Who is Queen Máxima of Netherlands, who wowed in lime-green welcoming Trump, world leaders to NATO summit
Queen Máxima of the Netherlands turned heads in a striking lime-green jumpsuit as she and hubby King Willem-Alexander gave President Trump and fellow world leaders a royal welcome at the NATO summit.
The Dutch royal couple beamed as they greeted world leaders from 32 countries – including Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer – at The Hague's World Forum, marking the first time the Netherlands has played host to a NATO summit.
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On Tuesday, the fashion-forward Argentinian-born Queen, 54, upstaged some of the world's most powerful figures, dazzling in the show-stopping, draped ensemble during the summit's family photo.
3 Group photo of NATO leaders with the King and Queen of the Netherlands at a summit.
POOL/AFP via Getty Images
The mother of three, celebrated for her vibrant fashion sense, is a former New York City investment banker who was once dubbed Europe's 'most interesting' royal.
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Máxima met her future husband, then-Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, at a party in Spain in 1999 while working as an economist at Deutsche Bank in the Big Apple — and the two quickly fell in love.
But their courtship hit a rough patch when Dutch media revealed that Máxima's father had served as a minister for Argentina's brutal military junta government during the country's infamous Dirty War.
3 President Trump greeted by the Dutch Royal Family.
AP
Former Queen Beatrix, who had faced controversy over marrying a former member of the Hitler Youth, gave her eldest son's marriage her blessing, praising Máxima as an 'intelligent, modern woman.'
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The King, 58, ascended to the throne in 2013, a year after the couple wed, with his Dutch Queen quickly gaining popularity for her charisma, smart wit, and strong work ethic.
3 European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen shaking hands with Queen Maxima of the Netherlands.
AP
Widely regarded as a fashion icon, Maxima is equally known for her substance, never shying away from tough political issues like immigration, and earning praise an early advocated for LGBTQ+ rights.
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The royal pair are regarded for their casual approach to monarch life, opting out of coronation ceremony and choosing to send their three daughters — Princess Catharina-Amalia, 21, Princess Alexia, 19, and Princess Ariane, 18 — to public school, rather than an elite private institution.
Catharina-Amalia, who is known as Princess of Orange, is heir to the Dutch throne.
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Embarrassed pro-recognition leaders had to deliver a new round of condemnations of Hamas at the very moment they were trying to pressure Israel to abandon its fight against Hamas. Nor does the promise of Palestinian recognition seem to be buying the four leaders the domestic quiet they had hoped for. On Sunday, British police arrested more than 500 people for demonstrating in support of a pro-Palestine group proscribed because of its acts of violence against British military installations. Those arrests amounted to the largest one-day total in the U.K. in a decade. Hours before Prime Minister Albanese's statement promising recognition, some 90,000 pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked traffic on Sydney Harbour Bridge. Their organizers issued four demands—recognition was not one of them. 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During the Syrian civil war, more than 3,000 Palestinian refugees in the country were killed by Syrian government forces, hundreds of them by torture. Nobody blocked the Sydney Harbour Bridge over that. It's Israel's standing as a Western-style state that energizes the movement against it and that is unlikely to change no matter what shifts in protocol Western governments adopt. After all, on October 6, 2023, Gaza was functionally a Palestinian state living alongside Israel. If the pro-Palestinian groups in the West had valued that status, they should have reacted to October 7 with horror, if nothing else for the existential threat that the attacks posed to any Palestinian state-building project. Instead, many in the pro-Palestinian diaspora—and even at the highest levels of Palestinian official life—applauded the terror attacks with jubilant anti-Jewish enthusiasm. 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They are unlikely to succeed. The Hamas terror attacks of October 7 provoked a war of fearsome scale. Almost two years later, the region is almost unrecognizable. Tens of thousands have been killed, and much of Gaza laid to ruin. Almost every known leader of Hamas is dead. Hezbollah has been broken as a military force. The Assad regime in Syria has been toppled and replaced. The United States directly struck Iran, and the Iranian nuclear program seems to have been pushed years backward, if not destroyed altogether. In this world upended, the creative minds of Western diplomacy have concluded that the best way forward is to revert to the Oslo peace process of 30 years ago. The Oslo process ended when the Palestinian leadership walked away from President Bill Clinton's best and final offer without making a counteroffer—and gambled everything on the merciless terrorist violence of the Second Intifada. Now here we are again, after another failed Palestinian terror campaign, and there is only one idea energizing Western foreign ministries: That thing that failed before? Let's try it one more time. But this time, the hope is not to bring peace to the Middle East. They hope instead to bring peace to their own streets. The undertaking is a testament either to human perseverance, or to the eternal bureaucratic faith in peace through fog.
