By Mark Anderson
At the recent NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, President Donald Trump set the tone for the event, dominating the entire gathering. In so doing, he maintained to the sitting defense ministers from NATO’s 32 member states that, even though the United States military had dropped massive bunker-buster bombs on Iranian targets, he is still the peace president that he promised to be while on the campaign trail.
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While many MAGA supporters voiced legitimate criticism over Trump’s decision to directly involve the United States in the Middle East, Trump still showcased his diplomatic efforts at a key press conference during the June 24-25 summit.
Flanked by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the 47th president expounded on a question from a summit reporter to outline what he described as ironclad peace arrangements that are unusually broad in scope.
Trump steered the conversation by saying that he’s been working to establish peace in traditional hotspot regions in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
“You know, in the last few weeks, we took care of India and Pakistan, Kosovo and Serbia … the Congo is coming in and Rwanda is coming in—[concerning] a vicious war that went on, a machete war [in Africa]. … We did [two other countries] in addition to that; nobody has ever done a thing like this.”
While Trump called Putin “misguided” for not ending the Ukraine-Russia war, Trump stressed that he was “very surprised, actually” that Putin had not played his part in ending hostilities in Ukraine.
“I would have thought we would’ve had that settled,” Trump said, walking this matter back, since he had said, even before his 2024 election, that he could have the Russia-Ukraine conflict ended in 24 hours.
Trump has been pushing his longtime plan to have NATO member states pay 5% of their GDP as their share in the military alliance—the ceiling had been 2%. Various media came under fire by Trump, even as several orthodox media reports acknowledged in rather stark terms that NATO seemed subservient to Trump at the summit.
Trump singled out those omnipresent “fake news” outlets, such as The New York Times and CNN, chastising them for what he described as skewing or misrepresenting his diplomatic efforts.
Most media also conveyed the probability that even the stature of NATO itself seemed to be diminished as a result of Trump’s visit—something the legacy media cartel is not accustomed to doing, given its penchant for internationalism as a domineering, virtually faultless philosophy, while nations with a strong sense of nationhood are often cast as “neo-Nazi” or “rogue.”
The focus on Ukraine was scaled back dramatically, with its invasion by Russia earning only a passing mention in the summit’s official statement. Ukrainian President Zelensky’s profile at the gathering was diminished.
As the summit wrapped up, the 32 leaders endorsed a final summit statement saying they will meet the 5% target—in up to 10 years from now.
“I’ve been asking them to go up to 5% for a number of years,” Trump remarked earlier when he met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, whose praise of Trump was posted on Trump’s Truth Social account.
