Nato seeks to ‘Trump-proof' summit

Business Times

4 hours ago

NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte hosts from Tuesday (Jun 24) the alliance's annual summit in The Netherlands. As much as a celebration of Western unity, the occasion has assumed one overriding purpose – trying to ensure the event is 'Trump-proofed'.
So, although the summit will see more than 30 heads of state and government attending, from countries with a collective population of around one billion, there will be an unprecedented focus on one person: US President Donald Trump.
Coming in the context of the US bombing of three nuclear weapon development sites in Iran over the weekend, Nato officials are determined to avoid a repeat of the alliance's 2018 summit in Brussels.
Trump upended the meeting then by threatening to withdraw the US from the alliance altogether, if other countries did not get more serious about reaching the 2 per cent of gross domestic product military spending benchmark they had agreed to some four years earlier.
His disruption led to what may have been one of the most remarkable ever of Nato's summits, with cancellations of a series of press conferences and bilateral meetings. He not only criticised Nato colleagues in Belgium, but then went on days later to have a very cordial meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
Fast forward to June 2025 and Trump, back again in White House, is now demanding that Nato allies agree to a target to increase spending to 5 per cent of GDP. This even though the US' own defence spending is around 3.4 per cent of GDP at present, and some key nations including Italy – led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a close ally of Trump – are still barely meeting the original 2 per cent target.
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While a number of countries, including Spain, are likely to raise significant concerns this week about the 5 per cent target, the Nato summit has been designed by Rutte to try to give Trump a victory lap. That is because the summit will underline that the debate over defence spending within Nato has changed significantly in recent years since Trump's first presidency from 2017 to 2021.
Rutte will have Trump much on his mind throughout the meeting. This especially after the G7 summit earlier this month in Canada, which the US president left early on Jun 16, ahead of the last day of meetings.
One of the key implications of this serenading of Trump is, inevitably, that Europe and Canada will eventually carry more of the burden for their own defence. This will give these countries greater influence within the alliance and lead, ultimately, to an overall Europeanisation of Nato, which appears to be supported by Trump.
Yet, while Trump has helped influence the debate towards greater military spending within Nato, there are much broader factors that have been pushing European and Canadian increases in defence budgets. Here, it is a combination of Russian military assertiveness, instability in the Middle East and Africa – not just Trump – that has driven this trend.
More than anything else, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 altered defence calculations for Europe. It was a wake-up call for much of the region, which recognised that whereas Russia is estimated to have increased defence spending by some 80 per cent between 2008 and 2014, the counterpart figure for Nato countries collectively was a decrease of around 20 per cent.
This stark reality has not only pushed more European countries to meet the 2 per cent threshold. It also prompted Sweden and Finland, after decades of neutrality, to join the Nato alliance.
Yet, despite these movements that Trump has welcomed, there is no guarantee the US will stay in Nato during his second presidency.
Former Trump officials, including ex-national security adviser John Bolton, have confirmed that the president came close to announcing US withdrawal from Nato during his first term. Despite the strength of the other Nato members, there is no question that a US withdrawal would be a body blow to its future credibility.
Behind the scenes, there is scenario planning going on in Europe about the feasibility of a future Nato without US participation. It is possible that the Western alliance could try to keep the military organisation functional for a few years, in the hope that Trump's successor might bring the US back into the fold from 2029.
Even if the US under Trump can be kept within the alliance, this upcoming Europeanisation of Nato could in any case herald a new phase in the more-than-75-year history of what is perhaps the world's most successful ever military alliance.
It helped the West to not only win the Cold War, but also underpinned the longest period of sustained peace in modern history, with a combined membership accounting for around half of global GDP.
So, the good news for Rutte is that the context for the debate about the organisation's future is more positive now than during Trump's first term. Only in 2019 there was widespread concern about Nato's purpose, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying that it had become 'brain dead' as a result of a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape, especially the diminished commitment of the US under Trump.
This also fuelled splits within the European alliance itself, as illustrated by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is one of Putin's strongest supporters in the European Union. He has also voiced opposition to Nato's growing focus on China.
Fast forward to today, and Macron has said that Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine has woken up Nato with the 'worst of electroshocks'. Moving to the future, there will be multiple further ways in which Rutte is likely to try to 'Trump-proof' the evolution of the alliance and mobilise the membership onto greater effectiveness.
Take the example of seeking to grow the club's geographical footprint outside of Europe and North America. This year, top officials from key Western allies in Asia-Pacific – including Australia, Japan and South Korea – have been invited to the summit. Nato has low-level partnerships with all of these allies, building from those bilateral ones that members like the US, UK and France have in the region.
Taken overall, Rutte will use the summit to showcase his view that the best way to engage the second Trump presidency is to transform the alliance, including increasing defence spending. While Nato has been given important strategic direction in a rapidly changing security environment under Rutte's leadership, the reforms may still not fully satisfy Trump, who could yet have significant continued concerns about whether the alliance is fit for purpose.
The writer is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics