Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, Azuzana Munchank and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about NATO. The NATO summit has just concluded. The accident that everybody feared would happen did not happen.

NATO did agree on an increase in the defense spending target for all the members, should we say for all but one of the members, but that again is disputed.

Donald Trump was reasonably in good mood. Ukraine was sort of subdued. The communique changed

its wording on Russia, toned it down. Quite a few things sort of subtle things happen. Mark

Rutter wrote an extremely embarrassing letter. Then he made another extremely

embarrassing comment. But it has a certain sense of this alliance that was like that embodied seriousness.

It was the embodiment of the West seriousness for decades. It's sort of descending into farce.

When grand nations decline, this, that kind of stuff that happens that you

see while it happens. It's not funny in a larger sense, but there's something funny about it at the

same time. Jack, what do you, how do you see what happened yesterday? Yeah, it's like Marx didn't

actually say this. It's a paraphrase of what he said in the 18th Broom era of Louis Napoleon,

that history repeats itself twice. First is tragedy at the second as farce. I guess if you look at it in

the lingerie, you can see the tragedy as being the massive really demilitarization of NATO after the Cold War,

which is partly what's put us in this position. The farce, obviously, is everything else. I think that

almost kind of, what was it, the Ruta said, that, you know, daddy needs to use strong language

sometime about Trump. I think that that was a bit of a reflection of some of the general

uns seriousness. First of all, this kind of defense spending target. So you have, you know, this

this 5% target, which is 3.5% in military spending and 1.5% in various other kinds of

spending that I guess you could claim has military applications, infrastructure, cybersecurity

capabilities, what have you. However, it's no coincidence that they've gone for like 5%

as the kind of headline target because that's what Trump wanted them to spend. However, it's no coincidence that they've gone for like 5% as the kind of headline target

...