NATO's sharpest tool right now is not a weapon. It is Mark Rutte's charm. The secretary-general flew to the White House on 24 June with one job: to talk Donald Trump down before the alliance's leaders meet in Ankara on 7 and 8 July. The summit was meant to be a victory lap for record defence spending. Instead it has become a test of whether the alliance survives its own most powerful member.
The trigger was Iran. After the US opened its conflict with Tehran, several European capitals refused Trump's calls to help reopen oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump took the snub personally. He has spent weeks musing aloud about whether the United States should still honour Article 5, NATO's promise that an attack on one member is an attack on all — the clause that has underwritten European security since 1949.
Behind the rhetoric sits something more concrete. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a six-month Pentagon review of American troop deployments across Europe, and officials expect it to call for sharp reductions. For frontline states from the Baltics to Poland, a US drawdown is not a talking point. It is the difference between deterrence and exposure.
Rutte, a former Dutch prime minister who has earned the nickname "the Trump whisperer," leaned into the flattery that has kept the relationship intact. He praised Trump as "the leader of the free world," pointed to Italy's decision to let some 500 US aircraft operate from its bases as proof of European loyalty, and reminded the president that allies have now committed roughly $1 trillion in new spending on his watch.
That spending figure is the heart of Rutte's pitch. At last year's summit in The Hague, NATO members bowed to Trump's central demand and pledged to lift defence and defence-related spending to 5% of GDP within a decade, by 2035 — a target that would have been unthinkable before his return. Washington now wants evidence that the money is real.
For most European governments, 5% is brutal arithmetic. It means cutting elsewhere, borrowing more, or both, at a time when growth is weak and voters are restless. The political bind is plain: spend to keep Trump in the alliance, and risk a backlash at home; hold back, and risk the alliance itself.
Nowhere is that bind sharper than in Prague. In an extraordinary fight over protocol, the Czech constitutional court ordered the government on Wednesday to let President Petr Pavel — a former senior NATO commander and staunch backer of Ukraine — join the delegation to Ankara. Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, a billionaire populist and Trump admirer who returned to office in December on a pledge not to fund Ukraine's weapons, had tried to exclude him. Babiš argued he was better placed to persuade Trump that Prague should not be punished for missing spending targets. The court gave the government until Friday to accredit Pavel; a final ruling on presidential authority will come later.
The squabble is small, but the signal is not. Pavel has led Czech delegations at 19 of the last 20 summits. That two leaders of one mid-sized member would go to court over a single seat shows how the Trump era is rearranging European politics — separating those who want to manage the president from those who want to outlast him.
Ankara will not settle the deeper question, which is no longer how much Europe spends but whether it can defend itself if Washington steps back. Rutte's charm can buy time and keep Trump in the room. It cannot make European armies bigger, faster, or more coordinated overnight. The summit's real test is whether Europe uses the breathing space its spending pledges have bought to build genuine capability — or whether it spends the next two weeks, and the years after, simply managing the mood of one man.
