NATO’s modest 2025 summit does not indicate a deepening trend toward crises in the alliance, but reflects the desire of its leadership to use the effect of continuing external challenges and changes in the internal dynamics in NATO following Donald Trump’s return to the White House to maintain institutional inertia in the bloc, Julia Melnikova writes.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s summit is traditionally one of the last events of the spring political season in Europe. In late June – early July, the allies “synchronise their watches” on the results of the first half of the year and record agreements for the future. Since 2022, NATO summits have been rich in news: after a twelve-year break, the Alliance’s Strategic Concept was updated, several aid packages for Ukraine were agreed upon, and regular interaction with allies in the Asia-Pacific region was established. It is significant that the 75th anniversary meeting of the bloc’s leaders in 2024 in Washington lasted three days and ended with a detailed joint statement, mostly anti-Russian in content, supplemented by a Long-Term Support Plan for Ukraine.
On the contrary, the 76th NATO summit in the Netherlands, the homeland of the new Secretary General Mark Rutte, became one of the most laconic in the post-Cold War history of the bloc: one day of meetings and five points of the final declaration, two and a half of which are practically meaningless. Assessments of the events were divided in the expert community: some talk about a clear example of the alliance’s position being reducible to US interests, some call it quite functional and therefore productive, and still others have recalled the long-announced “brain death” of NATO.
In this regard, the question arises whether the latest NATO meeting has independent significance and whether it is possible to draw preliminary conclusions about its trajectory in the new “five-year plan” based on the decisions made there. Despite the ambitious announced plans for the future, it seems that the 2025 summit is a marker of the end of the period of unconditional unification of the Euro-Atlantic community around the “Russian threat”" and very soon the allies will again face the existential question:
“Why us?”
From the point of view of formal agreements, the 2025 NATO summit can truly be considered historic: the joint declaration recorded the decision to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, of which 3.5% is direct spending on maintaining defence capability, and another 1.5% is investment in military infrastructure and the defence industry. The Allies have committed to reporting annually on the implementation of these indicators, and the first comprehensive review is scheduled for 2029. The apparent brevity of the final document, however, should not be confusing – it is complemented by the Updated Defence Production Action Plan adopted in February 2025 but published during the summit, which replaced the 2023 document agreed upon at the Vilnius summit and specified the tasks within the three areas of improving the Alliance’s defence.
The first area – aggregating demand for upgrading defence capabilities – involves establishing multilateral cooperation in the field of public procurement of arms based on a review of national strategies for the development of the military-industrial complex. The second area – increasing defence production and enhancing defence capability – is based on an assessment of the current state of the defence industry of the alliance countries in wartime and peacetime in order to bring it into line with new targets and ensure the security of production chains within NATO. The platform for this work should be the Defence Industrial Production Board (DIPB), established at the end of 2023. Of particular importance for the implementation of the third area – standardisation and increasing the complementarity of the military-industrial complex of NATO countries – is the coordination of the development of defence complexes with the EU, as well as with dialogue partners – Ukraine, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the Republic of Korea.
Forums for representatives of the defence industry and civil society were held on the side-lines of the main agenda. Their work was aimed directly at discussing the Updated Plan and ways to achieve the new targets. The first platform, provided by the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands together with the Confederation of Industry and Employers, discussed ways to build up NATO’s high-quality defensive and offensive capabilities. The recommendations essentially repeat the provisions of the official document and include, among other things, attracting targeted public and private investment in the military-industrial complex, concluding long-term contracts for supplies and production, and increasing the innovation and technological sophistication of military-industrial systems, including dual-use technologies. The NATO Public Forum performed the function of explaining the current policy of the alliance to a wide audience and adjusting plans for the future, taking into account the opinions and proposals of various stakeholders of the “second track” at the same time.
In addition, the summit programme included a meeting of the defence ministers of the alliance countries, a meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council, as well as meetings of the Secretary General with the President of Ukraine and the EU leadership, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Great Britain, as well as with Asian partners. The leaders of the alliance countries also held a number of bilateral and multilateral negotiations among themselves, including on the issue of resolving the situation in the Middle East. At the discourse level, the media’s attention was drawn to the somewhat reduced emotionality regarding Russia and the Ukrainian story as such. For example, at the final press conference, Mark Rutte stated that NATO is doing this to protect against any threats, be it Russia, the problem of terrorism or cyberterrorism, as well as strategic competition as such.
