Source: Chatham House –
European NATO has four years to re-establish ‘escalation dominance’ over Russia, conference hears
News release
jon.wallace
Following this week’s Ankara NATO summit, General Sir Richard Barrons told the Chatham House London Conference that European countries must act to re-establish deterrence in the light of US drawdown in Europe.
Leading voices from policymaking, business and academia gathered at Chatham House’s 2026 London Conference on 9 July under the theme of ‘a route to order in an evolving world’. The event opened with a panel discussing the issues confronting UK defence, the threat from Russia and the war in Ukraine – and strained relations within NATO, following the alliance summit this week in Ankara.
Speaking at the conference’s opening panel, General Sir Richard Barrons, a senior consulting fellow with Chatham House and a co-author of the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), said that the conversation about the US drawdown of commitment to NATO can no longer be abstract.
As a result, he argued, European NATO countries must seek to re-establish a relationship of ‘escalation dominance’ with Russia – that is ‘a certainty that you deter because you are more powerful’. This must be done, he said ‘with far less reliance on the US, inside four years.’
The UK and NATO
Speaking at the same panel, former NATO Secretary-General Lord George Robertson, another co-author of the UK’s SDR, said that the Ankara NATO summit was in many ways a great success for its ‘ironclad commitment to Article 5 and to collective security…to get all of the 32 countries, including the United States, to sign up to that is crucially important.’