WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s first appearance at NATO since returning to the White House was supposed to center on how the U.S. secured a historic military spending pledge from others in the defensive alliance — effectively bending it to its will.
But in the spotlight instead now is Trump’s decision to strike three nuclear enrichment facilities in Iran that the administration says eroded Tehran’s nuclear ambitions as well as the president’s sudden announcement that Israel and Iran had reached a “complete and total ceasefire.” The sharp U-turn in hostilities just hours before he was set to depart for the summit is sure to dominate the discussions in The Hague, Netherlands.
The impact of the strikes had already begun to shape the summit, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte dancing around the issue even as hundreds of people showed up in The Hague on Sunday to denounce the conflict in a protest that was supposed to be focused on defense spending.
Still, other NATO countries have become accustomed to the unpredictable when it comes to Trump, who has made no secret of his disdain for the alliance, which was created as a bulwark against threats from the former Soviet Union.
Trump’s debut on the NATO stage at the 2017 summit was perhaps most remembered by his shove of Dusko Markovic, the prime minister of Montenegro, as the U.S. president jostled toward the front of the pack of world leaders during a NATO headquarters tour.
And he began the 2018 summit by questioning the value of the decades-old military alliance and accusing its members of not contributing enough money for their defense — themes he has echoed since. In Brussels, Trump floated a 4% target of defense spending as a percentage of a country’s gross domestic product, a figure that seemed unthinkable at the time.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will also attend the NATO summit this week. She said if Trump does anything to sow division within the alliance, it would benefit Xi Jinping of China, which NATO countries have accused of enabling Russia as it invades Ukraine.
“That does not help America, does not help our national security,” Shaheen said in an interview. “What it does is hand a victory to our adversaries, and for an administration that claims to be so concerned about the threat from (China), to behave in that way is hard to understand.”
Trump heavily telegraphed his attitude toward global alliances during his presidential campaigns.
As a candidate in 2016, Trump suggested that he as president would not necessarily heed the alliance’s mutual defense guarantees outlined in Article 5 of the NATO treaty. And during a campaign rally in 2024, Trump recounted a conversation with another NATO leader during which Trump said he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to members who weren’t meeting the alliance’s military spending targets.
In The Hague, Trump will want to tout — and take credit for — the pledge to hike military spending, which requires other NATO countries to invest in their defense at an unprecedented scale.
The president went as far as to argue that the U.S. should not have to abide by the 5% spending pledge he wants imposed on the other NATO countries.
That 5% is effectively divided into two parts. The first, 3.5%, is meant to be made up of traditional military spending such as tanks, warplanes and air defense. What can comprise the remaining 1.5% is a bit fuzzier, but it can include things like roads and bridges that troops could use to travel. According to NATO, the U.S. was spending about 3.4% of its gross domestic product on defense as of 2024.
Most NATO countries — with Spain as the key holdout — are preparing to endorse the pledge, motivated not just by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to bolster their own defenses but also perhaps appease the United States and its tempestuous leader.
“He hasn’t said this in a while, but there are still a lot of worries in Europe that maybe the United States will pull out of NATO, maybe the United States won’t honor Article 5,” said Matthew Kroenig, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a former Pentagon official. “I think there is a real fear among Europeans that we need to deliver for Trump in order to keep the United States engaged in NATO.”
Kroenig added: “Like it or not, I do think Trump’s tougher style does get more results.”
European allies have taken note of potential signs of a broader U.S. retreat. France and other NATO countries have been concerned that the Trump administration is considering reducing troop levels in Europe and shift them over to the Indo-Pacific, which Cabinet officials have signaled is a higher priority.
Still, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker have underscored the U.S.’ commitment and have said the Trump administration is only seeking a stronger alliance.
“There’s sort of — in some ways — not a coherent view coming from this administration, the Trump administration, about how it sees NATO,” said Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And right now, Europeans can kind of see what they want from the United States.”
The White House has not said which world leaders Trump will meet with at the World Forum in The Hague. It’s unclear whether Trump’s path will cross with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s; the two leaders were scheduled to meet at the Group of 7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, earlier this month before Trump abruptly cut his trip short and returned to Washington.
Rutte has stressed before that Trump’s tariff war has no impact on NATO since the alliance doesn’t deal with trade. But it will be hard to ignore the issue as the U.S. and the European Union continue to negotiate a trade deal after the U.S. president threatened 50% import taxes on all European goods.
Trump has set a July 9 deadline for the U.S. and the 27-country EU to strike a trade deal. But in recent days, he’s said the EU had not offered a fair deal as he reiterated his threat to force Europe to “just pay whatever we say they have to pay.”
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Associated Press writer Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.
