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Nato's summit in The Hague is a critical test for the transatlantic alliance

Nato's summit in The Hague is a critical test for the transatlantic alliance

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 When Nato leaders meet for their annual summit in The Hague on Wednesday, June 25, all eyes will be on Donald Trump. Not only is the 47th president of the United States less committed to the alliance than any of his predecessors in Nato’s 76-year history. But he has also joined Israel’s war with Iran, threatened regime change, and then brokered a ceasefire between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Closer to Nato’s borders, he seems long have given up his efforts to end the war in Ukraine.Leaders of Nato’s 32 member states should therefore have a packed agenda. Although there are several meetings and a dinner planned for June 24, the actual summit – which has tended usually to stretch out over several days – has been reduced to a single session and a single agenda item. All of this has been done to accommodate the US president. A single session reduces the risk of Trump walking away from the summit early, as he did at the G7 leaders meeting in Kananaskis, Canada, on June 16.The single item remaining on the agenda is Nato members’ new commitment to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. This is meant to placate Trump who demanded such an increase even before his inauguration in January 2025. The US president, like many of his predecessors, has also frequently complained, and not without justification, that European members of the alliance invest too little in their defence and are over-reliant on the US. A draft summit declaration confirming the new spending target has now been approved.Even accounting for Trump’s notorious unpredictability, this should ensure that Nato will survive the Hague summit intact. What is less clear is whether Nato’s members can rise to the unprecedented challenges that the alliance is facing. These challenges look different from each of the 32 capitals, but for 31 of them, the continued survival of the alliance as an effective security provider is an existential question. Put simply, they need the US, while the US doesn’t necessarily need to be part of the alliance.Symptomatic for this dependence is the capability deficit that Canada and European member states have compared to the US, which was thrown into stark relief by Washington’s airstrikes against Iran over the weekend. This is not simply a question of increasing manpower and equipping troops to fight. European states also lack most of the so-called critical enablers required to prevail in a potential war with Russia, including intelligence capabilities, command and control structures, and heavy-lift aircraft to quickly move troops and equipment. All of these have traditionally been provided by US forces, and they will take significant time and resources to build up should the US pull back from Europe.For now, Russia is tied down in Ukraine, which will buy time. And the 5%-commitment, even if not all member states will get there quickly or at all, is likely to go some way to mobilise the necessary resources for beefing up Europe’s defences. But time and resources are not limitless. And it is not yet clear what the American commitment to Europe will be in the future and when and how it will be reduced.Nor is it completely obvious what kind of war Europe should prepare for. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is both a very traditional war of attrition and a very modern technological showdown. A future confrontation with the Kremlin is initially likely to take the form of a grey-zone conflict, a state of affairs between war and peace in which acts of aggression happen but are difficult to attribute unambiguously and to respond to proportionately.This has arguably already started with Russian attacks on critical infrastructure across Europe. But as the example of Ukraine illustrates, grey-zone conflicts have the potential to escalate to conventional war. In February 2022, Russia saw an opportunity to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence by brute force after and launched a full-scale invasion, hoping to capture Kyiv in a matter of a few days. This turned out to be a gross misjudgement on the Kremlin’s part. And three years on from that, and partly as a consequence of it, the possibility of a nuclear confrontation can no longer be ruled out either — if frequent Russian threats to this effect are to be believed.Key members of the alliance are unequivocal in their assessment of Russia as an existential threat to Europe. This is evident from the UK’s strategic defence review and a new strategy paper for the German armed forces. Yet, it is not a view unanimously shared. Trump’s pro-Putin leanings date back to their now infamous meeting in Helsinki when he sided with the Russian president against his own intelligence services. In Europe, long-term Putin supporters Victor Orban and Robert Fico, the prime ministers of EU and Nato members Hungary and Slovakia, have just announced that they will not support additional EU sanctions against Russia.Hungary and Slovakia are hardly defence ...
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