‘Daddy’ Trump Can't Be Trusted to Love NATO
Unrealistic defense spending targets won’t make the transatlantic alliance healthier.
Dick Schoof, Netherlands' prime minister, left, US President Donald Trump, center, and Mark Rutte, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, during the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, on Wednesday, June 25, 2025.
Photographer: Simon Wohlfahrt/BloombergDonald Trump used to quip that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. The same might be said of the royal palace in The Hague, where the US president arrived to a hero’s welcome despite having relentlessly berated, humiliated and questioned the utility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European allies.
Even as Trump was his initially cagey self on whether NATO commitments still applied, alliance boss Mark Rutte poured on the charm for the man he called “daddy.” America’s attack on Iranian nuclear sites, despite its clear repudiation of European diplomatic efforts over the past decade, was praised as “truly extraordinary”; a move to more than double defense spending targets, another of Trump’s obsessions, was described as a “big success.” Even Germany’s Friedrich Merz has described Israel’s bombing of Iran as the necessary “dirty work” of clipping Tehran’s nuclear wings.