NATO Summit Shows Europe And US No Longer Have A Common Enemy

2025-06-27 01:09:37

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Mark Rutte had an unenviable task at the Hague summit this week. The NATO secretary-general had to work with diverging American and European views of current security threats. After Rutte made extraordinary efforts at highly deferential, overt flattery of Donald Trump to secure crucial outcomes for the alliance, he seems to have succeeded for now.

But what this meeting and the run-up have made increasingly clear is that the US and Europe no longer perceive themselves as having a single common enemy. NATO was established in 1949 as a defensive alliance against the acknowledged threat from the USSR. This defined the alliance through the Cold War until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, NATO has focused on Moscow as the major threat to international peace. But the increasingly bellicose China is demanding more attention from the US .

There are some symbolic moves that signal how things are changing. Every NATO summit declaration since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has used the same form of words:“We adhere to international law and to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and are committed to upholding the rules-based international order.”

The declaration published during the Hague summit on June 25 conspicuously does not mention either. Indeed, in a departure from recent declarations, the five paragraphs of the Hague summit declaration are brutally short and focused entirely on portraying the alliance solely in terms of military capability and economic investment to sustain that. No mention of international law and order this time.

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