The UK and its European allies are scrambling to get serious about their own defences as Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin shape a new world order.
You can expect to hear multiple declarations from European leaders, including Sir Keir Starmer, about their respective plans to ramp up spending on defence and security at a major security conference in Munich over the next three days.
But the key indicator to track is evidence of the rhetoric becoming cold, hard fighting reality.
It is certainly what the United States will be looking for – a form of scrutiny that became clear at a separate meeting of defence ministers from the NATO alliance in Brussels on Thursday.
Elbridge Colby, the US under secretary of war policy – a deputy to Pete Hegseth who chose to miss the gathering in what some insiders saw as a signal of the US reducing the priority it places on its NATO membership, though others denied this was the case – delivered a striking speech to allies.
He said Europe must take the lead in defending itself, but – in words that will come as some relief to his counterparts – stressed that the US was not abandoning NATO.
Elbridge Colby, the deputy of Pete Hegseth, took the US defence secretary’s place. Pic: Reuters
“The world that shaped the habits, assumptions, and force posture of NATO during the so-called ‘unipolar moment’ following the Cold War no longer exists,” Mr Colby said.
“Power politics has returned, and military force is again being employed at a large scale.”
The Trump administration official said his message was about giving a reality check to his partners, about the need to turn a pledge made at a major NATO summit last year to increase total defence and security spending to 5% of GDP into viable military capability.
“For Europe, it means moving beyond inputs and intentions toward outputs and capabilities,” Mr Colby said.
“Defence spending levels matter, and there is no substitute for it. But what matters at the end of the day is what those resources produce: ready forces, usable munitions, resilient logistics, and integrated command structures that work at scale under stress.
“It means prioritising war-fighting effectiveness over bureaucratic and regulatory stasis. It means making hard choices about force structure, readiness, stockpiles, and industrial capacity that reflect the realities of modern conflict rather than peacetime politics.”
‘Defence spending levels matter, and there is no substitute for it’, Colby said. Pic: AP
These words should be triggering alarm bells in London and other – in particular Western – European capitals that have for too long relied on spin over substance when it comes to talking about defence.
The spending pledge last year comprises a commitment to increase spending on core defence to 3.5% of GDP by 2035, up from a target of 2%, with an additional 1.5% of GDP to be spent on an ill-defined bucket of wider security measures.
Donald Trump applauded the move, which he rightly received credit for forcing through. However, the US president talks as though those levels of defence spending have already been met.
In reality, many allies are planning to take advantage of the full ten-year timespan to reach the target – including the UK, even though it is a leading member of the alliance and a key partner of the United States.
Pic: Reuters
Mr Starmer’s government is only planning to inch up core defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by next year, lift it to 3% by the next parliament, and only reach the full 5% by 2035.
Defence sources say this is far too slow given the scale of the challenge to rebuild the UK’s armed forces as well as wider national resilience.
It is also, as Mr Colby said, not just about how much money a country spends but what the cash is spent on and whether input translates to credible military output.
Again, on that point, the UK is seen to be falling short.
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A plan for defence investment – due to be published last year – is yet to be revealed amid reports of a £28bn hole in the budget over the next four years.
At a press conference following the NATO conference, I asked John Healey, the defence secretary, if the UK was failing to meet the moment.
He strongly pushed back on this suggestion. “The UK has always met its commitments to funding NATO,” he said.
“The UK is putting more money into defence this year than it has done for 15 years – £270bn in this parliament alone. This is the largest increase since the end of the Cold War.”
But given that defence spending across NATO was repeatedly cut following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this is perhaps not the best measure to judge whether what is being spent now is actually enough. And many believe that it is not.
