When the NATO summit convenes in The Hague on June 24–25, it will do so in the long shadow of bunker-buster bombs dropped on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the shortened shadow of U.S. strategic patience. In a gathering already marked by fissures over defense spending, alliance credibility, and war fatigue, Washington’s sudden escalation in the Middle East adds a volatile ingredient to an already unstable mix.
The United States’ preemptive strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan on June 21 may have been militarily precise, but diplomatically, they detonated deep uncertainty within the alliance. While NATO officials hurried to declare that they were “monitoring” the Iran situation, the silence was deafening – especially from European allies who, only hours ago, were trying to prevent further regional conflagration.
And yet this is not simply about Iran. Nor just about Ukraine. It is, at its core, about NATO itself – its direction, purpose, and, above all, its dependence on the whims of one increasingly dominant voice: Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump has compressed the summit’s agenda into a narrow three-hour window on June 25 and reportedly reduced its final statement to five paragraphs. But the brevity masks neither the scale of the tensions nor the expanding gap between NATO’s founding ideal of collective security and its present trajectory of strategic ambiguity.
Consider the core issue on the table: military spending. Trump wants a 5% GDP threshold from every NATO member – a demand that many European leaders consider fantastical if not extortionate. Spain, the alliance’s most vocal dissenter, has already declared the proposal “unreasonable and counterproductive,” and capped its own military expenditure at 2.1%. Germany, Belgium, and even the UK have balked at the pace or scale of the increase, preferring either a more drawn-out timeline or broader spending categories that would allow for creative accounting.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has floated a compromise – 3.5% for direct military spending and 1.5% for “security-related infrastructure” by 2032. But this semantic sleight-of-hand is unlikely to conceal the reality that much of Europe simply cannot or will not meet Trump’s terms, however they are reframed.
Yet Trump’s diktats on spending are less about deterrence than dominance. His vision of NATO is transactional: pay up, or pack up. In this sense, Trump is less a president than a bill collector in a bomber jacket – demanding dues while threatening to yank the security umbrella if payments are deemed insufficient.
That posture has already produced diplomatic casualties. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky – once the face of Western unity against Russian aggression – has been relegated to the margins of the summit. Not only will Ukraine be omitted from the final joint statement, but Zelensky himself is reportedly barred from participating in the main discussion, allowed only at a ceremonial dinner. There will be no new commitments to his country’s NATO membership, nor serious debate over sustained military aid. Kyiv has, quite literally, been disinvited from the NATO table.
Why? Because Trump no longer sees Ukraine’s security as essential to American interests. As Politico has reported, the White House’s logic is simple: endless support for Kyiv is a liability, not a legacy. That approach, dubbed “strategic flexibility,” echoes past U.S. behavior – Pakistan and India in 1965, or even Vietnam in the early ’70s – where alliances were calibrated less by principle than by power projection.
So while European leaders may claim the summit is about unity, the real currency in The Hague is strategic drift. For Eastern European states like Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland – geographically closer to Russia and more eager to meet Trump’s spending demands – the summit is about survival. For Western Europe, it is about managing decline: of influence, cohesion, and policy alignment.
The irony, of course, is that NATO’s eastward expansion, long cited as a cause for Russian belligerence, is now being de-emphasized to preserve internal harmony. Ukraine’s NATO hopes have been indefinitely shelved, not because of Russian pressure, but because of American indifference.
Meanwhile, the sudden American escalation in Iran has thrust the Middle East – long a peripheral concern for NATO – into the center of summit discourse. Though officially off the agenda, Iran will loom over every conversation, especially as anti-NATO protests swell in The Hague. Demonstrators carrying banners such as “No Iran War” and “Peace, Not NATO” have made clear that Europe’s civil society is far less enthusiastic about this alliance than its leaders.
The political optics are equally fraught. With Trump attending only a single session and South Korea, Australia, and Japan cancelling side meetings due to the compressed schedule, NATO’s credibility as a multilateral platform has taken a beating. The summit is being rebranded as a high-cost, low-yield theatrical performance with a €183 million price tag and only one actor commanding the stage.
And therein lies NATO’s existential dilemma. The alliance was born to counterbalance the Soviet Union but survived the Cold War by reinventing itself as a liberal security community. Today, it resembles neither. It is too divided to act as a unified military bloc and too hierarchical to function as a genuine collective. Its declarations speak of cohesion, but its conduct reveals coercion – mostly from Washington.
Europe’s reluctant militarization, prodded by both Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s demands, may produce more tanks and missiles, but it won’t solve the core problem: a NATO increasingly defined by the personality of a single leader rather than the pluralism of its members. As the U.S. tilts away from multilateralism and treats NATO as a protection racket, its European allies must ask whether they are paying for security or surrendering sovereignty.
In The Hague, amid barbed smiles and shortened meetings, the real conversations will happen offstage: What is NATO now? What is it for? And can an alliance held together by fear – of Russia, of Iran, and of Trump – offer anything resembling peace?
Or will it merely stumble forward, dressed in old rhetoric, armed with new budgets, and increasingly unmoored from the world it once claimed to defend?
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