Hello and welcome to the Centre for European Forum podcast, Unpacking Europe.

I'm Octavia Hughes, host of today's episode, and today I'm joined by

Luigi Scatzieri, Senior Research Fellow at the CER, and Sophia Besh, senior fellow at Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace in Washington and CER alumna, as well as former CERR podcast host.

So in today's episode, we'll be discussing NATO and European security. In July,

NATO leaders met in Washington for the Alliance's 75th anniversary summit. They congratulated themselves

on the recent rise in defense spending in Europe and agreed on a set of measures to strengthen

deterrence against Russia and increased support for Ukraine. So I'll be asking Luigi and

Sophia what they make of all this and what Donald Trump's return would mean for the alliance

and for European security more broadly. So if I start with you, Sophia and with the question

of Ukraine's NATO membership, how significant is the fact that allies agree to say that Ukraine's membership is now irreversible

and how successful do you think the summit was in strengthening support for Ukraine?

Yes, thank you, Octavia, and thank you for having me on. It's really great to be back.

So look, I think in the lead-up to the summit, NATO allies and the host government in the US

were really quite careful to set

low expectations. And if you don't have expectations, you can't get disappointed. So that's sort of my

headline on Ukraine. But let's look at what concretely was decided. I think the Allies did

three things, essentially. First, they announced some significant commitments on aid, particularly on air defense

capabilities. I'd argue that those were long overdue and essentially designed to help Ukraine

through the rest of the year. There was also a financial commitment to give Ukraine 40 billion

euros in military aid over the next year, which sounds good, but I think it's notable that Allies

opted for an annual review here rather than

...