It was scripted as a lovefest with only one purpose: to prevent the most impulsive and erratic US president in history from throwing NATO’s toys out of his pram. No one provoked a tantrum. This week’s summit in The Hague, Netherlands, made little pretense of discussing global strategy. It merely showcased the desperate efforts of European NATO members to increase their defense spending. It offered flattery to the US guest of honor in a fashion unprecedented even during the Cold War.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte set the tone with his welcome message before US President Donald Trump’s arrival, congratulating the president on his “decisive action” in Iran and promising that he would be “flying into another big success in The Hague.” He even expressed sympathy for the president’s public use of four-letter language.
National leaders who might have wondered what life was like under a Roman emperor now know from experience. As they struggle to do business with the most powerful man on Earth, they are obliged to abase themselves, to pander, to profess assent when privately many dissent. No one in the room save the principal guest believed his claim that US and Israeli bombs had set back Iran “by decades,” but they kept silent, and will continue to do so, lest they provoke his wrath, so easily roused.
Illustration: Tania Chou
Some Europeans oppose this posture, arguing that appeasement demeans our continent to no purpose. I disagree. Like it or not, Trump is apparently unchallenged master of the richest nation on Earth. He is being indulged by the US Congress and the US Supreme Court in exercising dictatorial powers for making war, and much else. The rest of us must parley with Trump, or forfeit his indispensable support.
The standout issue is Ukraine, which survives only at his pleasure. He is squeezing US arms deliveries to the nation, which he dislikes. He has completely suspended them once and might do so again tomorrow. The Russians are pressing the Ukrainians on the ground, and intensifying bombardment of their cities. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s people are running perilously short of air-defense weapons. Their morale would suffer grievously if their armed forces lose the capability to blunt Russia’s terror attacks.
The Europeans cannot provide Zelenskiy with what he gets from the US. To have a chance of forcing Putin to negotiate, Washington must intensify economic sanctions and increase weapons deliveries. Every NATO member present at The Hague understood this, recognizing that only their submission and that of Zelenskiy might sustain Ukraine’s struggle unless or until Trump abandons his apparent infatuation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On the wider issue of keeping the US in NATO, most other members are showing a willingness to contribute more cash and to support the strategic objectives of the US. A British aircraft carrier has just docked in east Singapore in a swing across the Indo-Pacific region in solidarity with the US amid Chinese aggression. The British government announced this week that it would buy 12 US F-35A strike aircraft.
Rutte on Tuesday messaged Trump that all NATO members have signed up to a new target of spending 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035. In reality, many of the allies will not even meet the earlier 3.5 percent target, but Germany, Europe’s most important player, is to spend 62.4 billion euros (US$73.1 billion) on the military this year, a critical show of intent.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told parliament in Berlin on Tuesday: “We are not doing that as a favor to the US and its president. We’re doing this out of our own view and conviction, because Russia is actively and aggressively endangering the security and freedom of the entire Euro-Atlantic area.”
I am a cynic. I do not believe that most of the NATO nations would seriously attempt to achieve the ambitious spending targets, set for a decade ahead, by which time most of the present generation of national leaders would have quit politics. A game is being played in which none of the parties is being honest, but the Europeans have an honorable purpose — to save Ukraine and to save NATO, not from the Russians, but from the US.
And so to Iran. Most of Europe, like most of the US, was appalled by Trump’s airstrikes, which were perceived as a dance to a tune written by deeply feared and mistrusted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As with Iraq in 2003, while nobody likes Iran, few people believe that the nation was on the verge of producing nuclear weapons. It seems especially outrageous, to have attacked within days of telling the world that the White House would grant a two-week pause for diplomacy, before resorting to force.
Moreover, the real objection to the airstrikes is not the scale of damage to the nuclear program, which must be considerable, but to the destabilization of the region, with unknowable consequences that could well include an Iranian dash to acquire a bomb. The only people who can achieve successful and durable regime change in any nation are its own citizens, as the West should have learned from our several failures to achieve this since the millennium.
However, at The Hague, once again truth was subordinated to telling the US president what he wanted to hear. National leaders surely had to do this, but those of us who do not hold public office, and therefore are not constrained by the demands of diplomacy, seem to have a responsibility to be frank. We need not simulate belief in Trump’s constant outrageous statements and acts.
I chance to have reread recently Giuseppe Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard, about 19th century Sicily. In it, his principal character describes the villain: “Free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency and plain good manners, he moved through the forest of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing the scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed.”
What seems especially depressing about such events as the NATO summit, and Trump’s participation in it, is that while others leaders might go home believing that their flattery and deceit would suffice to save the organization, Trump is perfectly capable of returning to the White House and tearing up everything NATO members think has been agreed upon.
The game of stroking the president must go on and on, presumably for three years and seven months.
Britain has just issued an invitation to the president for a full state visit to London in September. In the past, US leaders have been received with genuine warmth and gratitude, sometimes even with love. Britain has always recognized how much it owes to the greatest nation on Earth, especially during the Cold War.
Now, however, it is different. Not one person, including the British king and prime minister, sincerely wants Trump in London. He has been invited solely in hopes of constraining the worst of his elephant-charges against allies, in hopes of sparing the flora and fauna around Buckingham Palace, figuratively echoing Lampedusa.
Many Britons feel sad that we have shrunk so far that we must make this gesture, but just as Trump has no respect for others, so the rest of us must, I suppose, sacrifice our self-respect to him. If it helps to save Ukraine, it would be worth it.
Max Hastings is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His histories include Inferno: The World At War, 1939–1945, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945–1975 and Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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