THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday wrapped up participation in the annual NATO summit, a gathering notable this year for an atmosphere that was far chummier toward Trump than the tension-filled meetings of his first term.
After less than 24 hours on the ground in the Netherlands, the Republican president headed back to Washington after securing a major policy change he's pushed for since 2017 as most NATO countries, except Spain, agreed to significantly increase their defense spending. He has complained that the U.S. shoulders too much of the burden.
The president also affirmed his commitment to NATO's mutual defense pledge on Wednesday, a day after he again rattled the 32-nation alliance by sounding noncommittal about the pact.
He cast the defense spending vote as a “big win” for the United States and the world and said the spending increase will add more than $1 trillion annually to “our common defense.”
“This is a monument, really, to victory, but it's a monumental win for the United States,” Trump said at a closing news conference at The Hague. “This is a big win for Europe and, actually, for Western civilization.”
Before taking reporters' questions, Trump sought to ease concerns by reaffirming that he abides by Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the mutual defense pact that treats an attack on one member as an attack on all. Asked to clarify his stance as he met with Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Trump said, "I stand with it. That’s why I'm here. If I didn't stand with it I wouldn't be here."
He had mused just a day earlier that whether he abides by the treaty “depends on your definition” of Article 5.
Trump scored a major achievement when NATO members pledged to increase, sometimes significantly, how much they spend on their defense.
“I've been asking them to go up to 5% for a number of years,” Trump said earlier in the day as he met with Mark Rutte, the alliance's secretary-general.
The 32 leaders endorsed a final summit statement saying: “Allies commit to invest 5% of GDP annually on core defense requirements as well as defense- and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations.”
Spain had already officially announced that it cannot meet the target, and others have voiced reservations, but the investment pledge includes a review of spending in 2029 to monitor progress and reassess the security threat posed by Russia.
Trump sounded peeved by Spain's decision and said he'd have the country make up for it by paying higher tariffs to the United States as part of a trade deal.
“They want a little bit of a free ride, but they’ll have to pay it back to us on trade,” he said during the news conference.
But Spain belongs to the European Union, the world’s largest trading bloc, which negotiates trade deals on behalf of all 27 member countries. They are not meant to negotiate trade deals individually.
Trump’s debut on the NATO stage at the 2017 summit was perhaps most remembered by his shove of Dusko Markovic, the prime minister of Montenegro, as the U.S. president jostled toward the front of the pack of world leaders during a NATO headquarters tour.
And he began the 2018 summit by questioning the value of the decades-old military alliance and accusing its members of not contributing enough money for their defense — themes he has echoed since. In Brussels that year, Trump floated a 4% target of defense spending as a percentage of a country’s gross domestic product, a figure that seemed unthinkable at the time.
But the atmosphere around Trump this week seemed far chummier than in past years. The president was offered — and accepted — the chance to sleep Tuesday night at the Dutch king's palace, and Rutte referred to Trump as “Daddy.”
The agreed-upon boost to defense spending follows years of Trump's complaints that other countries weren't paying their fair share as part of an alliance created as a bulwark against threats from the former Soviet Union. Most NATO countries appeared motivated to bolster their own defenses not just by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but also, perhaps, to placate Trump.
As a candidate in 2016, Trump suggested that as president he would not necessarily heed the alliance’s mutual defense guarantees outlined in Article 5 of the NATO treaty. In March of this year, he expressed uncertainty that NATO would come to the United States' defense if needed, though the alliance did just that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“There’s numerous definitions of Article 5. You know that, right?” Trump said Tuesday on Air Force One on his way to The Hague. “But I’m committed to being their friends.” He signaled that he would give a more precise definition of what Article 5 means to him once he was at the summit.
New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, who traveled to The Hague and met with several foreign leaders at the summit, said other countries raised “understandable questions” about the U.S. commitment to the alliance, “certainly given President Trump's past statements.”
After Trump arrived in the Netherlands on Tuesday, The Associated Press and other news outlets reported that a U.S. intelligence report suggested in an early assessment that Iran's nuclear program had been set back only a few months by weekend strikes and was not “completely and fully obliterated,” as Trump had said.
But on Wednesday morning, Trump and other senior Cabinet officials vigorously pushed back on the assessment, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the administration was launching an investigation into who disclosed those findings to reporters.
“That hit ended the war," Trump said. Drawing comparisons to the atomic bombings from the U.S. during World War II, he added: "I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki. But that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war.”
Trump held several one-on-one meetings with counterparts on Wednesday, including Schoof; Geert Wilders, the lawmaker known as the Dutch Donald Trump; and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The White House did not allow press coverage of the nearly hourlong sit-down with Zelenskyy. Trump said afterward that they had a “good meeting.”
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This story has been corrected to show Trump stayed at the Dutch king’s palace, not the Danish king’s palace.
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Superville reported from Washington.
Seung Min Kim And Darlene Superville, The Associated Press
