NATO Summit: Placating a loud, bullying, dumb and embarrassing uncle.

European leaders call Putin a bully – and tell the Ukrainians that they need to stand up to him. But in The Hague last week, they themselves readily submitted to another bully - Donald Trump. Why?

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

When West European politicians and media celebrate last week’s NATO summit as a success - because Donald Trump did not blow a fuse - it is time to realize that we have collectively lost the plot. Never mind our dignity.

“[Trump] has to get credit for the 5% spending target — that's why we're having the summit,” one unnamed European defense official told Politico. Read that again, please. Thousands of adults - prime ministers, presidents, the highest-ranking government officials, media - travel thousands of kilometers to keep one old, orange man happy. This is international politics anno 2025. Not 1725 or 1825, but 2025.

And by the way, if you think that comparing the U.S. President to an unpleasant, bullying uncle is me being clever or sarcastic (perish the thought), how about Mark Rutte, NATO’s General Secretary, calling Trump ‘Daddy’? In public. “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language,” the NATO General Secretary, himself in fact an adult man of 58, said adoringly, sharing a stage with Daddy Trump.

(Headlines hailing Trump’s victory in NATO from The Guardian/Wall Street Journal/New York Times and CNN)

It is astonishing how we – politicians and media – have by now gotten so used to the unprecedented and unpresidential, disrespectful behavior of this U.S. President. To the extent that it was celebrated by the media last week that Trump, at the summit press conference, all of a sudden was nice and pleasant to a Ukrainian journalist - or ‘normal’ as most people would consider it - asking about her family and her husband at the front. Breaking News!, ‘Read all about it!’, ‘Trump does not sh.. on journalist!’

I have seen many commentators claiming that ‘sucking up’ to the (Sun) King can sometimes be necessary to reach your goal – an agreement, an alliance, a ceasefire, peace etc. Sadly, as a long-time student of international relations, I cannot dispute that.

But, and this is where the chain has fallen off, we – Europe, including Ukraine – got nothing out of the summit.

It is like the humiliation of sucking up to a loud, dumb, embarrassing and aggressive uncle – in the hope that he will not bully family members at the annual get-together. As he normally does. But you know that even if he doesn’t do it today, he will do it tomorrow. It is his modus operandi. It is what he knows.

So, we sucked up all we could, humiliated ourselves, in the hope of keeping Uncle Donald interested in European security and avoiding that he cut off aid to Ukraine: but – and this is the crux of the matter - there is zero guarantee that Uncle Donald won’t change his mind. Again. Again. I am not stating this out of personal dislike for the American buffoon, not only, but because the way Trump thinks about (a big word in this connection) and acts in international relations should have shown us that his U.S. is not a reliable partner for us. Nor for Ukraine. Because at the end of the day, the Ukrainians are the ones who will suffer most from the antics of Uncle Donald.

‘But’, I hear you protest, ‘at the summit, an important agreement was reached, namely that NATO member states will be spending five percent of their GDP on defense. Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that going to help us to defend ourselves and Ukraine against Russia?’

Sorry folk, but this five percent nonsense is total BS. ‘Bad theater’, as Chekhov said.

Four points:

1) Five percent of GDP - a totally random target

Let me make myself clear: Donald Trump’s claim - using Eisenhower’s words - that Europe is taking the U.S. for a sucker - is fair. 80 years after the Second World War ended, it does seem ridiculously unbalanced and unfair that the U.S. accounts for 68 percent of NATO spending ($916 billion), according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The alliance’s European member countries made up just 28 percent. Mr. Trump has threatened to weaken American support for European security if allies do not shoulder more of the costs.

But the five percent tag itself illustrates perfectly how immature and random this whole placating-Trump farce is: Uncle Donald simply grabbed the five percent level - unilaterally disposing of the previous agreed target of two percent - out of thin air one afternoon in early January 2025 when he happened to be angry with Western Europe. Or bored at Mar-a-Lago, waiting to waltz back into the White House. Or? Who knows? These days, nobody - not in his team, not in the media, not even among the Democrats much - seems to ask Uncle Donald for reasoning or logic behind his ‘policies’.

Not to go all Marxist here, but this critic of the 5% poses some rather relevant questions, doesn’t he?

