Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief.

This is FP Live.

So I've been on the road in Europe for the last week or so, and I'm recording this today from the Hague in the Netherlands,

where this year's NATO summit has been taking place. Between the Iran-Israel

conflict and the NATO summit, things have been so newsy that I wanted to weigh in. So here goes.

If you've read even a single headline on the NATO summit, you know that members of the world's

biggest military alliance have now agreed to increase

their defense spending from around 2% of their GDPs to 5%. And if 5% sounds like a suspiciously round

number, that's because it is. It's the number Donald Trump wanted. And so Europe's leaders have basically figured out how to give the American president exactly what he wants.

They're agreeing to increase defense spending to 3.5% of their GDPs, with an additional 1.5% coming from defense-related infrastructure.

And that could include anything from roads to bridges or anything else. And on the one hand, it makes sense.

What is the point of building tanks if you don't have roads to get them from A to B?

But on the other hand, it's also a bit of financial wizardry.

One more thing that world leaders are doing to appease Trump.

And as we've been saying for a while now, flattery seems to work on the president.

Mark Ruta, the NATO Secretary General, literally called him daddy when he referred to Trump getting angry at Israel and Iran over the weekend.

Now, from all my conversations here in The Hague, it is clear that the flattery and the positive headlines,

they mask a broader concern. First, there's no real way to know, to ensure that countries actually will

keep their promises on defense spending. Second, Trump has made clear America will not increase

its spending from its current 3.2%. Spain has said it once an exemption. So all of these commitments, they're already fraying at the seams.

But more than all of that, even for the countries that genuinely want to uphold their pledges in the Summit, communique, there is a question that isn't getting asked enough.

Where does the money come from?

...