Trump wants one thing from the NATO summit. Europe is going to give it to him.

 

Trump wants one thing from the NATO summit. Europe is going to give it to him.

 

A streamlined summit centering around a new pledge to increase defense spending has been designed to give the president a victory lap.

 

By Eli Stokols

06/21/2025 07:00 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/21/trump-nato-defense-spending-00416118

 

President Donald Trump wants one big thing from next week’s NATO leader’s summit — and European leaders are itching to give it to him. That doesn’t guarantee the president will be satisfied.

 

The 32-nation transatlantic military alliance will pledge to dramatically increase spending on defense to 5 percent of gross domestic product — 3.5 percent on hard military expenditures and 1.5 percent on more loosely defined defense-related efforts. The commitment, a watershed moment that could rebalance transatlantic security, will allow Trump, who’s been demanding Europe pick up more of the burden for its own defense, a significant victory on the world stage.

 

“There is no way they would be going to 5 percent without Trump,” said one administration official, who was granted anonymity to share the president’s views. “So he sees this as a major win, and it is.”

 

Trump intends to deliver a speech Wednesday at the summit’s conclusion heralding the new spending pledge and his own catalytic role. But Trump’s victory won’t prevent him from pressuring countries to do even more, faster, which could prove difficult for some in the alliance. Spain, the NATO member with the lowest defense spending rate, isasking for an exemption from the new pledge and there is broad disagreement over the date by which this spending pledge is to be met.

 

“They’re thinking of a timeline that is, frankly, a decade,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “Trump is probably thinking of a timeline that is by the end of this decade, if not sooner. That’s where I think [the summit] can blow up.”

 

While NATO allies are at odds over the details of the security pledge, there is broad agreement about the overriding importance of keeping Trump happy and maintaining a united front in The Hague, with Russia’s war in Ukraine nowhere near an end and America’s foreign policy focus increasingly shifting to Asia and the Middle East. In service of that aim, summit organizers have streamlined the meeting, reducing what is typically a two-day affair to 24 hours and focusing it around Trump’s pledge, which has been negotiated ahead of time, and almost nothing else.

 

“He has to get credit for the 5 percent — that’s why we’re having the summit,” said one European defense official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about private government-level conversations. “Everything else is being streamlined to minimize risk.”

 

Asked about the pledge on Friday, Trump expressed support for allies spending more but added the 5 percent target shouldn’t apply to the U.S., which is at 3.4 percent.

 

Trump’s saber-rattling toward Iran,teasing the possibility that the U.S. would join Israel’s military campaign to destroy the country’s nuclear development infrastructure and potentially topple the regime, has injected new uncertainty into a summit NATO officials had hoped to tightly script. But as of Friday, there were no formal plans to meet with allies to discuss the situation in the Middle East, though it could provide an opportunity for the president to tout the need for increased defense spending.

 

NATO officials decided to pare down the agenda before Trump abruptly left the G7 halfway through the two-day program, a move that the administration official later attributed largely to his impatience with largely ceremonial multilateral meetings. In The Hague, as was the case in Canada, there will be no lengthy communique, only short statements about new commitments. The shortened NATO schedule allows for only two main events: a welcome dinner at the Dutch royal family’s castle and a single meeting of the North Atlantic Council rather than the usual two or three, according to five people familiar with the planning.

 

It is not clear if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, invited only to the summit’s opening dinner on Tuesday, will attend. And there won’t be a meeting of NATO’s Ukraine council in The Hague. It’s another concession to the U.S., which, despite the urging of some allies to hold such a session, wasn’t interested in heightening the focus on the war that Trump has been unable to resolve as he promised during last year’s campaign.

 

Paring down the summit is also a way for NATO allies to gloss over the persistent divide among countries about a critical detail of their pledge: how soon they’ll be expected to reach the new spending benchmark. While the U.S. — and countries in eastern Europe already above the 3.5 percent benchmark — prefer a deadline of 2030, smaller countries, struggling to reach the new goals, want until 2032 or 2035.

 

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte floated 2032 as a compromise but, amid pushback from several smaller countries in recent days, the final wording of the pledge could give countries until 2035 to hit 5 percent, according to a European official familiar with private negotiations.

 

“For a lot of countries, this is the whole issue,” the European defense official continued. “It’s not so difficult to say, ‘Yes, we will, we will agree.’ But it’s very difficult to find the right path and to actually find the budget for that path. So that’s why nobody, nobody wants to talk about it anymore.”

 

It’s possible that the matter of the timeline won’t be resolved during the summit.

 

“The priority is really to announce success in The Hague,” said another European official, also granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “The longer-term perspective is less important.”

 

NATO officials and European allies are determined to avoid a repeat of the 2018 summit in Brussels, which Trump upended by threatening to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance altogether if other countries didn’t get serious about reaching the 2 percent spending benchmark they’d agreed to four years earlier. More than anything since, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 altered defense calculations for Europe, pushing several countries to meet the 2 percent threshold and prompting Sweden and Finland, after decades of neutrality, to join the alliance.

 

With the war ongoing and Trump back in office, the increased spending commitments are at least as much about Europe’s long-term defense as they are appeasing the unpredictable Trump. In his speech this week at London’s Chatham House, Rutte began to publicly lay out NATO’s new capability targets — the amount of military equipment needed to implement a defense plan against a potential Russian attack — that defense ministers agreed to earlier this month.

 

The alliance, Rutte said, needs “a 400 percent increase in air and missile defence … thousands more armored vehicles and tanks, millions more artillery shells, and we must double our enabling capabilities, such as logistics, supply, transportation, and medical support.”

 

Over time, that will lead to Europe carrying more of the burden for its own defense — and having more sway within the alliance.

 

“You now have a road map for Europeanizing NATO that you never had before, and that ultimately will lead to a more successful alliance,” Daalder said. “Everybody wants to move in that direction, the U.S. and the Europeans.”

 

Trump has long groused that the U.S. shoulders too much of the cost for defending the world and has pushed more than just NATO members to increase their defense budgets. The administration is also pressuring Japan, a non-NATO ally pursuing a new trade deal with Washington, to boost its defense spending significantly with the Pentagon describing the 5 percent benchmark as a new “global standard.”

 

It’s a standard many countries may struggle to reach. Spain, far from the alliance’s eastern flank, has been difficult to convince, as have other smaller countries such as Italy and Belgium that are still not hitting the 2 percent level the alliance adopted in 2014.

 

Even Great Britain, one of Europe’s biggest military powers, has balked at the 2032 deadline. Laying out a plan for boosting defense spending, Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised the U.K. would be at 2.5 percent by 2027 and expressed confidence about getting to 3 percent by 2034, at the latest.

 

Paul McLeary contributed to this report.