Short meetings, a palace bedroom: how NATO plans to stop Trump ‘blowing up’
To avoid taxing Donald Trump with long discussions over geopolitics, meetings will be kept short and he will be the personal overnight guest of King Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands.
NATO delegates will tiptoe around President Trump to prevent him “blowing up” a summit that has been planned around the American leader.
To avoid taxing Trump with long discussions over geopolitics and strategy, the meeting of leaders of the alliance’s North Atlantic Council (NAC) will be the shortest yet, with only one agenda item: increased NATO spending.
Last year’s summit in Washington, before Trump’s second term, brought NATO leaders together for more than seven hours of talks, with sessions on the Indo-Pacific, Ukraine and the future of the alliance, resulting in a 44-paragraph communique running to more than 5400 words.
Today they will meet for only two-and-a-half hours in The Hague, with the sole agenda item of a new 5 per cent defence spending target already thrashed out in advance, resulting in a one-page, five-paragraph communique.
To help put Trump in the mood, he will be the personal overnight guest of King Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands, sleeping in the Huis ten Bosch royal palace rather than a corporate hotel in the city centre.
Ben Hodges, former head of the US Army in Europe, said summit organisers had done “everything they can to make sure Trump doesn’t blow up”.
En route to the summit, Trump shared a message on his Truth Social platform from Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary-general and former Dutch prime minister, showing how far he is willing to go to keep the US President on board.
“Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran,” Rutte wrote, despite deep divisions over the legality of strikes among allies, including France. “You are flying into another big success in The Hague tonight … Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should.”
Rutte praised Trump for pressuring European allies into increasing their defence budgets, a source of constant American complaint stretching back to the 1950s.
“We will finally deal with this huge pebble in the shoe, this huge irritant, which is that we are not spending enough as Europeans and Canadians,” he said, opening the summit.
Trump has in the past called into question America’s security guarantees to Europe and has threatened that the US would not honour NATO’s article 5 mutual defence clause if an ally had not met alliance spending targets. Hodges said: “So many people ask, ‘Will the US live up to article 5?’ It is bad for the US and raises the risk of Russia making a miscalculation. Trump could wipe that out with one clear statement.”
The retired general expressed a widespread concern that, to soothe Trump, alliance leaders will not hold an NAC session with President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss Ukraine and the stalled peace talks with President Vladimir Putin. “My biggest disappointment for this one is, in addition to doing so much to make sure the President is there, Ukraine is almost forgotten.”
While agreement on new spending targets – 3.5 per cent of GDP on military budgets and 1.5 per cent on defence-related expenditure – has been agreed in advance of the summit, there is still scope for conflict.
Spain’s refusal to hit the target has meant that the brief summit text has been watered down from a 5 per cent commitment by each ally to a more general pledge that the alliance will commit to it. Belgium and Slovakia have announced that they too will be “flexible”.
Behind the diplomatic scenes, Britain also pressed to water down the spending commitments by postponing the deadline to hit the target from 2032 – the US demand – to 2035. However, General Sir James Everard, who served as deputy supreme allied commander Europe for NATO between 2017 and 2020, called for Keir Starmer to take the lead on defence spending as Poland and Germany overtake Britain. “If NATO ever weakens, if the US ever walks away, it will be because the US looked at its most important ally in Europe – the UK – and sees that we do not care enough about our own defence, are sly with the numbers and appear happy to carry extreme risk in our levels of military capabilities,” he said. “We can do so much better, so cementing our leadership role in NATO before others take our place.”
Germany today (Wednesday) pledged to hit the NATO target of 3.5 per cent of GDP spent on core military expenditure by 2029, in contrast to Starmer, and Britain, which will not hit the objective until 2035. “We will raise defence spending step by step so that we will reach a NATO quota of 3.5 per cent in 2029,” said Lars Klingbeil, the German finance minister, announcing that German defence spending will overtake Britain’s this year.
The Times
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