NEW YORK, June 26. /TASS/. The main aim of the NATO summit in The Hague was to persuade the United States to stay in the alliance and keep supplying Ukraine with military aid, Bloomberg columnist Max Hastings wrote in an opinion piece.
According to him, European leaders were forced to show their loyalty and praise US President Donald Trump to avoid his ire or new threats of leaving NATO.
“Yesterday’s summit in The Hague made little pretense of discussing global strategy. It merely showcased the desperate efforts of European NATO members to increase their defense spending. It offered flattery to the US guest of honor in a fashion unprecedented even during the Cold War,” Hastings wrote.
According to him, Western leaders were “obliged to abase themselves, to pander, to profess assent when privately many dissent.” “No one in the room yesterday save the principal guest believed his claim that US and Israeli bombs had set back Iran `by decades’,” Hastings insisted.
As regards Ukraine, the columnist continued, “the Europeans can’t provide Zelensky with what he gets from the US.” Every NATO ally present at the summit understood that “only their submission and that of Zelensky may sustain Ukraine,” he argued.
Hastings doubted the majority of the NATO allies would seriously attempt to achieve what he called an ambitious spending target, in place for the next decade, by which time most of today’s leaders will have quit politics. Most of the Europeans were appalled by the US airstrikes on Iran, “which were perceived as a dance to a tune” written by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he noted. “At the Hague yesterday, however, once again truth was subordinated to telling the US president what he wanted to hear,” Hastings concluded.