Nato’s Hague summit was an orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump. The originally planned two-day meeting was truncated into a single morning’s official business to flatter the president’s ego and accommodate his short attention span. The agenda was cynically narrowed to focus on the defence spending hikes he demands from US allies. Issues that may provoke or embarrass Trump – the Ukraine conflict, or whether the Iranian nuclear threat has actually been eliminated by US bombing – were relegated to the sidelines.
Instead, the flattery throttle was opened up to maximum, with Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte leading the assembled fawning. On Tuesday, Rutte hymned Trump’s brilliance over Iran; yesterday, he garlanded him as the vindicated visionary of Nato’s drive towards the 5% of GDP spending goal. No one spoiled the party. As the president’s own former adviser Fiona Hill put it yesterday, Nato seemed briefly to have turned into the North Atlantic Trump Organization.
For Rutte and most of the alliance leaders, however, this was 24 hours of self-abasement with a specific goal. The purpose of this first Nato summit of the second Trump presidency was to keep the US as fully on board as possible with the transatlantic alliance. Nothing else mattered. Any repetition of the shocks that JD Vance and Pete Hegseth delivered to Europe at the Munich security conference in February was to be avoided at all costs. In pursuit of that objective, no humiliation or hypocrisy was too gross.
So, was it mission accomplished for Nato? Maybe yes, judging by Trump’s generally good behaviour in The Hague. The 5% pledge was “very big news”, he announced. The US was still committed to Nato’s article 5 collective-defence doctrine, he appeared to say at his post-summit press conference, though his curious choice of words – “We are here to help them protect their country” – will not reassure everyone. The leaders have nevertheless emerged with what Henry James called “the equanimity of a result”. The Nato summit got what it was designed to get.
But in every longer term way, this appeasement of Trump solves nothing. In political terms the Hague summit does not mark the resumption of normal relationships, let alone the beginning of a new Nato golden age. Such things are not possible in the Trump era. Politically, the summit was a bunker buster dodged. True, things have not got worse, an outcome that many, including Rutte, will regard as a kind of achievement. However, none of Nato’s other preexisting difficulties has been solved. Most remain firmly in place.