It appears that the 76th summit of the alliance reflects the desire of the bloc’s leadership to avoid exacerbating disagreements both among the European allies and between them and the United States, while at the same time routinising preparations for the new five-year period. The modest architecture of the meeting, at first glance, is, in this sense, quite rational and corresponds to the moment. An appeal to the bureaucratic and economic dimension of interdependence in the Euro-Atlantic region has allowed NATO leaders to solve at least two problems amid the current instability:
First, the persistence of the “Russian threat” allows NATO and the United States to try to use the moment to guarantee the stability of the bloc’s financing for the period after the end of the Ukraine conflict. The increase in defence spending by European allies has been articulated by Washington since the 1970s as the central problem of the alliance. At the 2006 summit in Riga, a 2% of GDP bar was set, 20% of which should consist of investment in the latest technology and development. The problem was exacerbated during Donald Trump’s first term, as in the second half of the 2010s only five or six NATO countries met this target. Even as of early 2025, eight allies (Croatia, Portugal, Italy, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Spain) had not met these requirements. Raising the bar to 5% of GDP by 2035 and finding economic mechanisms to implement these ambitions is an attempt to “transfer” the inertia of the current conflict into long-term investments in collective defence, even if the 5% target is not actually achieved.
Second, it is equally important for the US and NATO to use the growing willingness of European countries to develop their own defence systems to prevent a lack of coordination between the US and Europe in the future. Donald Trump’s return to the White House has created a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, the EU is seeking to strengthen its defence capability within the framework of the course towards “strategic autonomy” in the event of a new crisis in Euro-Atlantic relations; on the other hand, Brussels is not interested in the US stopping its support for Ukraine, so the development of the EU Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) is positioned, unlike in the 2010s, as an addition to NATO, not an alternative to it. It is no coincidence that the statements of European leaders, including on the issue of the conflict around Ukraine, are harsher today than those of the Americans. Thus, in a joint article in the Financial Times, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron assured their support for transatlantic unity precisely as the basis for containing Russia. Merz separately condemned Russian actions in Ukraine, declaring Germany’s “new determination” to strengthen its national defence capability.
Such rhetoric from European countries develops the provisions of the EU Strategic Compass adopted in 2022, as well as the new EU programmes to strengthen defence capabilities – the Readiness 2030 plan, which envisages the allocation of 800 billion euros from the EU budget for defence needs, the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP), and the Security Action for Europe (SAFE), a defence industry lending programme with a budget of $ 150 billion. In the second half of 2025, the presidency of the EU Council will pass to Denmark, which not only supports pan-European defence initiatives, but also provides consistent individual support to Ukraine. In particular, on the side-lines of the NATO summit, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky discussed the possibility of joint weapons production in the kingdom – an unprecedented step for both parties to the deal. Accordingly, for the North Atlantic Alliance as a multilateral organisation and, in essence, a bureaucratic structure (albeit with a strong political and ideological impulse), the most important task today is to transpose the current mood of the allies into greater investments in common defence in the event of a change in the strategic situation in the future.
At the same time, it is the strategic situation in the future that is the most interesting variable for predicting NATO’s future activities. Since the first review of the compliance of the allies’ defence spending with the new targets is scheduled for 2029, it can be concluded that the alliance assumes that the relevance of increased military readiness, primarily to repel the “Russian threat”, will remain. If the Ukraine conflict is not overcome or is frozen, it will be easier to maintain the rate of increase in military spending. However, the identity of NATO as a regional bloc with a positional military structure, recreated around containing Russia, cannot be viable in other conditions. If the alliance faces challenges of a different nature, other arguments will be needed to legitimise joint actions.
At the same time, the search for an alternative model of the bloc’s coexistence and functioning since the late 1990s has revealed that uniting allies around larger goals than containing their closest neighbour is possible only to a certain extent: operations in the Balkans were supported by most allies, as well as the operation in Afghanistan. However, there were fewer enthusiasts for intervention in Iraq, and even fewer in Libya and Syria. Since the early 2020s, China has been constructed as another long-term challenge for NATO, and maintaining the network of NATO allies in the Asia-Pacific region is certainly aimed at countering it. In the current circumstances, the Chinese challenge has faded into the background, but the willingness of European countries to maintain a high level of military spending and restructure military mechanisms in the bloc to contain China is by no means guaranteed. An agreement was already concluded on the side-lines of the summit with Spain that it will be excluded from NATO standards and will strive to maintain defence spending at 2% of GDP. As the immediate threat fades, such precedents may become more frequent.
Thus, the modest NATO summit in 2025 does not indicate a deepening trend toward crises in the alliance, but reflects the desire of its leadership to use the effect of continuing external challenges and changes in the internal dynamics in NATO following Donald Trump’s return to the White House to maintain institutional inertia in the bloc. For this reason, all the political emphases of recent times – the “Russian threat”, support for Ukraine, and coordination with allies in Asia – are still present in the general discourse, but for some time they have become the background for strengthening the functional instruments for maintaining community – increasing efforts at standardisation, as well as establishing regulations and mechanisms for monitoring their implementation. These actions will contribute to the short-term maintenance of cohesion of NATO countries around the “Russian threat” and can serve as a basis for further joint action. However, if the strategic situation changes, their effectiveness will decrease, since it will be much more difficult to justify the containment of, for example, China as a common challenge.
Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.