel from several NATO advisory groups, The Washington Post reported Tuesday, marking the United States' most concrete step toward strategic decoupling from the alliance it founded 75 years ago.
The move affects American participation in approximately a dozen NATO advisory bodies focused on military interoperability, joint procurement, and strategic planning. While the Pentagon emphasized these are "non-operational" groups that do not directly affect combat readiness, defense analysts described the withdrawals as a systematic dismantling of the institutional architecture that has underpinned transatlantic defense cooperation since 1949.
"This is death by a thousand cuts," said a senior European defense official speaking on condition of anonymity. "They're not leaving NATO tomorrow. They're making NATO irrelevant."
The Pentagon announcement comes as France requests NATO military exercises in Greenland to counter President Trump's territorial ambitions, Denmark deploys 1,000 combat troops to the Arctic territory, and the European Union suspends approval of a major US trade deal. Each development represents a separate thread of the unraveling transatlantic relationship, but the Pentagon move suggests Washington is methodically preparing for a post-NATO security posture.
The timing is not coincidental. The affected advisory groups include the NATO Air Defence Committee, the Army Armaments Group, the Naval Armaments Group, and several working groups on cyber defense and space operations. These bodies don't command troops or make policy, but they serve a critical function: ensuring that American, European, and Canadian forces can operate together seamlessly in a crisis.
Without American participation, European militaries will face growing challenges maintaining interoperability with US systems. Everything from communications protocols to ammunition calibers to air traffic control procedures relies on standardization work done in these advisory groups. Their degradation won't cause immediate operational failures, but it will gradually make combined operations more difficult and less effective.
Defense analysts noted the irony: as Europe scrambles to coordinate a unified response to the Greenland crisis, the United States is quietly removing the institutional infrastructure that enables such coordination. "They're pulling the foundation out from under the building while we're still inside it," one NATO diplomat told the Post.
The withdrawals also have fiscal implications. American personnel in NATO advisory groups typically include technical experts whose salaries and travel are funded by the Pentagon. Their removal saves money—though the amounts involved are negligible in the context of a $900 billion annual defense budget—while signaling that NATO is no longer a priority.
President Trump has repeatedly threatened to withdraw from NATO entirely, describing the alliance as obsolete and complaining that European members don't spend enough on defense. During his first term, he was reportedly restrained by advisers who feared the domestic and international consequences of formal withdrawal. Those restraints appear to have been removed.
Europe's response has been fragmented. France and Denmark have taken visible actions to assert sovereignty and alliance solidarity. Germany and most smaller European states have remained largely silent, apparently hoping the crisis will resolve itself. Poland and the Baltic states, which depend most heavily on American security guarantees against Russia, face an impossible choice between antagonizing Washington and supporting Copenhagen.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte issued a statement calling for "continued dialogue and mutual respect" but did not directly criticize the Pentagon decision. "NATO remains the cornerstone of transatlantic security," Rutte said, a formulation that struck observers as increasingly aspirational rather than descriptive.
Historical parallels are limited. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, the United States opposed Britain and France but worked through NATO and other multilateral institutions. During the Iraq War in 2003, deep transatlantic divisions emerged over American unilateralism, but institutional cooperation continued. The current crisis is different in kind: the United States is not merely disagreeing with allies but systematically withdrawing from the mechanisms of alliance coordination.
The withdrawals also raise questions about American military posture in Europe. The United States maintains approximately 70,000 troops on the continent, primarily in Germany, Italy, and Britain. Those forces train extensively with European allies through NATO frameworks. If the institutional architecture degrades sufficiently, the rationale for maintaining those deployments becomes unclear.
Defense industry executives expressed concern about the impact on procurement cooperation. NATO standardization has enabled European and American manufacturers to develop common systems, reducing costs and increasing interoperability. "If we're not in the same advisory groups working on the same standards, we'll drift apart technically," said one aerospace executive. "That makes combined operations harder and more expensive."
For Russia, the NATO disarray represents a strategic gift. President Vladimir Putin has sought to fracture the alliance for decades, using energy dependence, disinformation, and military pressure. American withdrawal from NATO advisory groups achieves what Russian active measures could not: the systematic degradation of Western defense cooperation from within.
To understand today's headlines, we must look at yesterday's decisions. NATO was created when the United States emerged from World War II as the world's dominant power, willing to shoulder the costs of European defense in exchange for global leadership. That willingness no longer exists, and no amount of European defense spending or diplomatic accommodation will restore it. The Pentagon withdrawals are not the cause of NATO's crisis; they are the acknowledgment that the alliance as conceived in 1949 has run its course.
