NATO leaders convened in the Netherlands on Tuesday for a significant two-day summit, aiming to either bring the world’s largest security organization together under a fresh defense spending commitment or potentially deepen rifts among the 32 members.
The participants are expected to support an objective of allocating 5% of their gross domestic product to defense, ensuring the alliance’s readiness to counter external threats. However, Spain has declared it cannot meet this goal, deeming it “unreasonable,” and President Donald Trump has also expressed that the U.S. shouldn’t be obligated to comply.
Slovakia said that it reserves the right to decide how to reach the target by NATO’s new 2035 deadline.
“There’s a challenge with Spain. Spain’s disagreement is quite unfair to the others, frankly,” Trump mentioned to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to the summit.
NATO’s first summit with Trump, in 2018, unraveled due to a dispute over defense spending.
Ahead of the meeting, Britain, France and Germany committed to the 5% goal. Host country the Netherlands is also onboard. Nations closer to the borders of Ukraine, Russia and its ally Belarus had previously pledged to do so.
“We are not living in happy land after the Berlin Wall came down. We are living in much more dangerous times and there are enemies, adversaries who might want to attack us,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said ahead of the summit in The Hague.
“We have to make sure that we defend our beautiful way of life and systems and our values,” he said.
Trump’s first appearance at NATO since returning to the White House was supposed to center on how the U.S. secured the historic military spending pledge from others in the security alliance – effectively bending it to its will.
But the spotlight has shifted to 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.”
Ukraine has also suffered as a result of that conflict. It has created a need for weapons and ammunition that Kyiv desperately wants, and shifted the world’s attention away. Past NATO summits have focused almost entirely on the war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year.
Still, Rutte insisted NATO could manage more than one conflict at a time.
“If we would not be able to deal with … the Middle East, which is very big and commanding all the headlines, and Ukraine at the same time, we should not be in the business of politics and military at all,” he said. “If you can only deal with one issue at a time, that will be that. Then let other people take over.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in The Hague for a series of meetings, despite his absence from a leaders’ meeting aiming to seal the agreement to boost military spending.
It’s a big change since the summit in Washington last year, when the military alliance’s weighty communique included a vow to supply long-term security assistance to Ukraine, and a commitment to back the country “on its irreversible path” to NATO membership.
Zelenskyy’s first official engagement was with Dutch caretaker Prime Minister Dick Schoof at his official residence just across the road from the summit venue.
But in a telling sign of Ukraine’s status at the summit, neither leader mentioned NATO. Ukraine’s bid to join the alliance has been put in deep freeze by Trump.
“Let me be very clear, Ukraine is part of the family that we call the Euro-Atlantic family,” Schoof told Zelenskyy, who in turn said he sees his country’s future in peace “and of course, a part of a big family of EU family.”
Schoof used the meeting to announce a new package of Dutch support to Kyiv including 100 radar systems to detect drones and a move to produce drones for Ukraine in the Netherlands, using Kyiv’s specifications.
The U.S. has made no new public pledges of support to Ukraine since Trump took office six months ago.
Meeting later with Rutte and top EU officials, Zelenskyy appealed for European investment in Ukraine’s defense industry, which can produce weapons and ammunition more quickly and cheaply than elsewhere in Europe.
“No doubt, we must stop (Russian President Vladimir) Putin now and in Ukraine. But we have to understand that his objectives reach beyond Ukraine. European countries need to increase defense spending,” he said. He said that NATO’s new target of 5% of GDP “is the right level.”
He thanked them for their unity in supporting Ukraine, saying: “I think this is the most important thing.”
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