Question: How should we understand this year’s NATO Summit communique? Was it very different from the 2024 Washington summit document?
Jason Israel: I would say that every word in the communique this year was particularly significant because the document was only five paragraphs. Last year, the communique was 44 paragraphs, which included a six-paragraph Ukraine supplement. The 2025 communique was scoped down, as was the summit itself.
The communique was encouraging for those of us who believe in transatlantic defense industry integration and its potential for increasing scale and resilience across countries that want to deter together, if not fight together at some point. Paragraph 4 [which commits to “rapidly expand transatlantic defense industrial cooperation and to harness emerging technology”] is helpful and will encourage companies to seek joint ventures and other ways to develop partnerships across the alliance. And the commitments by NATO countries to up defense spending to 5% of GDP should mean job creation and production will be enhanced on both sides of the Atlantic.
Question: Was this year’s summit enough to ease European uncertainty in America’s commitment to NATO? Did it provide a strong blueprint for Europe and America to work together?
Jason Israel: We have a diplomacy and trust gap with our allies that has formed over the last several months now. Trust can be lost quickly, and it takes a long time to get back, so no, there wasn’t enough to assuage concerns.
That said, the fact that there’s this historic increase in commitment across NATO is at least partially due to the Trump administration’s tactics of sowing doubt in the US commitment. And whether those tactics used to push NATO in that direction were necessary, you have to give credit to the results.
The communique also included a couple of major steps in the direction of defense commitment and in helping Ukraine. Even while Ukraine was an understated topic as compared to last year, the communique included allowing direct support to Ukraine and its defense industrial base to count for the calculation of national defense spending, which is new.
Overall, this summit reminded us that across allies and partners, we need to continue to innovate together, buy from each other, and make it easier to do both.
And to do this while we face increasingly aligned adversaries — China, Russia, DPRK, Iran — want to export more defense equipment to the world. And these countries don’t have export controls. They advertise that you can buy whatever you want and do whatever you want with it — and that’s the competition we need to consider.
Summarizing, we need to get to co-production at scale that makes sense for the alliance, but also assuages member nations’ domestic concerns, all while facing growing competition from global exporters that don’t have strings attached to their sales.
As we do so, there are multiple initiatives and pots of money to look out for. The EU has ReArm Europe, NATO has the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) and Task Force X, the US has the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), and Europe has the Joint European Disruptive Initiative (JEDI). We need to examine how these programs can more efficiently get tech from the lab to the warfighter while ensuring that individual countries buy things that are interoperable and align. NATO headquarters, among others, will be important in that.
Question: Was the shortened format of the summit and final communique leave too many things unaddressed?
Jason Israel: We definitely kicked a lot of the topics and decisions from last year down the road.
Last year, member nations agreed to create a NATO-Russia strategy and relatively early in the process of preparation for this summit, they realized that there was no way to get on the same page as to how to deal with Russia. We called it a “long-term threat” in the communique, but that’s not a strategy.
But a lot of business can get done outside the leaders meeting and the communique. For example, the NATO Summit Industry Forum also met in The Hague last week. The first one in Washington last year saw hundreds of attendees from companies, ministries of defense, academics that work on defense industry policy. Making regular that industry meeting on the margins, that’s progress. And they notably refreshed NATO’s Defense Production Action and released NATO’s first-ever Commercial Space Strategy .
Question: Some might have thought the summit was smoother than expected; was there a potential for more serious disagreement that was successfully avoided?
Jason Israel: I would answer that with a question. What is it, big picture, that the NATO Summit is trying to do? Why do they meet annually?
Foremost, a unified NATO at the summit is an annual checking of a box, showing that they can come together, and that they can agree on things. How many and what things they agree on can vary each year.
And there will always be internal divisions. That’s democracy, right? We celebrate diversity of perspectives and we work through them. I believe Secretary General Mark Rutte gets a lot for credit for his vision for this summit — that we needed to find the common ground well in advance, and come in and show the world that the NATO alliance is still unified.
Look at Iran, it had strikes from Israel and the US basically in the same week. Iran doesn’t have real alliances, there are no countries really coming in to help them. They would look at something like NATO and ask, how do you get dozens of countries — that have different views — to really support each other? That’s what I’d be asking myself if I were in Iran’s position.
There were certainly some ups and downs throughout the week. President Trump did equivocate when asked about the US commitment to Article Five. But in the end they reaffirmed the principles of NATO and produced, even though it was smaller, a noteworthy communique.
Question: China was notably absent from the communique this year. Why might that be?
Jason Israel: I would guess they decided not to use the document from last year as a starting point — unless it was just to note a couple very important things — but rather start with a blank sheet and list the few things that we wanted to include and agree on this year.
It’s certainly not that China is any less of a concern or a threat. From a US perspective, I was a bit surprised it wasn’t in there, because I thought the US might demand it be included as strategic competition with China is increasingly the priority. I’m sure that there were some interesting discussions — those I’m no longer part of — on the subject.
Question: If you’re Russia, how are you reacting to the 5% defense spending agreement?
Jason Israel: I think that for Russia, and particularly President Putin, this week didn’t change much. While it may have introduced a broader concern for them because of the massive amounts of defense spending that were committed, commitments are not military capability. It will take years for those to become real money, then to become real production.
In parallel, seeking interoperability and production can itself bolster deterrence. Some of deterrence is strategic messaging, which you did see at the summit.
Maybe Putin would have hoped that there’d have been massive disagreements and fissures on public display, because one of his goals is to make NATO look weak and fragmented.
But although, as I mentioned, the communique called Russia a “long-term threat,” there wasn’t a strong statement about the ongoing hybrid warfare that Russia supports. So I’d have to conclude that right now, Putin is not deterred from attacking Ukraine and pursuing sabotage and hybrid warfare across the continent, which relates to those key questions we kicked down the road last week. In terms of the discussions we’re having, where does the gray zone hybrid warfare actually become an attack on NATO?
Jason Israel is the Auterion Senior Fellow for the Defense Technology Initiative at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He has twice served the White House National Security Council, most recently as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Defense Policy & Strategy. He is a Captain in the US Navy Reserve.
Amy Graham holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and is currently Intern with the Editorial team at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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