00:00You were listening to U.S. President Donald Trump speaking from the NATO summit at The Hague.
00:05He said the pledge to spend 5% of GDP on defense by 2035 was a monumental win for the United States,
00:12adding NATO Secretary General was doing a fantastic job.
00:16Trump spent a lot of the time discussing the recent strikes on Iran and said they were successful.
00:22He pointed to a statement from Iran's foreign ministry earlier this Wednesday
00:27which said there was extensive damage done to the country's nuclear program.
00:31Trump hit out at the media.
00:33He batched CNN, The New York Times and MSNBC over reports that the U.S. strikes only set the Iranian program back a couple of months.
00:42The war in Ukraine was mentioned too, but he did not pledge continued U.S. support.
00:47But he did say that Washington told Kiev it could see if it can make Patriot missiles available.
00:54He said the meeting with Zelensky was good, adding that ceasefires were not discussed,
00:58but he will speak to Putin about the war in Ukraine and how to end it.
01:03For more on this story, we can now bring in Ivo Dalda, former U.S. ambassador to NATO.
01:08Thank you so much for staying with us throughout that whole interaction with the media and Donald Trump's speech there.
01:14Where to begin?
01:17In the run-up to this NATO summit, we had the Secretary General Mark Reuter send a groveling message to the U.S. President Donald Trump,
01:25one that he shared on his social media platform.
01:29Today he called Donald Trump daddy.
01:32Is this what needs to be done, groveling on behalf of the Europeans to keep America engaged in NATO?
01:38Well, judging from the press conference and the outcome of the meeting, apparently the answer to that is yes.
01:45This is a very different human being who is spending a lot of time and worries about his image.
01:53He wants to be seen as a winner, as someone who can do things that other people are unable to do.
01:59I think that was very much the large message of this press conference, whether it was talking about peace around the world or talking about Iran or, in this case, who spends what on defense.
02:11It is all about his ability to get this done.
02:15And I think the Secretary General and, indeed, the leaders of NATO recognize that if that's what it takes to say some nice things,
02:23grovel perhaps a little, including publicly, in order to get the President of the United States to do what every other president in the last 76 years has done,
02:32to reaffirm the fundamental American commitment to European security, then that is worth it.
02:38And that's regard, I think, the statement we heard from President Trump, that he will stay and remain actively engaged in the defense of Europe,
02:46even as Europe takes on a larger responsibility for that defense, which, by the way, it should.
02:53It's the right thing to do, is the kind of outcome that European leaders and Margaret specifically was hoping to achieve at this summit.
03:03Because it's either agreed to what America sets out or otherwise pay the consequences, like Spain apparently will.
03:14Donald Trump says Spain will pay more in a trade deal after its refusal to meet that 5%.
03:19Yeah, unfortunately, Spain doesn't negotiate trade deals with the United States.
03:25It's a member of the European Union.
03:27True, but Donald Trump says he's going to personally, I don't know how he's going to personally negotiate the trade deal.
03:32He thinks he can.
03:34Well, he thinks he can.
03:35I think of this, there's a lot of things he thinks he can and don't necessarily get achieved.
03:41He also talked about the unfortunate reality that he was unable to end the war in Ukraine and that he had learned what I think many of us already knew, that Vladimir Putin was not an easy man to work with.
03:56He thought he was an easy man to work with.
03:58He'll find out that trying to negotiate a separate deal with Spain on trade is just not going in the cards.
04:04It's not going to happen.
04:05There are just some things he can't do.
04:08Clearly, he was disappointed about Spain's inability and unwillingness to sign on to this agreement.
04:14But, and I think there's a but here, what NATO agreed is not only a spending target.
04:20What it also agreed, and that I think is in many cases more important, are new force requirements necessary to deter and defend NATO territory against a Russian attack.
04:33And Spain has said that they will, no matter what the cost, fulfill their requirements.
04:37Ultimately, it's not about percentages of money spent on defense.
04:42It's about capabilities and the forces necessary to execute that defense.
04:47And if Spain is willing and able to do its fair share, then whether it spends 2% or 3.5% or indeed 5% of GDP is less important than that it is able and willing to do what all allies are able and willing to do, which is to deter and, if necessary, defend NATO territory against attack.
05:06Do you believe, from what you heard, from what Donald Trump said, that he is committed to Article 5, that's collective defense?
05:14Because yesterday, he said that there are numerous interpretations, I believe.
05:20How can he have a different interpretation to Article 5?
05:23I looked it up, and it's quite simple.
05:25An attack against one is an attack against all.
05:27Yeah, you know, I'm worried that he is continually unable and unwilling to say outright, I am fully, totally committed to Article 5.
