Nato drafts one-page communiqué to suit Trump's attention span

Telegraph

19 hours ago

Donald Trump will be handed a one-page communiqué to sign off at a Nato leaders' summit, in an effort to avoid sparking a row between Europe and the US president, The Telegraph can disclose.
The simplified statement will likely only contain around five or six paragraphs, detailing how the Western military alliance will meet Mr Trump's demand to increase defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP.
The summit in The Hague will also be modelled on a similar leaders gathering in London in 2019, which was deliberately kept short because of the president's attention span.
The one-page communiqué will be almost entirely focused on the historic decision to more than double spending on defence by leaders to meet new capability targets for deterring a Russian invasion.
The Telegraph understands the document will brand Russia as a 'threat' to Nato, as well as offer a nod to the alliance's support for war-torn Ukraine.
But it will strip out any mention of Kyiv's 'irreversible' path to membership, and remove any mention of climate change posing a 'defining challenge' to member states.
Also, there will unlikely be any language accusing China of being a ' decisive enabler ' of Russia's war against Ukraine.
One alliance source said it would be 'focused on the core issues at hand'.
It will be a stark contrast to previous statements issued by Nato leaders after their set-piece annual summit.
At the 2023 summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, the declaration contained 90 paragraphs.
A year later, in Washington, leaders signed off on 44 lines of text, including statements on climate change, Ukraine, Russia, terrorism and the defence industry.
A senior Nato diplomat said: 'We're going to go even shorter this time. A single sheet of paper and it should be five paragraphs long.'
The conciseness of the statement is purely designed to prevent rows from breaking out between Mr Trump and his counterparts in Canada and Europe.
European leaders have been barred from bringing up the issue of trade tariffs, in a further bid to maintain harmony with the president.
The White House chief is known for preferring short, sharp briefings, with his aides deliberately keeping their memos to a single page of A4.
Crackdown on leaking
A Nato source said the drafting process for the annual communiqué of Nato countries had been changed this year by Mark Rutte, the alliance's secretary-general, to make it more secure.
Usually, the document leaks to the media in the final hours of negotiations between member states as the various commitments are agreed by deputy ambassadors and their staff.
But sources close to Nato HQ said Mr Rutte had restricted the distribution list of the communiqué only to ambassadors, in an attempt to prevent it from leaking.
The secretary-general has also cracked down on the 'Christmas tree' approach taken by member states in previous years, when national governments attach their own priorities to the communiqué.
One example given was Spain's insistence at previous summits that the Mediterranean was listed as a key strategic region for Nato.
The Dutch organisers of The Hague summit will also roll out the red carpet for the US president in the hope it keeps him sweet.
There will be a working session solely on defence spending, with leaders huddled around the table.
Mr Trump, a fan of royals, will also be given the opportunity to meet King Willem-Alexander at a dinner hosted by the Dutch monarch the night before the summit.
Interactions between the US president and Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, will also be limited, because of the risk of a public bust-up.
A meeting of the Nato-Ukraine Council, the official body established in Washington, will be held by foreign ministers.
There also won't be any meetings of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, which coordinates Western military aid to Kyiv, or the ' coalition of the willing ', the Anglo-French initiative to police any ceasefire.