The United States has been pressing NATO to scale back its peacekeeping force in Kosovo and end its advisory mission in Iraq, four alliance diplomats told Politico, in the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration intends to strip NATO of commitments it considers peripheral to European defence.
The push - described internally as a “return to factory settings” - amounts to an effort to refocus the alliance on its core mandate of territorial deterrence and to shed the crisis-management operations, global partnerships, and out-of-area missions that have accumulated since the 1990s. The Kosovo Force (KFOR), a UN-mandated mission that has maintained a continuous military presence since 1999, is now on the list.
Early days, high stakes
Discussions on reducing KFOR are still at a preliminary stage, the diplomats stressed. No formal decision has been taken, and any termination of a NATO operation requires the consensus of all 32 member states. A NATO official, speaking on behalf of the organisation, said there was no timeline attached to either the Kosovo or Iraq missions. Both, the official said, are subject to periodic review and adapt as circumstances change.
The diplomatic language is measured, but the direction of travel is not. Washington has reportedly been lobbying allies for months on KFOR specifically, and has separately asked NATO to close its advisory mission in Iraq by September 2026 - a timeline aligned with the planned withdrawal of some 2,500 American troops under a 2024 agreement with Baghdad. The broader vision was laid out last week by Elbridge Colby, the deputy Pentagon chief, who told alliance defence ministers in terms designed to be quoted that “not every mission can be a priority” and not every opportunity can be improved to the limit. He called the approach “NATO 3.0.”
A mission that grew when others shrank
KFOR entered Kosovo on 12 June 1999, in the wake of NATO’s 78-day air campaign against Slobodan Milošević’s forces. At peak strength it numbered 50,000 troops. Successive drawdowns over the following two decades reduced that to fewer than 5,000 - until events reversed the trajectory. After violent clashes between Kosovo Serbs and Kosovo police in 2023, and an armed confrontation near a monastery in the north in which a police officer was killed, KFOR was reinforced. Some 200 British troops deployed in October 2023 as part of a Strategic Reserve Force, and the contingent was brought up to roughly 4,500 - where it stands today.
The mission’s composition has shifted, too. Italy provides the largest single contingent with 855 troops. The United States, once the dominant contributor, has dropped to second place with 598. Hungary follows with 365, Turkey with 325, and Germany with 300. The rest is drawn from 23 other allied and partner countries. If Washington were to pull its contingent, the gap would be significant but not necessarily fatal - provided Europeans were willing to fill it. That proviso, of course, is where the politics begin.
European alarm
A fifth senior NATO diplomat, speaking separately to Politico, said allies were “quite worried” about the downscaling push, precisely because the Western Balkans can escalate with little warning. The 2023 incidents bear that out: a situation that was stable on paper deteriorated within weeks. The concern among European diplomats is not confined to Kosovo itself but to the second-order signal a diminished KFOR would send across the Western Balkans, where security calculations are already shifting. In Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik - judicially barred from office since August 2025 but still governing through a proxy president who scraped to victory in February’s rerun by fewer than 11,000 votes - continues to pursue a separatist course with open backing from Moscow, and the assessment among Western officials tracking the region is that a shrinking NATO presence in Kosovo would be read in Banja Luka not as a drawdown but as a permission structure. The alliance’s physical footprint in Kosovo is, in practice, the most visible proof that the post-war settlement in the Western Balkans still has guarantors willing to maintain it; remove or hollow that out, and the calculations in Pristina, Belgrade, and Banja Luka all move at once.
The wider pattern
KFOR is not the only piece being moved on the board. Washington is simultaneously lobbying to prevent the formal participation of Ukraine and four Indo-Pacific partners - Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea - at the NATO summit in Ankara in July. Alliance staff have reportedly proposed dropping the summit’s traditional public forum, keeping only a closed defence-industry event, citing costs. Critics within NATO view the cancellation as another concession to an administration that regards the alliance’s post-Cold War expansion of partnerships and missions as mission creep. The cumulative picture is coherent. Colby’s “NATO 3.0” doctrine treats the alliance as a defensive pact for the Euro-Atlantic space and little else. Global engagement, stabilisation missions, and partnerships with non-members are recast as luxuries - tolerable in a unipolar moment, untenable when Washington wants European allies to spend more on their own conventional defence and less time on what some in the administration regard as legacy commitments.
What comes next
No one in Brussels expects KFOR to disappear overnight. The consensus requirement gives European allies a veto, and several - Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom among them - have invested enough in the mission to resist a disorderly drawdown. But the pressure to reduce is now public, named, and aligned with a broader doctrinal shift in Washington that shows no sign of being temporary. The question is less whether KFOR shrinks than on whose terms and at what pace. If Washington withdraws its 598 troops unilaterally, the mission survives but loses its American anchor - and with it, a good portion of its deterrent credibility. If allies negotiate a phased reduction tied to security benchmarks, the outcome could be manageable. If neither happens and the mission simply drifts, underfunded and politically orphaned, the Western Balkans will draw the obvious conclusion.
KFOR has been in Kosovo for nearly 27 years. It has outlasted multiple American administrations, two Kosovo wars, a unilateral declaration of independence, and an armed standoff at a monastery. Whether it can outlast a factory reset remains to be seen.