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| From left, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President Donald Trump and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands take their positions for a photo of NATO leaders in The Hague on Tuesday. (Haiyun Jiang/AFP/Getty Images) |
| President Donald Trump left Tuesday to appear at a NATO summit in The Hague that seemed choreographed for him. The other Western leaders convening in the Dutch capital appeared to understand the assignment. The military alliance’s member states would pursue a massive increase in defense spending, aiming for a target equivalent to 5 percent of their national GDP — a significant rise from the 2 percent threshold that most NATO states have struggled for years to meet. The effort reflects Europe’s newfound willingness to take its security in its own hands and ramp up the continent’s military-industrial base. Successive U.S. presidents have urged NATO partners to increase their defense outlays, but no one has been louder and more insistent about the matter than Trump. On Tuesday, as he transited across the Atlantic, Trump shared private messages on Truth Social from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that hailed the U.S. president’s galvanizing effect. “Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world,” Rutte said in the messages, which were later confirmed as authentic. “You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done,” he went on, echoing Trump’s own rhetoric. “It was not easy but we’ve got them all signed onto 5 per cent!” Rutte trumpeted. “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.” | ||||||
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| President Donald Trump raises his glass for a toast during a NATO dinner with heads of state and government. (Remko De Waal/AFP/Getty Images) |
| This all may be music to the ears of an American leader who exults in flattery. Trump has long questioned the value of U.S. membership in NATO, an alliance he’s cast as a drain on U.S. resources. In briefings Tuesday, Rutte said that Trump had “total commitment” to NATO, but that it came with the understanding that Europe would take “a bigger share of this burden” of military spending. But there are other disturbances in the force. Trump’s impatience with the war in Ukraine and occasional embrace of the Kremlin’s talking points have ruffled European feathers. European officials are hoping to secure more direct U.S. support for Ukraine’s war effort, though they may have to muster the necessary funds themselves. It’s not clear whether Trump will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who infamously clashed with Trump in the Oval Office and whose nation’s resistance to Russian invasion has dominated recent NATO summits. The two were kept at separate tables during a Tuesday dinner hosted by the Dutch royal family. “Our friends among NATO countries understand the delicacy of the situation and are trying to do everything possible to ensure Ukraine is present at the summit, while at the same time avoiding antagonizing Trump,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the Ukrainian parliament committee on foreign policy, to my colleagues. On the battlefield, an end to U.S. aid wouldn’t lead to the immediate surrender of Ukraine’s forces, but an extended, ill-fated rearguard action. “Our judgment is it would not lead to a total collapse in 12 months. You’d still have another year probably, but Ukraine … would be remarkably lean,” said a senior NATO official, speaking to my colleagues on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. “They would be fighting from a defensive situation almost all the time,” he said. “We’d be looking at shortages in air defense, in tank brigades and missile stocks, so you could see more rationing of munitions.” Trump may want to leave the summit with a simple message — that his pressure tactics and insistence compelled NATO partners to get in line. But those methods and his transactional view of U.S. alliances have caused a degree of damage, too. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba chose to skip the NATO meeting, even though his country is NATO’s most important partner outside the alliance. Difficulties with the United States over Trump’s trade war and tariffs, as well as Tokyo’s concerns about Washington potentially urging high-spending Japan to pony up even more for its defense budget, may underlie his absence. More broadly, traditional U.S. allies are variously reeling from Trump’s disruptive second term. Multiple opinion polls show tanking global attitudes toward Trump’s America. A recent Pew survey of 24 nations found that many had negative attitudes toward Trump. “Majorities in most countries also express little or no confidence in Trump’s ability to handle specific issues, including immigration, the Russia-Ukraine war, U.S.-China relations, global economic problems, conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, and climate change,” noted Pew. Those numbers were particularly striking in Europe. A separate study by the Institute for Global Affairs, which is part of the Eurasia Group consultancy, found that many in Western Europe, especially young people, want their governments to stand up to Trump. Only 28 percent of Western Europeans “see the U.S. as at least a ‘somewhat reliable’ guarantor to European security over the next decade — down 25 percentage points from last year,” noted the IGA’s report. A May analysis conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations offered a glimpse of a continent that is reckoning with its inexorable drift away from the old understandings of the transatlantic relationship. “Almost overnight, the bloc’s far right has gone from passionate defenders of national sovereignty against the threat of a federalist E.U. to the vanguard of a transnational movement that advocates a sort of civilizational nationalism,” observed the ECFR’s Mark Leonard and Ivan Krastev. “Conversely, many mainstream parties — or, rather, the ex-globalists — have recast themselves as the new sovereigntists, defending national dignity against what they perceive to be ideological interference from Washington.” Leaders including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Emmanuel Macron of France have been most blunt about Europe’s need to find its own geopolitical feet. Battered by Trump’s own nationalist instincts and rhetoric, they are piecing together an incipient greater European foreign policy, which could eventually diverge in significant ways from Washington. “The Trump team has instead taken an approach predicated on a pair of faulty assumptions: that other countries, international organizations, businesses, and civil society organizations have no alternative to capitulation in the face of U.S. demands and that even if alternatives emerged, the United States could remain predominant without its allies,” wrote Kori Schake, a former George W. Bush administration official, in Foreign Affairs. “This is solipsism masquerading as strategy. Instead of producing a less constraining order in which American power will flourish, it will instead yield a more hostile order in which American power will fade.” | ||||||||||||