In 2018, during his first term as President, Donald Trump famously responded to a question from Lesley Stahl of CBS about tariffs he had slapped on US allies with the quip, “I mean, what’s an ally?” Prime Minister Mark Carney is about to find out.
The upcoming NATO Summit in The Hague June 24-25 will be his first. And it will be one of the most consequential and fraught meetings of the Alliance since NATO began in 1949.
I was Canada’s Ambassador to NATO during President Trump’s first two NATO Summits. These, too, were high-stakes meetings. The aim among allies then was to maintain NATO unity condemning Russia’s aggression, support Ukraine, keep the US in the NATO tent (including, if we managed it, a US recommitment to Article 5’s collective defence), and signal a real willingness to correct the longstanding imbalance in defence spending.
The upcoming NATO Summit will have the same goals. The difference is that Trump 2.0 is much higher-risk for NATO than Trump’s first term. All is not ‘doom and gloom’: after a series of worrisome messages from the American Vice President and Secretary of Defence that Europe should not rely on the US backstop, the administration has recently signaled it will not abandon NATO.
But there are still high-risk scenarios that could unfold: Trump could once again change his position on NATO. He is famous for sowing uncertainty and shifting goalposts. Or, the summit could see a weakening of American support for Ukraine: there is a risk that Trump might be swayed in this direction by a tactically-timed gesture from Vladimir Putin just before the NATO Summit. There is also a likelihood that President Trump’s pointed support for Putin before his early departure from the Kananaskis G7 will have an impact on the NATO Summit decisions on support for Ukraine. Or, the review of US global troop posture later this year could result in a significant reduction of US presence in Europe at a time when European forces could not lead a sustained defence on land, air or sea.
Secretary General Mark Rutte warned last week that Russia could be ready to attack NATO within five years. Putin has been emboldened by the shift in US policy and, although unlikely, it is not inconceivable he could use disarray among NATO allies to launch a short-lived sub-threshhold attack on NATO to prove a point that the collective defence guarantee isn’t worth the paper it is printed on.
We’ve already seen the seeds of such a move by Russia, with attacks on undersea communications cables, build-up in the Arctic and along NATO borders, grey zone disinformation campaigns, election interference and assassinations inside NATO states. Deterrence is at its core political, and the messages from the NATO Summit and from NATO leaders could have profound impacts on the risk calculus of Russia and other adversaries. Fraying cohesion among allies will be seen as a lack of resolve and make the alliance more vulnerable.
There are longer-term strategic challenges at play that will have a profound impact on NATO, Canada’s security interests and the international architecture Canada and Europe rely on for stability.
The antidote to this, maybe, is to illustrate to the Americans that European and Canadian allies are finally serious about increasing their defence, including contributions to NATO.
I expect this NATO Summit to agree to a new benchmark of between 3 and 3.5% of GDP on defence and 1.5% of GDP on defence enablers such as infrastructure and cybersecurity. Even this might not end up being enough. Current defence plans established by NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) already require roughly 3.7% of GDP across NATO, barring efficiencies gained by pooling procurements.
So, the expected hike from the Hague summit would be less than needed to fulfill existing deterrence and defence plans. Secretary-General Rutte starkly stated that NATO needs “a quantum leap in our collective defence” that would include a fivefold increase in air defence, thousands more tanks and millions more artillery shells to boost stockpiles and ensure NATO countries match existing levels of Russian production. And this is without taking into account threats from other potential adversaries.
Whether the NATO Summit declaration will also reaffirm the collective defence commitment of Article 5, refer to the security risk posed by China or to conflict in the Middle East, call out Russian aggression, signal continuing or more support to Ukraine or reaffirm the importance of Greenland to NATO’s collective defence of the Atlantic are all open questions.
What is certain, as with the first two NATO Summits involving President Trump, is that there will not be lengthy and ambitious summit declarations setting out NATO positions on most geopolitical issues of the day. I fully expect to see a very short, high-level declaratory document coming out of the Hague Summit focused almost exclusively on defence spending. This is a smart tactical choice.
Trying and failing to secure consensus from all leaders on issues of importance to NATO would be worse than not trying at all. It would send a signal that NATO is walking away from or weakening standards it has set in the past. My advice to leaders would be: “Don’t ask the question if you won’t like the answer”’: wait for another day, another year and another summit to move substantive goalposts forward and rely on meetings of foreign ministers, defence ministers and quiet diplomacy among Allied diplomats and Allied military to keep the NATO work going throughout the year.
But these are all short-term tactical considerations. There are longer-term strategic challenges at play that will have a profound impact on NATO, Canada’s security interests and the international architecture Canada and Europe rely on for stability. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission said in April that “the West as we knew it no longer exists”. This may well be the case. At the very least we are at a ‘hinge of history’ where the future of NATO is at risk.
Defence Minister David McGuinty and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte during the NATO defence ministers meeting in Brussels, June 5, 2025/NATO image
This matters to Canada. As I recently wrote in Canada Among Nations, from the beginning and throughout its history, Canada has relied on the North Atlantic Alliance to be more than a military alliance:
- We saw NATO as a place where we would have a voice and a veto at the world’s primary (functioning) international security table.
