America First, allies second: Trump steers Nato, Ukraine left waiting

Even though US President Donald Trump will be in The Hague for just 24 hours, the Nato Summit will be all about him.

Trump has shaped the agenda, duration, and even leisurely activities on the sidelines of the summit, which will start on Tuesday and conclude on Wednesday.

Even though European nations are overwhelmingly the members of Nato, their core concern of Russian aggression is set to be marginal in the summit. Instead, the focus will be on outlining how Nato members will raise their defence spending to 5 per cent of their GDP.

The Nato Summit 2025 is set to become not just America First but Trump First and concerns of allies are set to be a distant second.

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Trump shapes Nato Summit — literally

To placate Trump, who has been berating allies for years, Nato Summit 2025 is going to see members formally commit to raise defence spending to 5 per cent of the GDP, according to The Daily Telegraph.

Considering the short attention span of Trump, three sessions have been reduced to just one three-hour-long session, and the joint statement has been reduced to just one page so Trump may actually read it, as per the newspaper.

In the hope that Trump will not toss the shrunken joint statement, officials have condensed it to just one page that will almost entirely be about Nato members’ commitment to raise defence spending to 5 per cent of the GDP, the report said.

Considering Trump’s fondness for golf —he has spent most weekends golfing in his second term— organisers had also planned to include a round of golf, but Trump’s short stay ruled it out.

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Despite such arrangements to shape the Nato Summit in his image, Trump will skip most of the engagements and will just attend a dinner hosted by the Dutch king and queen on Tuesday evening and one session on Wednesday and leave after a press conference, as per the report.

Trump drives Ukraine to margins

With his focus on increasing defence spending, Trump has driven Ukraine to the margin of Nato Summit even as the war continues to rage.

As the bloc converges to manage Trump, organisers have not invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the three-hour-long session tomorrow that Trump will attend.

The focus of the summit will be to outline how Nato members will take their defence spending to 5 per cent of the GDP, which will include core defence spending of 3.5 of the GDP and 1.5 per cent of the GDP on related expenditures, such as strategic infrastructure and cyberdefence.

Jamie Shea, a former Nato Deputy Assistant Secretary General, told Guardian that the meeting would be “disappointing for Ukraine, especially as most allies would have wanted much stronger language on support, the open door for Ukraine’s Nato membership and a clearer path on sanctions against Russia”.

The nature of the summit would work towards changing the nature of support to Ukraine from US-centric to Europe-centric, suggested Shea.

However, even as Europe has stepped up lately, it is not possible to make up for the lost support in terms of money and weapons from the United States.