When President Donald Trump travels here Tuesday for a consequential summit of NATO leaders, he’ll arrive toting a freshly brokered ceasefire he hopes can prove to his skeptics — including at the conference — that he is a peacemaker at heart.
The arrangement between Israel and Iran came after an intensive afternoon of diplomacy at the White House, but hours after it was set to take effect, Israel accused Iran of firing several missiles and vowed to respond “with force.” Tehran denied violating the truce.
Trump hopes the ceasefire — if it holds — will act as vindication for the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which drew a mixed response from leaders here in Europe, who feared becoming embroiled in a wider war.
In the end, the deal Trump announced Monday was brokered with the help of Qatar, and appeared to leave the Europeans on the sidelines. White House officials said the diplomatic arrangement would not have been possible had Trump not ordered the bombing run over the weekend.
“Congratulations to everyone!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform Monday evening as he revealed the parameters of what he called the end of the “12 Day War.”
At least in Trump’s mind, the deal could bolster his stature as a global deal maker at a moment when his ability to strike peace agreements is being tested. As he steps back onto the world stage, the president appears eager to demonstrate his ability to bring warring parties to the table — even if he hasn’t yet been able to resolve the European conflict in the background of this week’s gathering.
This week’s Hague summit had been carefully planned over months to avoid angering Trump and paper over the significant differences that remain between Europe and the United States on how to manage the war in Ukraine.
The centerpiece is a short and focused final statement — designed to avoid any disputes over language — that will formalize a new plan to raise annual military spending targets to the figure Trump had demanded: 5% of GDP. (Trump, however, told reporters on Friday that the US shouldn’t have to meet that target.)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will have a seat at a pre-summit dinner on Tuesday evening, which Trump is expected to attend. But the Ukrainian leader won’t participate in the one-day summit on Wednesday, underscoring his stalled ambitions for his country to join NATO — an outcome Trump has ruled out.
Already, divisions between Trump and European leaders over Ukraine had threatened to foil attempts by NATO to signal a unified front to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump has appeared reluctant to apply new sanctions on Moscow, even as his peacemaking efforts have stalled, and so far hasn’t approved any new military assistance to Ukraine.
And over the weekend, European officials privately fretted Trump would decide to cancel his trip to the NATO summit altogether, afraid he’d deem it a needless exercise that would take him away from Middle East consolations in Washington, according to one western official.
White House officials had also weighed whether to still attend amid the Middle East conflagration. But on Monday, after it appeared both Israel and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire, the president determined to go ahead, carrying with him the freshly brokered agreement after an extraordinary day of diplomacy at the White House.
In the past, a US president who just conducted a major military operation, followed by arranging a pause in fighting, might have relished an opportunity to consult his European counterparts in person to attempt coalition building.
But Trump’s approach appears less collaborative and more go-it-alone.
Even before he gave the go-ahead to launch strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, Trump openly dismissed European efforts at brokering a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.
“Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe, they want to speak to us,” Trump told reporters Friday, hours before US stealth jets took off on a bombing run in Iran.
“Europe is not going to be able to help on this one.”
A few days beforehand, he departed early from the Group of 7 summit in Canada rather than remaining at the mountainside gathering to strategize on Iran with leaders whose own countries could have become embroiled in the widening conflict.
The president’s solitary approach has hardly come as a surprise to European leaders, who found themselves sidelined in the lead-up to the US strikes. Trump made clear over the weekend he believed only the US had any real standing to intervene, and declared afterwards, “only American weapons could do what has been done.”
Trump views multilateral organizations like the G7 and NATO skeptically, believing instead that direct interactions between countries is a more fruitful approach to world affairs.
He has previously written off NATO as an attempt to wring resources from the United States to protect nations on the other side of an ocean. At a 2018 NATO summit during his first presidency, he left fellow leaders shaken when he said during a closed-door meeting he would considering doing his “own thing” if they didn’t significantly boost their defense spending.
Trump’s loud calls for increased investment in defense among NATO members have yielded results. More countries now meet the alliance’s threshold than they did when he first entered office in 2017. But he has continued to insist it’s not enough, particularly as the war in Ukraine rages.
Now, however, the recent tensions in the Middle East may overshadow the war playing out in Europe.
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