All About Trump: the 2025 NATO Hague Summit

The main objective for NATO at the Hague Summit was to placate Trump and in doing so avoid the fallout that Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky was subjected to in the Oval Office. Evaluated on this narrow – but important – goal then the Summit was a success. However, it has exposed deeper problems for the Alliance.

NATO is at risk of succumbing to the whims of US politics and becoming totally consumed by internal management crises, rather than focusing on growing external security threats. The July 2024 Washington Summit was designed solely to maximise the chances of Joe Biden’s re-election. The Alliance delivered, providing a well-choreographed opportunity for a 75th anniversary celebration, but Biden sealed his own fate – referring to President Zelensky as ‘President Putin’ during the closing press conference. One year on, the Hague Summit was a similarly choreographed kow-tow to Trump and US leadership of the Alliance for fear of causing an upset. The self-described ‘strongest alliance in history’ has reduced itself to the total subservience of a single man. In doing so, the Europeans have eroded that little deterrence value they had in the eyes of their principal enemy – President Putin. Putin only fears attacking US forces in Europe, making the expected drawdown of the US military from the continent a strategic risk for NATO and an opportunity for Russia who will seek to exploit gaps.

The Alliance must proceed with caution. Its disastrous involvement in Afghanistan – both the initial invasion in 2001 and the huge expansion of the mission in 2006 – was borne about by trying to please a US President. It represented the largest individual and collective military failure since the Cold War and significantly reduced European militaries’ abilities to deter and defend against Russia after prosecuting years of crisis management operations.

The Summit

The consequence of placating Trump is the continual diminishing of expectations for Leaders summits – precisely when those summits need to be more ambitious. The main plenary session was reduced to just two and a half hours to accommodate Trump, giving each ally less than five minutes airtime each. Furthermore, the government of the Netherlands estimates that the cost of the most expensive summit thus far will be €183.4 million – or €1.2 million per minute – making it a serious contender for being the most expensive meeting ever held anywhere in the world. There was a forming view amongst expert attendees at the summit that the money and effort could have been better spent.

The communique is short and the key decision reaffirms an ‘ironclad’ commitment to Article V. The fact that this was even doubtful shows the precarious position that NATO is in. There was no mention of China whereas last year’s Washington Summit made substantial collective progress in this area and directly called China out as a ‘decisive enabler’ of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The promised NATO ‘Russia Strategy’ has quietly been dropped. Moreover, there was no mention of the growing anti-NATO partnerships that Russia and China are developing with Iran and North Korea. The most productive discussions were hosted by think tanks on the side-lines.

The biggest loser was Ukraine. After securing the hard-fought limelight of consecutive summits since 2022 – Madrid, Vilnius and Washington – Kyiv is fading fast from the Alliance agenda. The inconvenient truth is that NATO timidity towards Ukraine since 2008 – and especially since 2022 – has backed the Alliance into a corner. Apart from a formal invitation to join, the Alliance has nothing of value left to offer Ukraine. Subsequent support will continue to be led through bilateral member state contributions and coalitions of the willing.

The positive of this narrow agenda was the ability to agree a new defence spending target of 5% of GDP on defence: with 3.5% allocated to hard capabilities, and a further 1.5% on security related spending including infrastructure and cyber security, by 2035. Yet, Rutte at a speech in London just 2 weeks ago warned that ‘Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years’. Within defence planning the most important time is ‘H Hour’ – the point when you expect to be in combat. NATO cannot wait to deliver and thus train on new capabilities ahead of when they might be needed. As a national task this is hard. As part of an Alliance, it makes interoperability incredibly difficult. Germany obviously did not get the memo and has pledged to meet the target in 2029 – the date when its intelligence service believes it may be at war with Russia – making it a significant European leader for rearmament.

