Trump heads to NATO summit with alliance's unity on the line

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00:00Now, President Donald Trump's first appearance at NATO later today since returning to the White

00:04House was supposed to centre on how the US secured a historic military spending pledge

00:10from others in the defensive alliance, effectively bending it to his will. NATO members generally

00:16bowing to Trump's suggestion of an imposition of countries spending 5% of their GDP on defence.

00:22The spotlight now, though, also set to be on Trump's decision to attack Iran, of course,

00:26as well, of course, set the situation in Ukraine. Well, a little earlier on, we brought you this

00:32from our correspondent Dave Keating in Brussels. The big headline outcome from this summit of NATO

00:39leaders will be the agreement to increase the spending target from 2% of GDP to 5% of GDP.

00:47That's a pretty major increase. And it was an insistence of the Trump administration who demanded

00:53it. And it's actually quite surprising that we've ended up with it actually happening,

00:56because when the Trump administration first asked for this, European countries balked. They said

01:00that was an absurdly large amount of money. And they pointed out that even the US doesn't spend

01:05anywhere near 5% of its GDP on military expenditure. The way we got here was a bit of fudging of the

01:13math. So NATO Secretary General Mark Wouter came up with this split. Really, this is a target of 3.5%

01:22military spending. And then countries can do an additional 1.5% of spending on things that are

01:29adjacent to the military. Now, that's been left very vague. And it could include things like

01:34investment in domestic infrastructure and roads and bridges. The Italian government seems to think

01:39that efforts to combat illegal migration would also count toward that target. That's how they got

01:46countries there. But at the last minute, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez last week said even

01:51this math fudging was not going to work for Spain. He said that the target is unrealistic, that they

01:57know already they will not meet that target. And so engaging in that commitment now would be folly.

02:03The way they got around that was they changed the wording in the text that essentially it looks like

02:09it means that this target will be NATO-wide and not for each country. But we still don't really have

02:16any clear explanation about what's happened here. Yesterday at the press conference, before the

02:22summit given by Secretary General Ruta, you can see how sensitive this is, because he would not answer

02:26any question about this. He would not say whether this is a specific exception for Spain or whether

02:32this applies to all NATO countries. The Spanish government has been quite clear. They see the change in

02:38wording last week as meaning that they do not have to meet a 5% target. But the other thing that will

02:45happen here at this summit is the optics. There has been fear for months about Donald Trump blowing up

02:51this summit. Memories are still fresh from the 2018 NATO leader summit here in Brussels, where he really

02:58threw a lot of dramatics into the discussions. Now that we're in the second term and the guardrails are

03:07off. The fears were that something could be even worse than that. Luckily for them, at least, Donald

03:14Trump has delayed his entry to the summit. I think everyone's just going to try to keep their heads down,

03:20get in and get out and just try to avoid any dramatic flare up with Donald Trump. You can see the anxiety

03:28about this and a change in the agenda from what would normally be expected. Ukrainian President

03:34Vladimir Zelenskyy will be joining the summit. However, he's just going to be joining for an informal

03:39meeting this afternoon and, it appears, not joining for the formal summit tomorrow like he has in the

03:46past, both in the EU and in NATO. It looks like that informal meeting today will happen even before Donald

03:52Trump arrives. And that is clearly to try to avoid something like the Oval Office confrontation that

03:59we saw between Trump and Zelenskyy earlier this year. So again, big headline news. And it is big

04:05news that NATO is increasing its spending target. But the devil is in the detail. And what we should

04:11really be watching over the next two days is the specifics and the optics.

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