CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING – The stakes at this week’s NATO summit were sky-high – support for Ukraine, a shoring up of Europe’s defenses, and the viability of the alliance amid a waning U.S. commitment. On that last and arguably most important front, the gathering at The Hague produced surprising results.
By the end of the summit, President Donald Trump’s famous disdain for NATO had morphed into a gush. “This was a tremendous summit,” the president said at a news conference, “I enjoyed it very much.”
Trump spoke in glowing terms about the alliance - “I left here differently,” he said and promised U.S. support for NATO’s Article 5, which compels each member state to respond to an attack against any other, and which he had previously called into question. Trump was also clearly pleased with the summit’s main achievement – a collective pledge by members to contribute 5% of their GDP to defense, something the U.S. president had wanted for years.
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges (Ret.), former Commander of U.S. Army Forces in Europe, told The Cipher Brief that the summit’s “best outcome” was NATO’s success at bringing Trump back into the fold.
“There was a huge sigh of relief in The Hague that he even showed up, Hodges told us. “There was some anxiety about that, or that he might blow it up somehow.”
“He was there, he stayed for the entire thing. He met with President Zelensky. We got an agreement on 5 % [spending]...and then a public affirmation of American commitment to the alliance by the president. That's pretty good.”
“I actually think it went exceptionally well,” said Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, a senior member of the Cyber Initiatives Group and director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It went exceptionally well because NATO Secretary General [Mark] Rutte did a great job corralling the players…and then he did a terrific job managing President Trump and that's no easy feat.”
The costs of placating the U.S. president included hitting that 5% figure, which may be difficult for many members to meet, and a relegating of Ukraine’s concerns to the summit’s back burner.
At The Hague, President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was pleased by what he called a “long and meaningful” meeting with President Trump, and Trump himself acknowledged Ukraine’s “brave battle” in a way he hasn’t done previously. Still, some in Ukraine noted that beyond verbal support from Trump and Rutte, there was little new NATO support for Kyiv.
“The problem for Ukrainians is that we are super tired from so many words,” Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, told The Cipher Brief. He noted that June had been one of the worst months of the war in terms of civilian deaths, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been “emboldened” by a failure of the U.S. to hold Moscow accountable. “We want to see concrete results,” Goncharenko said. “We want this war to end as soon as possible.”
“The NATO allies made some brutal and to some extent also cynical trade-offs,” Liana Fix, a Europe expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Cipher Brief. “They wanted the summit to be a success for Donald Trump and to be about defense spending to secure their own security in the long term. It was not designed to be about Ukraine.”
A Trump surprise
President Trump’s pivot didn’t just help with the atmospherics at The Hague. For the moment at least, it means that a bitter and dangerous NATO-U.S. rift has been mended.
Trump has mused out loud about ending U.S. financial and military commitments to NATO. Last week, he said he saw no reason for the U.S. to meet the very 5% spending target he had pushed for – “I don’t think we should,” he said – and on the eve of the summit he refused to commit to U.S. support for Article 5. It “depends on your definition,” he said.
All that seemed like rear-view-mirror material by the time the summit wrapped at The Hague. Rutte’s pre-summit flattering of Trump – including a leaked private message in which he praised the U.S. strikes against Iran and told the president he was “flying into another big success in The Hague” – seemed to have had the desired effect. Trump praised Rutte and the alliance, took credit for the spending pledges, and sought to put to rest any doubts about Washington’s Article 5 commitments. “I stand with it. That’s why I’m here,” Trump said when asked to clarify his position. “If I didn’t stand with it, I wouldn’t be here.”
That full-throated support allowed for a final summit communiqué that included a reaffirmation of the “ironclad commitment to collective defense as enshrined in Article 5.”
“It was important that the president affirmed it very strongly, clearly and publicly,” Lt. Gen. Hodges told us.
“Donald Trump committed to Article 5, but European NATO members paid a high price for that,” Fix said. “The whole summit was about offering 5% to Donald Trump, flattering him and making sure that he stays in the alliance. Of course, it's also in the interest of European NATO allies to increase their defense spending, but they would have never come up with this 5% target. That was specifically for Donald Trump, and it worked.”
Rutte also managed to achieve near consensus among the NATO members – 32 of them – with the exception of Spain – committed to the 5 % ask; ultimately it was split into 3.5 % for core military elements – troops, missiles, ammunition – and another 1.5 percent for “militarily adjacent” spending that nations may devote to infrastructure and cybersecurity.
That drew praise from Rear Adm. Montgomery, who had advocated for the additional commitment.
“What I really loved about this was the 1.5 %,” he said. “This is about getting cyber right and critical infrastructure protection right.”
Beyond the detailed spending targets, experts saw value in the unified message put forth at the summit, given recent transatlantic tensions.
“The degree to which the alliance acts in a unified voice, utilizes consensus, agrees on broad positions, that's a win for the alliance and a big defeat for Putin,” Admiral James Stavridis, a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, told The Cipher Brief.
