Trump Administration Excludes UK, France and Baltics From NATO Future Group and Summit Planning
The Trump administration has left the UK, France and the Baltic states out of a Pentagon‑led working group on NATO’s future while Trump says they’re not allowed at next month’s summit in Poland, concentrating early planning in a smaller set of northern and central European allies.
The Trump administration is reshaping who gets an early say over NATO’s direction by excluding several prominent allies from a core planning group and signalling they should stay away from an upcoming summit.
A Pentagon‑led working group on the alliance’s future, informally called the “Bergen Group,” currently includes the United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Germany and the Netherlands. The Trump administration has decided that the United Kingdom, France and the Baltic states will not be part of this smaller forum.
Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby has said the group is intended to generate ideas that can later strengthen the wider alliance. In practice, its membership list means a subset of northern and central European countries are in the room when initial concepts are developed.
At the same time, Trump has stated that the UK, the Baltics and France are not allowed to attend next month’s NATO summit in Poland. His comments add a public, political layer to the narrower participation already set inside the Bergen Group.
The working group’s current members bring experience from NATO’s northern and eastern flanks and from key logistics and industrial hubs. But the absence of the UK and France, along with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, keeps major military powers and front‑line states out of this early‑stage process.
The move lands as NATO is under pressure from Russia’s war in Ukraine, exercises and activity near its borders, and broader debates over spending and posture. Decisions on who sits at the table to draft ideas affect which perspectives dominate those discussions.
Signals to watch include how the excluded allies respond in public and through diplomatic channels, how much of the Bergen Group’s work is adopted by NATO as a whole, and whether Trump’s stated ban on certain allies attending the Poland summit stands once other member states engage.
Sources
- OSINT