The Pentagon Is Asking NATO Allies to Account for Their Political Loyalty to Washington
The Pentagon has sent a three-page questionnaire to NATO allies asking whether their governments have been "publicly supportive of US foreign policy priorities," according to documents obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera. The document, titled "Questions for NATO Allies & Other Stakeholders," is meant to guide conversations between US officials and their NATO counterparts during an ongoing six-month Pentagon review of American military forces in Europe.
The questionnaire asks allies whether they have fallen in line with the US approach of being "strong, clear, and quiet" — a phrase Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a major defense summit, in May. It also asks whether governments have endorsed the Trump administration's "NATO 3.0" concept, which calls for European allies to take on greater responsibility for their own defense with "more limited US support." Other questions echo President Donald Trump's repeated demands that allies increase defense spending and contribute more to NATO's command structure and troop deployments.
Bloomberg News first reported on portions of the questionnaire on August 14, describing it as an effort to gauge ally loyalty before cutting US military assets tied to the alliance. The Japan Times corroborated the document's existence on August 15. The review itself was announced on June 18, when Hegseth declared a new assessment of US troop deployments in Europe, threatened to withhold some US dues to NATO, and criticized allied governments for not carrying enough of the burden.
A significant portion of the questionnaire focuses on basing and overflight access — the ability of the US military to use allied airbases and fly through allied airspace. This became a flashpoint after the start of the US-Israel war on Iran on February 28. Several European countries restricted US access to bases and military flights after the conflict began. The questionnaire asks allies whether they have imposed such restrictions and whether they are willing to reduce or remove them.
Spain stands as the clearest example of the frictions the questionnaire is designed to surface. In March, Madrid closed its airspace to US planes and refused to allow the use of Spanish bases for attacks against Iran. Trump responded by threatening to cut trade with Spain. He had separately criticized Spain over its decision to seek an exemption from a 2025 NATO agreement that raised military spending targets to 5 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP — a standard measure of a country's economic output.
The questionnaire's structure effectively blends two distinct sets of criteria: operational access (basing, overflight, burden-sharing) and political alignment (public support for US foreign policy priorities, endorsement of the administration's strategic concept). Whether a government's answers on the first set will be weighed against its position on the second is an open question, but the format invites that reading.
The broader context here is a US administration systematically tightening the conditions attached to its alliance commitments. The six-month European force review, announced by Hegseth in June, is the mechanism through which any answers to this questionnaire could translate into concrete changes to US military presence on the continent. By asking about political loyalty alongside operational metrics within a single document, the Pentagon appears to be building a framework in which an ally's level of alignment with Trump's foreign policy vision becomes a factor in decisions about troop levels, basing access, and resource allocation.
For NATO allies, the questionnaire sharpens a dilemma that has been building since the start of the Iran conflict: how to navigate a bilateral relationship with Washington in which military support is increasingly conditioned on political conformity. The "NATO 3.0" concept, with its explicit premise of "more limited US support," signals that the administration views a reduced American footprint in Europe not as a fallback but as a policy goal. Allies that restricted US access to bases or airspace during the Iran war now face a process in which those decisions may be factored into determinations about future US force posture on their territory.
The questionnaire also serves as a data-collection tool ahead of the review's conclusions. By asking the same questions across all allies, the Pentagon creates a comparable dataset that could inform country-by-country decisions about force levels and how deeply the US engages with each government. Allies that answer favorably on political alignment and access restrictions may position themselves differently in the review's outcomes than those that do not.
What remains unclear is how allies will respond to questions that, by their nature, ask governments to formally account in writing for their political posture toward the United States. The questionnaire does not appear to impose a deadline, and its stated purpose is to "guide interactions" rather than produce binding commitments. But its existence as a circulated document means that allied governments now have an explicit set of criteria against which their behavior is being assessed — and those criteria extend well beyond the traditional measures of defense spending and capability contribution that have structured burden-sharing debates within NATO for decades.