Pandora’s Box

The new spending target was long signalled. The surprise was the eleventh-hour exemption request by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, arguing that Spain could make its capability targets without such a spending hike. While allies are rightly furious, Spain should be commended for having the bravery to stand up to Trump and be honest and realistic about what is achievable within the timeframe. Moreover, Sanchez put a sound argument forward for NATO to measure outputs and outcomes, rather than a crude financial input metric.

In a responding letter, Rutte stated that Spain would have ‘the flexibility to determine its own sovereign path for reaching the Capability Target goal and the annual resources necessary as a share of GDP’. This caused a serious amount of confusion for all at the Summit and then Rutte backtracked, saying ‘NATO has no opt-out and NATO doesn't know side deals’. It was still not clear at the end of the summit what precisely had been agreed, or the expectations on Spain.

The possible willingness to accept carve outs sets a dangerous precedent and could open a Pandora’s box of further exemptions. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, while agreeing to the summit communique said that his country would not meet the 5% target. Belgium hinted at following Spain’s lead on a possible exemption. Across NATO member countries, many governments are facing a rise of insurgent parties and calls for special measures will likely grow and will create far more challenging management for NATO and national governments as more and more money is taken away from other spending priorities to fun defence.

‘Opt-outs’ are nothing new in European security. France withdrew from NATO’s Integrated Command Structure in 1966, before recommitting in 2009. Denmark, until recently, had secured an opt-out for the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy, which it reversed after 2022 via referendum. Yet, these were done for geopolitical and strategic reasons, not because of financial pressures, which every ally shares.

What is remarkable about the Spanish case is that Madrid did not offer anything significant in return. Spain could – and should – have made enhancements to its Forward Land Forces presence in Latvia, or promised to deploy more of its 317 modern main battle tanks East, or enhanced its Baltic Air Policing mission. More worryingly, it seems the NATO Secretary General didn’t even ask for concessions.

The result is that certain NATO members will feel there is a deal to be done on capability targets and these pressures will only increase as the deadline nears. This makes the new 5% defence spending target feel advisory, rather than mandatory, and something to get through the summit without much thought to the consequences.

NATO First

The summit capped off a busy month for UK defence and security. It started with the long-awaited publication of the Strategic Defence Review which committed the UK to a ‘NATO first’ approach in how it plans, thinks and acts. A new UK National Security Strategy – designed to bring together various security reviews together – was formally unveiled at the summit. The UK has much to do to prepare the UK for war and it still has ambitious national security goals. Unsurprisingly the big question remains – how is all of this to be paid for?

In February, the Prime Minister committed to increasing defence spending to 2.5% by 2027. Getting to 3% by the next Parliament formally remains an ‘ambition’ with the vague caveat of ‘when fiscal conditions allow’. However, Sir Keir Starmer has now signed the UK up to the new 5% NATO target requiring an extra £40 billion annually with no costed plan on how to achieve it. Furthermore, in 2025 the UK signed up to all bar one of its new NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP) capability targets, which would require the UK to be spending 3.6% of GDP from now to meet them. The NDPP is effectively accumulative which will cause further funding shortfalls in the future and make meeting its NATO capability targets extremely hard. The UK is already towards the bottom of the NDPP progress reports, and the government is being disingenuous to suggest that all is harmonious between UK capability targets and NATO.

The UK must go further. Having adopted the new spending target the UK should legislate to realise its NATO-first thinking. The government should write NATO spending targets into UK law, with a legal requirement to meet them, akin to the commitment to achieve Net Zero by 2050. This would significantly boost UK standing within the Alliance and demonstrate the leadership credentials it craves.

Storing up Problems for Later

NATO managed to conclude the summit with a new agreed spending target and avoided a transatlantic fallout. This obviously should be commended. But has NATO paid too high a price? Trump obviously enjoyed the attention and will likely attend three more NATO summits which will create very high expectations on NATO members. The real worry is that NATO will be unable to keep up the hype, leading to reduced US focus and attention anyway. European NATO members are totally unprepared for this scenario and the Hague summit proved it.

© RUSI, 2025.

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