NATO Goes Dutch

Diary of the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague

This week’s NATO Summit in The Hague was the most expensive ever. At a cost of roughly €1.2 million per minute, it is reportedly in the running for most expensive meeting in history. With such an extraordinary price tag, and in such an efficient Northern European setting, you’d expect laser-precise organization. But there was no such thing. Accredited members of the international media were basically left to fend for themselves. For the first two days of the event, that hardly mattered. All anyone was doing was waiting for Trump to arrive. In the converted underground garage that served as the international media center, journalists would periodically erupt in laughter as a new Truth Social post was published, or a new Trump video clip was released. Dutch journalists reported on the movements of Air Force One as it made its way across the Atlantic. The entire event was dedicated to demonstrating total servility to Trump, flattering Trump, and getting him to see the value of the “globalist” NATO project, which conservative leaders of the alliance portrayed in civilizational terms, as a guardian of “Western civilization”–presumably to make the Atlantic compact sound more appealing to Trump. (I do wonder what the non-Western members of NATO – Turkey, Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro, to name a few – think about this civilizational framing).