NATO Could Stop Annual Gatherings
Trump has been an outspoken critic of the military alliance, branding it a "paper tiger" and labeling fellow member states "free-loaders" — most recently after they declined to support the US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran. Since first winning the presidency in 2016, Trump has repeatedly turned NATO summits into flashpoints of tension.
"Better to have fewer summits than bad summits," a European diplomat told media.
NATO's de facto think tank, the Atlantic Council, echoed that sentiment last week, recommending that scaling back "high-profile summitry" would "dial down the drama." The same report outlined four additional steps to ensure a productive outcome at the upcoming Türkiye summit — among them, organizing a military parade of the sort Trump is known to favor.
A History of High-Stakes Moments
Trump's summit record is striking. At his inaugural appearance as president in 2017, footage captured him shoving Montenegro's then-Prime Minister Dusko Markovic aside during a group photo. A year later, he rattled allied governments by threatening to pull the US out of the bloc entirely — a pressure maneuver he has since openly boasted about.
He departed the 2019 summit ahead of schedule, calling then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "two-faced" after Trudeau was caught on a hot microphone venting to fellow leaders about Trump's conduct.
More recently, Trump pressured member states into pledging 5% of their GDP toward defense expenditure — though the figure carries an asterisk. Only 3.5% constitutes direct military spending; the remaining 1.5% falls under a loosely defined "defense-related" category that can encompass civilian infrastructure projects, such as a proposed bridge connecting Sicily to the Italian mainland.
Controversy Beyond Trump
Trump is far from the only leader to have turned these gatherings into spectacles. French President Emmanuel Macron memorably declared the alliance "brain-dead" on the eve of its 70th anniversary summit in London — the very meeting Trump walked out of early.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has become a near-permanent presence at recent summits, consistently pressing weapons-supplying nations for greater military assistance in Ukraine's war against Russia. The 2023 Vilnius summit produced one particularly telling image: Zelensky, clad in his trademark military-style outfit, appearing visibly isolated among formally dressed heads of state.
NATO has convened annually since 2021 and held two additional emergency sessions following Russia's escalation in Ukraine in 2022. By contrast, from the alliance's founding in 1949 through the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaders met just 12 times in total.
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