The skeptics – and the hurdles ahead
For all the post-summit cheering, there was also skepticism about the implementation of the new 5 % commitments.
While Poland and the Baltic states are already spending nearly 5% of their GDP on defense, other NATO members hover close to 2% and will face political and economic challenges in meeting the new targets. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez refused to sign on, saying his country would spend 2.1 percent of its GDP on defense, “no more, no less.” Slovakia and Belgium pledged to meet the target but said it would be difficult to do.
Experts noted that in the push to placate President Trump, NATO’s European members had agreed to more than double their military spending at a time when many are already struggling to balance their budgets. Politically, these governments – particularly those in Western Europe, where the Russia threat is less palpable – may have trouble convincing their constituents that military spending should spike at the expense of outlays for social programs.
“To what extent will populists in Europe make defense spending a topic?” asked Fix. “Do they come up with claims like, ‘Why should we spend for defense just to please Donald Trump? We could spend for social welfare and make a deal with Russia.’”
Then there is the timetable.
The NATO communique calls for members to meet their 5% target by 2035. Experts and some intelligence agencies have warned that while Russia’s military and economy have been weakened, new Russian threats to Europe may arise within three to five years of an end of the Ukraine war.
Hodges and Montgomery both said they were disappointed by the long timeline. The Ukrainian president did too.
“This is slow,” Zelensky said of the NATO timeline. “We believe starting in 2030, Putin can have significantly greater capabilities. Today, Ukraine is holding him up, he has no time to drill the army.”
Finally, there is the question of how the money will be spent. As The Cipher Brief has reported, European defense production has often been slowed or thwarted by continent-wide regulations. And while overall defense strategy and standards have been set by NATO commanders, national military budgets and planning are decided by individual nations. Experts stressed the need for NATO’s European members to spend their 5% in a strategic and coordinated fashion.
“The most important thing, of course, is capability,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said. “Do we have the actual capability to do what we're supposed to do? Because that's what will deter the Russians, not a sign on the board that says, Hey, we're at 3.5 percent. You know, it's real capability, units that are properly trained, fully manned, that have lots of ammunition, aircraft that fly and ships that sail. That's got to be the focus.”
Ukraine on the “back burner”
Russia’s full-scale of invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the catalyst for a unified NATO front that had eluded the alliance since the end of the Cold War. This week, with the focus on NATO’s overall defense spending, the recent strikes against Iran, and the wish to please President Trump, support for Ukraine took a back seat.
The good news for Ukraine came in the 50-minute meeting Trump held with Zelensky on the summit’s sidelines. Trump spoke of the bravery of Ukrainians and said he would consider providing more Patriot missiles to Ukraine to counter Russian air strikes. "We are going to see if we can make some of them available," Trump said. He also did not reject the idea of approving more U.S. military aid to Kyiv.
But there were no fresh commitments from NATO, only a general pledge of “continued support” for Ukraine. The communiqué made no promise of Ukraine’s future membership in the alliance, which was taken as another concession to Trump, who opposes inviting Ukraine to join NATO. And Fix noted that NATO did not publish a Russia strategy at the summit, presumably over a concern that the U.S. would object – given the Trump administration’s refusal to recognize Russia as the aggressor in the Ukraine war.
“This is my biggest disappointment from this summit, that Ukraine was put on a back burner,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said. “I'm glad that President Zelensky showed up, that he was invited and that he attended. I'm glad that President Trump met with President Zelensky…and he was more positive about Ukraine than I'd heard from him in quite some time. But I had hoped that this summit would be another affirmation by the alliance that we're going to do everything we can to help Ukraine.”
Goncharenko and other members of the Ukrainian parliament were particularly exasperated by the Trump administration’s rationale for not imposing fresh sanctions against Russia. Trump threatened such sanctions following Russia’s recent military strikes and Putin’s intransigence at the negotiating table, but on the eve of the summit, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said sanctions were off the table for now.
“If we come in and crush them with more sanctions, we probably lose our ability to talk to them,” Rubio said.
“I really can't understand it,” Goncharenko said. “So, in the case of Iran, to make them go to the negotiating table, their nuclear facilities were crushed by American bombing. And it looks like it worked, at least it looks like that for the moment. In the case of Russia, they say, if we crush them, we will lose the possibility to negotiate. I can't understand.”
Goncharenko argued that the opposite would be a more logical approach. “If you want to have Russia at the negotiating table with seriousness, you need to crush them first,” he said. “They don't understand any language except the language of strength.”
Montgomery was more hopeful – for Ukraine and for Europe’s overall posture toward Russia.
“The Hague 2025 will be remembered as where there was a true commitment to deterring Russia, and if necessary, defeating them if they were to invade a NATO state,” Montgomery told us. “And the 5 percent is certainly part of it, but the language, the direction, the focus, the crawling back of the United States, all that happened at this summit.”
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