- We used it to share the risks and burdens of defence with other allies.
- We also viewed NATO as a tool to keep the US engaged in Europe and to keep the transatlantic relationship.
- At the same time, we also used NATO as a forum where we could seek to blunt extremes of US policies or behaviors with which we did not agree.
- Finally, we also relied on NATO to help build a community of democracies as the Alliance expanded to incorporate former Soviet republics.
Canada has these same interests in NATO today – even more so I would argue given global instability and a less certain US security guarantee. History has show that adapting NATO while maintaining cohesion takes constant diplomatic work and concrete military and political contributions. For Canada to assume blindly that NATO will continue to serve our security and foreign policy needs in the same way that it has for the past 76 years would be naïve. So, what can Canada do to help save and shape the Alliance going forward?
For the upcoming Summit, Canada’s immediate to-do list should be short. The first and only priority is to spend more on defence. Prime Minister Carney’s announcement that Canada would meet the NATO 2% this year, five years ahead of the previous government’s timeline, was very welcome. Unfortunately, this will see Canada in compliance with NATO spending targets for less than three weeks. When the new target is set at the Hague Summit, Canada will have to increase its defence spending yet again. It is not yet clear what timeline will be set.
What is clear is the spending will have to happen, and not solely, or even mainly because it helps manage our bilateral relationship with the US. Rather, greater defence and security investments serve Canada’s direct interests. This is not a hard case to make: new threat vectors have a daily impact on Canadians’ lives, whether from disinformation, cyber attacks, or hikes in prices of food or energy prices due to disruptions of supply chains. Europe is one of Canada’s most important security and economic partners; the EU is our third-largest trading partner and supply chains and communications are dependent on free navigation of land, sea and space across the Euro-Atlantic. Canada gains militarily by working with interoperable allies, and benefits from the deterrence effect of NATO’s collective security guarantee.
The challenge for the Carney government as it makes the case to Canadians for more defence spending is that a national conversation about Canada’s place in the world has been missing from public debate for a long time. One means of illustrating to Canadians how spending more on security and defence is in their interests would be to engage them in a sustained public conversation around the updated defence policy the PM promised in his June 9th speech. That new defence policy should be accompanied by revised national security and foreign policies that are integrated, breaking down the barriers between international and national levels, spanning trade, security, defence, diplomacy and national resilience.
Moving fast after the Summit to meet the new defence spending targets would give Canada leverage at the NATO table to work with allies to redefine defence spending in a way that is more about impact.
Beyond the immediacy of the Summit, there is a more ambitious approach Canada should take at NATO to better serve Canadian interests. First, in the area of defence spending, the metric of percentage of GDP is flawed and has gained a political weight and importance that outweighs its utility. It is flawed because it compares the percentage of GDP spent by those few allies, like the US, with global military reach against the rest of the Alliance with militaries focused on their own neighbourhood.
The utility of the metric is limited because percentage of GDP does not measure military effectiveness or participation in NATO operations. Based on a recent Rand study, Canada could push to revise the metric to focus on military effectiveness and contributions. Such arguments, however, could only be made from a position of strength if they were to gain traction. Moving fast after the Summit to meet the new defence spending targets would give Canada leverage at the NATO table to work with allies to redefine defence spending in a way that is more about impact.
Second, NATO should consider Canada’s contributions to the defence of North America when it assigns military capability targets. Current NATO defence planning is still largely based on a Cold War model where North American troops and assets travel eastward across the Atlantic to protect Europe. In spite of Canada’s lead role in Latvia and many other contributions to deterrence in Europe, we have been criticized for the gap in military capabilities NATO has assigned us. As Canada focuses more on deterrence and defence in its own backyard, we should still contribute to European security, particularly through Canadian command of the NATO presence in Latvia. But framing Canada’ contributions to NORAD, maritime and land defence of Canadian territory as being firmly within NATO and SACEUR’s defence planning process would reinforce the “transatlantic” part of transatlantic security, and send an important signal that the mutual defence guarantee of the Alliance is a “two-way street”.
Finally, to begin to rectify our over-reliance on the US, Canada is seeking a new defence and security agreement with the EU. The challenge at the upcoming NATO Summit for both Europe and Canada will be to do significantly more on defence without losing Washington’s security guarantee and to have the EU invest more in defence without undercutting NATO. Canada had long resisted the creation of a European pillar within NATO for fear of being sidelined and because we didn’t want the EU exercising ‘strategic autonomy’ in decision-making or otherwise competing with NATO.
As the world becomes more dangerous and American leadership more unpredictable, it is in Canada’s interests to work to shape NATO into the Alliance Canada needs. Success at the Hague Summit will be measured by cohesion among allies and maintenance of NATO’s deterrent messaging and posture. But success in the long run will be measured by the strength of the transatlantic relationship and whether NATO can adapt to what might turn out to be a post-American alliance. Elbows up, Canada.
Republished from Policy Magazine
Policy Contributing Writer Kerry Buck was Canada’s Ambassador to NATO from 2015-2018. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa and the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at Trinity College, University of Toronto.
