The latest NATO summit held on June 24-25 in The Hague was the first since 2022 that did not feature Ukraine and its desperate fight with Russian aggression as the main topic. Yet paradoxically, its results were broadly celebrated in the country as a great diplomatic success for both Ukraine and its European partners.
There were two interrelated reasons for this: the final five-point declaration approved by the summit – the shortest in the history of summits – clearly defined Russia as “the long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security” and reaffirmed the allies’ “enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine, whose security contributes to ours.” Something that in the past three years was taken for granted and was merely reconfirmed in The Hague caused a sigh of relief and even a cheerful mood in Ukraine that can be hard to understand without accounting for the sea changes in international politics over the past six months and fundamentally new relations between the U.S. and its former allies.
The shortest word to describe those changes is Trumpism – the reckless and self-aggrandizing way of policymaking that has been quite typical for many dictatorships and, all of a sudden, has become a national style of the largest, oldest, and, presumably, strongest world democracy. Ukraine has perhaps been the main collateral victim of these changes, inasmuch as the new U.S. president indicated his willingness to make a peace deal with Moscow by accepting tacitly all its maximalist demands (tantamount to Ukraine’s de facto capitulation) and exerting all kinds of pressure on Kyiv while sparing Moscow from any new sanctions (abstaining even from mere condemnation of its aggression at international fora like the UN, the G7, etc.). All this perverse ‘peacemaking’ was properly taken in Moscow for what it is: appeasement. The number of Russian air strikes on Ukrainian cities has grown exponentially since January, with the lion share made up by the ‘proxy bombing’ – the strikes that deliberately target civilian infrastructure, residential areas, and people.
NATO may have become another victim of this new politics – after the U.S. president raised bizarre territorial claims to Denmark and Canada (NATO members), threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from Europe (another encouraging signal to Moscow), and questioned the applicability of paragraph 5 of the NATO Charter (which mandates all members to help one another in the case of external aggression, treating the attack on one of them as the attack on all). All these statements had been music to Putin’s ears, who learned fast how to manipulate the ignorance, vanity, and buffoonery of his self-assigned ‘pal’ in Washington. Moscow’s six-month ‘peace talks game’ may provide an excellent case study of well-calculated perfidy on the one side and miscalculated stupidity on the other.
Within this context, the U.S. signature under the final document that reiterates NATO commitment to assist Ukraine, recognizes Russia as the main security threat (alongside international terrorism), and implicitly, by default, maintains the validity of past promises to eventually admit Ukraine into the club (in spite of Trump’s inclination to skip this at Putin’s request), – all this may come as a nice surprise and a good reason for celebration.
Most commentators attribute this (relative) success to the diplomatic skills and mundane efforts of European leaders who apparently learned from Moscow how to play on Donald Trump’s hubris and narcissism. Probably starting from Zelensky’s spectacular disaster in the Oval Office at the end of February, they concluded reasonably (and conveyed this to their Ukrainian counterpart) that the new U.S. president is not a person who tolerates opinions that contradict his own, nor is he inclined to listen to inconvenient arguments. The NATO summit in The Hague was staged as a one-man show where the entire universe revolved around King Don. He stood at the royal palace as a personal guest of the Dutch king and queen, he was praised and thanked by all the summit participants, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte playing a leading role in this flattering and buttering, and even President Zelensky, to please the boss, changed his traditional paramilitary khaki outfit for something resembling a black suit.
Some observers rushed to mock all this show as Europeans’ humility bordering self-humiliation. Rishi Iyengar and John Haltiwanger of Foreign Policy even headlined their report on the NATO summit “Stockholm Syndrome in The Hague”, comparing participants to the hostages or abuse victims who develop positive feelings toward their abuser. Others opined, however, that efforts paid off and that ultimate success is what really matters. As Hans Morgenthau averred long ago in his classical Politics Among Nations (1948), the “ethics in abstract” is not applicable in the field of international relations. “Morality of political decisions,” he argued, “should not be judged by intentions but by results.” From this ‘realist’ point of view, one may argue that it was actually Trump who was humiliated by conspirators who treated him as a fussy child or a mentally challenged person, assuring him that he was not just a ‘Napoleon’ but the greatest ‘Napoleon’ of all times and countries.
There might have been one more reason that made the mercurial American president take a more reconciliatory stance vis-à-vis Ukraine and his NATO allies. The reason is entirely domestic and stems from the public opinion in the U.S. that increasingly disapproves of Trump’s appeasement of Putin and tough stance on Ukraine and Europeans. The latest opinion poll (May-June) indicates that 37% of respondents believe the Trump administration is favoring Russia when it comes to negotiating an end to the conflict, 36% feel it is taking a neutral approach, and only 14% say the White House is favoring Ukraine. And since most Americans have a very negative view of Putin, consider Russia a major adversary and security threat, and condemn overwhelmingly its aggression against Ukraine, the president cannot fully ignore these views and rely exclusively on his core MAGA electorate. The growing criticism of Trump’s policies in Congress, including the voices of influential Republicans, may also have contributed to the shift in his initial position. Last but not least, NATO members agreed in The Hague to gradually raise their expenditures on defense to 5% of the budget – something that the boastful American president could present to his faithful electorate as a major victory.
How long he will stay in this mood is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the Russian president has assessed the threat properly and responded with a deceptive proposal to resume the ‘peace talks’ with Ukraine in Istanbul – a treacherous smokescreen that allows him to murder more Ukrainians, bomb infrastructure, and avoid any serious U.S. sanctions. The second problem may haunt both Ukrainians and Europeans from within – if they would not match the modest success in international politics with much greater successes in the domestic field, including the delicate sphere of public communication. According to Europe-wide surveys, the majority of respondents approve further support for Ukraine, recognize the Russian threat, and agree to gradually increase defense expenditures. They disapprove pressuring Kyiv to cede occupied territories, or lifting sanctions on Russia even if the U.S. changes course.
The devil, however, is in the detail: the same surveys reveal big differences in opinions and attitudes between countries, political parties, and social groups. This means that the relative success of The Hague NATO summit signals not the end but just the beginning of hard work. As the former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker quipped sardonically: “We all know what to do.” “We just don’t know how to get reelected after we’ve done it.”
Mykola Ryabchuk is a research director at the Institute of Political and Nationality Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a lecturer at the George Washington University. He has written extensively on civil society, nation-state building, national identity, and post-communist transition. One of his books has been translated into French: De la 'Petite-Russie' à l'Ukraine, published in Paris by L'Harmattan in 2003.