Donald Trump thinks he is a king and certainly acts like a king, so NATO chief Mark Rutte decided the way to get through to him was to get an actual king to cozy up to him and treat him, well, royally. The NATO meeting this week happens to be in The Hague, where a real king (King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands) actually lives in a royal palace. So Rutte, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, who knows the king extremely well, asked His Majesty to put out the red carpet for Trump. Trump dined with the king and queen and got to stay overnight in the palace, which is a very rare honor. No U.S. president has ever been the house guest of the Dutch royal family before, so Trump can now brag he got an honor denied to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. That alone probably made his trip and put him in a good mood. The royal couple were instructed to flatter Trump endlessly. They probably actually hate him, since most Dutch people do, but they turned up their smiles to 10 and went to work. Possibly by design, none of the three young attractive princesses were home the night of Trump's sleepover. One is in college in Amsterdam, one is in college in London, and one is in an international baccalaureate program in Italy.
The goal of the royal treatment was to soften Trump up for the hard part of the trip: Making a deal on defense spending. Trump wants European countries to spend more on defense. Most are willing to do that, but the devil is in the details. The wording that Rutte gave Trump is mushy on both the details and the timeline. Spain, in particular, is refusing to get to Trump's goal of 5%. The prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, said 2.1% is his maximum. He probably thinks that Spain is so far from Russia that a Russian invasion is unlikely, so he doesn't need the other countries to promise to defend Spain if it is invaded.
Defense spending wasn't the only topic at the NATO summit. French President Emmanuel Macron also gently brought up Trump's tariffs and the trade war and the damage they will do. Nothing changed, of course.
Trump also spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy briefly, even though Ukraine is not a member of NATO (although it would love to be one). Trump got almost everything he wanted, but will that be enough? Probably not. It never is. And in this case, someone might eventually explain to Trump that Rutte is an extremely skilled diplomat, and that he might just have found a way to tell Trump what he wants to hear, without actually promising much. (V)