The NATO Summit: A Qualified Victory
June Teufel Dreyer
6/30/2025|Updated: 6/30/2025
Commentary
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, meets annually with some occasions more memorable than others. This year’s iteration, held in The Hague and chaired by new Secretary-General Mark Rutte, drew unusual attention because it seemed that the very future of the alliance was at stake.
Founded as a counter to Soviet expansion after World War II, some believed NATO had lost its reason for existence after the disintegration of the Soviet empire. An exception was those Eastern European countries that had been part of that empire: they feared that Russia meant to reassert its control over them. Many applied for and were admitted to NATO, prompting Russian leader Vladimir Putin to accuse the organization of sinister plans against his country.
NATO’s tepid reaction to Moscow’s forcible detachment of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 confirmed the fears of the Eastern European states, and did not lead to any noticeable enhancement of its capabilities. The United States quietly sent advisers to the Ukraine government and added a special line item in its defense budget called the European Deterrence Initiative to bolster the defense capabilities of the Eastern European states, but NATO itself did little.
Apart from the United States at 3.6 percent, only four states—Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Greece—met their commitments to devote 2 percent of their gross domestic product (GPD) to defense, to the annoyance of 2016 presidential candidate and eventual victor Donald Trump, who threatened to pull the United States out of NATO if members did not live up to their comments. Due to the dominant size of the U.S. economy and military, the alliance could not counter a threat from Russia without it. Trump repeated the threat on returning to office in 2024, this time proposing a new benchmark of 5 percent in light of changing circumstances: Putin’s 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine had impressed most European countries with the seriousness of the Russian threat and even prompted two new countries—Finland and Sweden, both of them located in close proximity to Russia—to join NATO.
Against this backdrop as well as a rising perception of threat from an expansionist China tacitly partnered with Russia, four Indo-Pacific states—Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, the IP-4—were invited to participate in the summit. As Rutte pointed out, China could use Russia to divide NATO’s attention and resources in Europe if it moved on Taiwan. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not receive an official invitation, reportedly at the insistence of the Trump administration, but was received with full honors by high-ranking Dutch officials, addressed a joint session of parliament, and was included in a banquet hosted for all delegates by the Dutch king and queen.
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READ MORE: https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-nato-summit-a-qualified-victory-5879244?ea_src=frontpage&ea_cnt=a&ea_med=section-1
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