“There is no rationale behind the 5 percent target or details on why threats to NATO have so drastically increased…. Russia has increased military spending, but it still spends 10 times less than NATO. Nor could it catch up militarily with NATO’s 32-strong alliance, given its economy: $2 trillion in 2024 (nominal GDP), compared with $26 trillion for non-US NATO countries and $29 trillion for the US alone.”

It should be known by now, that that is the sad way the President of the United States of America operates these days. Like standing in front of a casino table and, as a spur of the moment kind of thing, going for red instead of black. Because you can always go back in the next round. It’s just a game at a casino, dude.

So, Uncle Donald thundered “FIVE percent!” And the European leaders are playing along, to keep vile Uncle Donald happy, appeased.

But nobody has explained to us - the citizens and taxpayers - why 5? Why not 4 or 17?

At the summit last week, the allies promised each other that by 2035 they will be spending 3,5 percent of their GDP on ‘hard defense’, the core military needs, and1,5 percent on a looser category of ‘defence-related’ investments such as infrastructure and cybersecurity.

But here is the thing: if there is one thing that we should have learned from the war in Ukraine, it is that the technological development is now going so fast that it is difficult to imagine, never mind plan much ahead. And most certainly, that traditional – and 100 times more expensive – hardware has been made very vulnerable by the explosion in drone warfare (pardon the pun). Last night, I talked to a drone developer in Kyiv, and he told me that ‘a generation’ in the world of drones is now 8 or 9 months. Drones that cost a few hundred dollars now allow you to hit behind enemy lines, hit critical supplies for the attackers, like the gasoline supply, for example - rendering more traditional military equipment, costing millions and millions, useless.

So when the Spanish prime minister, before the summit, questioned the validity of using GDP as a benchmark – Trump just flat out demanding 5% - by pointing out that “Capabilities are paid for with euros, not GDP percentages,” he seems to have a point. As the commentator Jamie Shea ( a former high-ranking NATO official) added: “What the Spanish have said is that there's been too much talk about money and not enough about capabilities.”

In fact, just a few months before he became chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, was questioning whether Trump should be taken so literally: “The 2, 3 or 5 percent are basically irrelevant”, Merz said in January. “What matters is that we do what is necessary to defend ourselves.”

The American economist, Cullen S. Hendrix, from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, ads another factor:

“I agree [with Trump]. NATO should be doing more in terms of defense. But spending under duress and on capital-intensive US weapons systems, satisfying Trump’s desire to reduce US trade deficits is - not obviously the right way to go. The war in Ukraine has provided many lessons, including that conventional military might - air superiority fighters, naval cruisers, and tanks - can be counterbalanced by smaller forces using asymmetric tactics and combining some conventional capabilities with comparatively inexpensive, civilian tech-based drones.”

If anybody still hasn’t caught up, on June 1, Ukraine – with its so-called ‘Spiderweb’ attack on five airfields thousands of kilometers inside Russia - demonstrated that the balance has shifted away from traditional warfare: “Using drones produced indigenously for less than the cost of an iPhone, Ukraine took out strategic bombers worth upward of $100 million each.”

‘Asymmetric warfare’ on speed. For once, the word ‘game changer’ is justified. And on that background, it seems misplaced and overblown when the (strongly pro-Ukrainian) Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen recently exclaimed “I have only one message to the Danish chief of defense: Buy, buy, buy.”

Experts warn that there is a real danger of inefficient haste-buying, but also that by just chucking a set amount of money after the problem, and fast!, we run the risk – as the old adage goes – of making plans to win the last war. Which is, of course, exactly what Putin thought that he was going to do in February 2022.

Politicians bowing down to Uncle Donald and promising to spend five percent willy-nilly are disrespecting the people who are paying their salaries and the budgets they play around with.

“The priority is really to announce success in The Hague,” an anonymous European official told Politico, as the important guests were gathering. “The longer-term perspective is less important.”

You what?, the taxpayer is shouting. (Or will be soon.)

2) Five percent = promises, promises, promises…

The NATO communique had not even been handed out to the press, before several countries let it be known that they were opting out of the five percent spending promise.

Spain openly and loudly opted out of the five percent – “That level of spending would be incompatible with our Welfare State and our vision of the world,” explained Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

This made an angry Uncle Donald threaten to punish Madrid hard. “We're negotiating with Spain on a trade deal and we're going to make them pay twice as much - and I'm actually serious about that,” Trump said.

