Trump gets NATO to cough up
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Laura Cook and Alex Dibble. The NATO summit in The Hague has all been about Donald Trump. The format was adjusted to keep him happy and interested. And there was only one item on the agenda, which was the thing he's been calling for, that NATO members will spend 5% of GDP on defence.

The Secretary General praised President Trump for this, saying, You made this change possible.

Our guest today is John Luff, a former NATO official. He was in fact the first NATO official to be permanently based in Moscow. He's now head of foreign policy at the new Eurasian Strategy Centre. John, what do you make of quite how much NATO tailored everything to Donald Trump? Well, definitely it's an effort to keep the United States in NATO. We know that in 2018, according to the testimony of the National Security Advisor at the time, John Bolton...

Trump was on the verge of taking the U.S. out of NATO. It doesn't feel as though that's going to happen this time. I think I give credit to Mark Rutter, the secretary general, for, I think, making many of the right noises to Trump, bending over backwards to ensure that the NATO allies, the European allies understand, you know, the seriousness of the situation.

And I think to have come away with what appears to be an agreement from all of them, with the exception of Spain and possibly Belgium, that 5% is going to be the new requirement. I mean, that is a huge win for Donald Trump. There's no question about it. I mean, no U.S. president has been able to persuade the Europeans before him that they really need to dig deep.

And this comes at a moment, of course, when many European countries, and Britain is a prime example of that, are seriously stretched in terms of public debt. And, you know, finding the resources to fund these pledges is going to be a huge, a huge challenge.

John, we'll look at the defence spending shortly, but focusing a little bit more on the relationship Mark Rutter has with Donald Trump. We saw Trump publishing on Truth Social a private message Rutter sent him, and today we've seen Rutter saying, Daddy, Trump has sorted out the Middle East. Before he became NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutter was labelled the Trump whisperer. How important is this handling of Trump and comments like that?

It's immensely important because we know from Trump's first term that he sees international relations principally through the prism of his personal relationship with the other leaders. And in this case, somebody like Mark Rutter, who has the skill, it appears, to handle Trump the way he likes to be handled,

This is well received, and I suspect that it has contributed greatly to softening his approach to NATO. He's clearly sceptical.

about the value of NATO for the United States, but maybe the equation for him is about to change in the realization that he has single-handedly persuaded the Europeans that they now need to cough up. And he is absolutely right, by the way, that the Europeans have been free riders for decades in NATO. That's not to say that the US got nothing out of the alliance. Of course it did. But

it was becoming really seriously unbalanced and to some extent no longer sustainable. But I think the broader concern has to be about just how committed the United States really is to NATO when push comes to a shove. But...

Also, how should we take the fact that Donald Trump has shared a private message to him from Mark Rutter? Surely other world leaders will see that and wonder if things they say to Donald Trump could end up being published. And that could affect diplomacy, couldn't it? But I suppose Mark Rutter didn't seem to mind.

I think they might be to what extent Mark Rutte was aware that his message would be shared. I don't know, but it sort of feels as though Trump just decided, you know, laterally that he was going to publish this. So I'm sure it would make sense.

Prime Minister Starmer or Chancellor Mertz much more cautious about the type of personal message they would send and indeed the way they would send it. But this is the way Trump operates. He is something of a showman president. He loves these dramatic moments of doing things in the extremely unconventional way. And look at the language he used before he got onto his helicopter yesterday.

I think I've never heard a U.S. president speak in that way before or use foul language. So he's not a man who is, shall we say, encumbered by boundaries.

Something that did dominate the last NATO summit was Russia's war in Ukraine that continues. No reference to Russian aggression at this summit, but one development that will please Britain, the alliance will include direct contributions towards Ukraine's defence and its defence industry when calculating Allies' defence spending. That will help, won't it?

Yes, it definitely will. I think the European members of NATO by and large are very committed to supporting Ukraine because they realize that Ukraine is the new front line and they want to do everything to prevent Ukraine's surrender.

And then Putin simply, you know, underlining the point that might is right and borders can be changed without the consent of, you know, the countries concerned. And, you know, we're back to the 19th century. So I think there is a lot of determination there to see off that problem.

But more broadly, we have to ask the question of whether our societies, and I think Britain is a good example of this, whether we really are in a position to honor these pledges that we're making in terms of really drastically increasing defense spending.

And there's no doubt in my mind that the Russians, possibly the Chinese and others are going to continue to interfere in our debates in society and try to influence them in such a way that this polarization that we've experienced over recent years and possibly even decades, that deepens. And of course, that can make it much harder to invest in defense when there are clearly many other national priorities at the moment.

John, what do you think Presidents Putin and Xi will be thinking at the end of this NATO summit? Do you think they'll be in any way concerned with the reaffirming of Article 5? Well, I suspect that they will conclude that Trump is playing a clever game. He's keeping his options open.

He has been able to persuade the Europeans to invest more in defense in a way that his predecessors, they talked about this, but they never managed to get it done. The former defense secretary, Robert Gates, famously wrote that it was like some –

I think the way he put it was shouting down a well when it came to this issue of trying to get the Europeans to do more about their own defenses. The U.S. sort of found itself in a strange way, sort of rather powerless. So I think Putin and Xi at the same time will be looking at the way, of course, Trump has taken decisions related to Iran and Israel.

and will recognize that this is a U.S. president who is prepared to take risks.

He is not risk averse. And despite coming to office on a platform to take the U.S. out of distant wars and to unburden the country in that way, he's actually had very little hesitation to take the side of Israel, seeing a common interest here between the U.S. and Israel over the threat posed by Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. So I think in their position, you have to take note that Iran

This is a U.S. president. Despite what he says, he is prepared to do things that, again, his predecessors simply shied away from. So that makes him a different quantity. The Russians for sure have understood very well that Trump is unpredictable.

And the Chinese must surely – I'm not a China expert, but they must surely have the same view in looking at his tariff policies and that sort of thing. That's a fine embodiment, I suppose, of the way he can improvise. But in this case, we are seeing a sort of Trump foreign policy form.

that many people would have not predicted just three or four months ago. Okay, John, thank you. That's John Luff, Head of Foreign Policy at the new Eurasian Strategy Centre and formerly the first NATO official based in Moscow.

On the subject of Article 5, you must listen to our episode with Edward Lucas, who explains the little-known nuances of that clause. It does require scrolling back to March 5th, but it is well worth it. Separately, and after a remarkable couple of weeks in the Middle East, do listen to yesterday's episode where we analysed whether Donald Trump can keep Israel and Iran in line and maintain the ceasefire.

That's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. See you tomorrow.