NATO leaders are breathing a sigh of relief after a smooth summit in The Hague that projected allied unity and secured a new defense spending pledge. But the harmonious summit is actually an indication of its failure to address any of the hard questions facing the Alliance. Over the coming months, NATO allies will have to wrestle with several difficult but fundamental questions: How committed is the United States to European security? Will US President Donald Trump apply more pressure on Russia? Will the United States continue to support Ukraine? Can allies find a common approach to China? That’s not to say the summit achieved nothing. To appease Trump’s demands that allies spend more on their own defenses, they agreed on an impressive new defense spending pledge. The pledge raises the bar from the current threshold of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense to a whopping 5 percent over the next decade—with 3.5 percent devoted to military equipment and another 1.5 percent for defense-related priorities such as critical infrastructure and cybersecurity. In this regard, The Hague summit was a success.
Four fundamental questions the NATO Summit did not answer – Atlantic Council
