By Anthony J. Tokarz, Fall 2025 Marcellus Policy Fellow

As the Ukraine war enters its fifth year, Russia’s growing momentum requires a reevaluation of transatlantic security. While both American and European leaders had hoped that the war would weaken Russia, the first four years of the conflict suggest that it has weakened Europe’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members instead. This weakening takes three main forms: the draining of budgets, which adversely affects the fiscal balance of major states like France; the depletion of military stockpiles, from ammunition to armor to anti-aircraft missiles; and the precarized political standings of leaders who preside over growing discontent among their citizenries. However, some states— most notably, Poland—have bucked this trend, logging both improved military capabilities and robust, sustained economic growth. Analyses of NATO’s preparedness for a large-scale confrontation with Russia have tended to focus on NATO as a whole or individual member states. Such analyses are incomplete because they fail to consider the missing layer of regionalism.

Indeed, the economic and military success of Poland since 2022 is intelligible only in the context of its leadership of and participation in the Bucharest Nine (B9) bloc, a grouping of the nine states of NATO’s eastern flank in a flexible coalition united by shared security objectives. The B9 generates demonstrable advantages for its members and demonstrates its salutary effect on NATO as a whole. Indeed, NATO ought to incorporate regional coalitions modeled on the B9 to improve its defense readiness while reducing its European members’ reliance on the United States, which, under the second Trump Administration, has signaled its intent to draw down its troop presence and demand more of its European partners in providing for their defense. The elevation of such regional coalitions would affect a more modular NATO, in which active regional coalitions “plug into” the alliance.

Two concepts allow for a more productive analysis of NATO’s force posture and the challenges confronting it in Europe. The first, strategic regionalism, calls for treating NATO less like a monolith and more like a collection of distinct regional groups with shared security interests while advocating for greater regional integration around these interests. The second, economic realism, applies the assumptions of logic and realism in international relations theory to economic reality. Taken together, these concepts create a framework which policymakers can utilize to understand how security interests interact with economic structures and, consequently, reconceptualize security itself as a supply chain. Following the logic of this framework, NATO ought to support greater regional economic integration of the defense industrial bases of states that share concrete security concerns in order to achieve value-added deterrence. This argument does not seek to lay out a new theory but instead calls attention to the success of existing regional blocs and fleshes out their contributions to NATO’s strategic thinking.