Hello and welcome to this Centre for European Reform podcast. I'm Charles Grant, the CR's director.

I'm joined today by Luigi Skatsyieri to discuss the NATO summit which happened a few days ago on

the 25th of June. Luigi was until recently a senior researcher at the Centre for European

Reform working on defence issues. He's now left us to go to work for the European Institute

of Security Studies. We're delighted that he's come back today to tell us what he thinks about

the summit. Welcome, Luigi.

Thank you, Charles. My pleasure to be

on the podcast again. One could argue that in most respects, Donald Trump has been a more revolutionary

or disruptive president in his second term than we expected. For example, he's sometimes taken

rather Russian view of the war in Ukraine. He's bombed Iran. He's closed-ungoverned agents like USAID. He started trade war with

much of the world. So he's been very disruptive, but perhaps on NATO, he's been less disruptive

than we expected because last time he was president in his first term, he came quite close to pulling

America out of NATO altogether in 2018. So do you think the way the summit's gone

this week, Louisiana, and perhaps you can start by telling us a little bit about what was

the agreed with the summit, do you think we can now be reassured and that Trump has turned out to

be less disruptive vis-a-vis-vis-a-native than we expected? Can we start relaxing? Tell us,

first of all, what happened at the summit?

Sure, and it's a very, very good question. But I think in a nutshell, the summit was kept very short,

precisely to cater to that risk that leaders were aware of, of Trump potentially torpedoing the

summit, whether by leaving early or saying bad things about NATO.

And so the agenda was kept to really minimum, and the whole summit was structured around giving Trump a big win,

namely with Europeans signing up to a new defence spending target of 5% on defence, which is a big jump

...