05:39The statement that was released in the name of all the leaders does talk about an ironclad commitment of Article 5, does mention Article 5's key sentence of an attack against one is an attack against all.
05:53I have no doubt that many in the U.S. military, indeed all in the U.S. military, and indeed in his administration, including the Secretary of State, are fully committed to Article 5.
06:06But yes, it's one of the reasons Europeans are increasing their defense spending is because increasingly Europeans are worried that the United States can no longer be relied upon to defend them, and that's why they need to do more.
06:19That is one of the subtexts of this meeting.
06:24It is indeed the uncertainty about America's commitment to NATO that is, in some ways, responsible for the decisions that were made here.
06:34Of course, the Russian military threat, which, again, the president refused to embrace and refer to, even when he was asked directly to it, the Russian military threat to European security is real.
06:47It's pressing, it's large, and is another major reason why Europeans are deciding to do more on defense.
06:55Again, it's something they should do, it's something they should have been doing for a long time.
06:59It is a good thing that Donald Trump was part of the process of getting this done, and if he wants to claim the win, I think the European leaders are more than willing to give it to them.
07:10For them, the most important thing is NATO is now prepared to deter and defend against the real threat that exists, which is from Russia.
07:16He did say that it was possible that Russia had territorial ambitions beyond Ukraine, but I want to talk about Ukraine, because Donald Trump spent a very, very little time of that press conference talking about Ukraine.
07:30He did say Washington will see if they can give Ukraine Patriot missiles, but he didn't pledge continued U.S. support to Kyiv, essentially.
07:40It's now going to be down to a ceasefire.
07:42So is that it?
07:43Is Washington washing its hands clean of this conflict?
07:49Well, I hope not, but all indications are that the United States, under Donald Trump and Donald Trump himself, is not interested in doing what needs to be done,
07:58which is to maximize pressure on Russia, which is, after all, the aggressor, and to maximize the support for the victim, which is Ukraine.
08:05From the very beginning, it's clear that Donald Trump doesn't share this view.
08:09He doesn't believe that the war in Ukraine is existential to American security.
08:15He's called it a European issue.
08:16He said it should remain a European issue.
08:19Indeed, this is one of the fundamental problems that President Trump has put forward.
08:26It's this idea that security of the United States is no longer intricately and inextricably tied to the security of Europe.
08:34The basis of the alliance for 76 years has been that security has been indivisible.
08:39Indeed, the only time that Article V was ever invoked was when the United States was attacked on September 11.
08:45European allies at the time believed that their security depended on coming to the aid of the United States, as they did in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
08:54So this is a pretty fundamental break in the way in which the United States approaches European security.
09:02And one of the results is Europeans trying to do more because they have to rely more on themselves and less on the United States.
09:10Donald Trump was on the defensive a lot when it came to, you heard him there bashing the media, many U.S. outlets over their recent report saying that the U.S. strikes on Saturday night in Iran only set the country's nuclear program back a couple of months.
09:30What do you make of the U.S. president's arguments that essentially these reports are meant to demean the army personnel who flew those planes and carried out that mission?
09:43I think it's a way to deflect the fundamental issue.
09:47We just don't know how much of the nuclear program has been destroyed.
09:52We do know that the pilots that flew the airplanes hit the targets they were supposed to hit.
09:57But we don't know because we have never been in a situation in which these bunker busters, these big bombs, whether they, in fact, penetrated deep enough to actually completely and utterly destroy, obliterate, to use the word the president, sites that are half a mile below a mountain.
10:20We also don't know, and we cannot know for now, whether the materials, the nuclear material, particularly the enriched uranium, was present there or indeed present somewhere else.
10:32Indeed, before the war, before the strikes, this material was in Isfahan.
10:39It was not in Fordow, according to the IAEA.
10:41So we just don't know.
10:44And rather than just saying we are waiting to assess, as General Keynes, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday, we are waiting to get a full assessment of the damage that it has inflicted.
10:57The president and Pete Hexeth, the secretary of defense, love to bash the media rather than deal with the fundamental fact, and it's a fact that we don't know.
11:09We just don't know.
11:10It's too early.
11:11Time will tell.
11:12And the problem is that the president always wants to have a win, and that's how it goes.
11:19Wait, because he was even quoting the Iranian foreign minister, foreign ministry spokesperson, who said that there was significant damage done.
11:29Yeah, I mean, if you have to rely on the Iranian foreign minister for your intelligence, you know you have a problem.
11:35So I would just unfortunately have to conclude that we don't know, and the president would like to know, and he's just blaming everybody else for seeing the obvious.
11:45We don't know.
11:46Ivo Adal, we're going to have to leave it there.
11:48Thank you so much for joining us on the program today.