In general, says Rachel Ellehuus, director of the think tank RUSI, when it comes to spending, NATO splits according to geography:

“It’s the allies who are closer to the threat from Russia in the north and the east of the alliance who are spending more and as we get down to southern allies, the spending tends to go to 2%, if not lower,” Ellehuus told the BBC.

Following soon after Spain, both Belgium and Slovakia made it clear that they will not be reaching anywhere near five percent by 2035. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico made it clear that his country “has other priorities in the coming years than armament.”

“The only European countries with public finances that allow them to aim for this [five percent] target are Germany, Poland, and the Baltic and Nordic countries,” said François Heisbourg, senior adviser for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies to Politico.

“Everyone knows that France, Belgium, the U.K., Spain and Italy are absolutely not in a position to keep this type of commitment.”

Let’s not forget that Trump, on the campaign trail in 2024, suggested that, if a NATO ally underspent on defense, the U.S. would not provide military support in case of a Russian attack. “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they [Russia] want,” he said. “You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple.”

3) And the loser is…. Ukraine. Again.

For months before the summit, U.S. officials were working to squeeze Ukraine off the agenda. Trump did not want it there.

But, nevertheless, in the weeks up to the summit, NATO’ General Secretary - him of ‘Daddy' Donald - worked hard to convince the media, and not least the Ukrainians, that, as Rutte put it “[in the communique,] you will see important language about Ukraine, including connecting the defence spending, up to 2035 to Ukraine, and the need for Ukraine to stay in the fight.”

In the end, the NATO communique literally mentioned Ukraine twice, see below. And if you can spot “the important language” that Rutte promised, you know where to reach me, thanks.

4) Uncle Donald is utterly unreliable = sucking up to him is pointless

And then, despite all the sycophancy, when Uncle Donald, literally on his way to the summit, was asked whether he would abide by Nato’s article 5 guarantee - that says that if one member of the alliance is attacked, it is considered an attack on all - he answered:

“Depends on your definition - there’s numerous definitions of article 5, you know that, right? But I’m committed to being their friends.”

The fact is that Uncle Donald, for almost a decade, has been considering how to get the U.S. out of the alliance. And, furthermore, that President Trump simply - there really is no other way of putting this - does not take NATO seriously. The U.S. President does not understand what the alliance is, its history, or the obligations it entails:

This is a U.S. President who did not know the difference between the Baltics and the Balkans, who was surprised when told that Finland is an independent country, and who, after he was elected the first time, had to have article 5 of NATO - sort of the whole fcuking point, you might say - explained to him. Whose staff has basically stopped briefing him on foreign affairs, because he cannot concentrate long enough to read the briefings.

These and many more funny = frightening ‘episodes’ can be found in the magnificent book ‘The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021’, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

In 2023, Glasser predicted that “if Trump is elected, Article 5 is effectively dead for practical purposes.”

“If you have a President of the United States who says: ‘Why would I go to war for Lithuania? Or Estonia? Or Latvia?’” Or Greece? Glasser laughs. “I don’t think Donald Trump would be going to war for America, never mind for Greece… He couldn’t find Greece on the map.”

A brilliant recent piece in the New Yorker tells the story about how Trump carefully avoided endorsing NATO’s Article 5 in his speech during his first visit to NATO as president back in 2017. Trump called it “unfair” that many NATO members were not even hitting the two percent mark. At a campaign rally, he had said “We’re protecting countries that most of the people in this room have never even heard of.”

So, you tell me, please, how much you believe in Uncle Donald and article 5?

Now, imagine that you are a soldier from Ukraine; many millions of Ukrainians have had to flee their homes, hundreds of thousands have been killed and injured, maybe 20 or 30,000 children have been kidnapped to Russia. But western politicians, generals and military trainers, experts and pundits - are telling/asking Ukrainians to continue fighting the Russian invaders. ‘Trust us, we will provide you with weapons’, ‘for a long as it takes’ etc etc.

In other words, European leaders call Putin a bully – and tell the Ukrainians that they need to stand up to him. But in The Hague last week they themselves readily submitted to another bully - Donald Trump.