Lavishing praise, playing the royal card and copying his slogans – NATO pulled out all the stops to keep US President Donald Trump happy and hold the alliance together at a summit in The Hague.
Far from the tense meetings of Trump’s first term, much of the annual summit in The Hague seemed catered to the impulses and worldviews of the Republican president whose “America First” foreign policy ethos downplays the importance and influence of multilateral coalitions.
The plan came off, although it largely avoided tough topics of vital importance to NATO such as the war in Ukraine, Russia strategy and a likely drawdown of US troops in Europe. Sooner or later, NATO will have to deal with them too.
As NATO boss Mark Rutte had planned, the main summit outcomes were a vow by the allies to heed Trump’s call to spend 5 percent of GDP on defence – a big increase on the current 2 percent target – and a renewed US commitment to NATO’s mutual defence pact.
That is a far cry from a few months ago, when transatlantic ties were so tense that Friedrich Merz, now Germany‘s chancellor, wondered openly after his election win whether NATO would exist in its current form by the time of the Hague summit.
