23 June 2025, 23:28 | Updated: 24 June 2025, 07:45

By Natasha Clark

As I flew into the last NATO summit in Washington nearly a year ago, America and the wider world stage looked quite different.

Outgoing President Joe Biden hadn’t yet stepped aside from the race for the White House.

What turned out to be his final summit in charge was spent batting off questions about his suitability to continue to hold high office, after he introduced Zelensky as Putin.

12 months on, and a lot has changed. A new President back in the White House, a humanitarian crisis brewing in Gaza, and Israel and Iran firing missiles across the Middle East.

One thing has not – and that is Downing Street’s Trump appeasement strategy.

But there are some serious cracks starting to appear in the transatlantic alliance.

NATO bosses will this week deliver the fudge of all fudges on defence spending in a bid to keep him on side.

The PM and other allies will agree to spend a whopping five per cent of GDP on defence by 2035, just as he called for.

To mark Trump’s first NATO summit back in charge of the free world, keeping its biggest spender firmly on side looks on the face of things, like a smart strategy.

And with the President’s other foreign policy promises – peace to Gaza and Ukraine – looking stubbornly stuck, the President desperately needs an international win to hail on the home front.

Our prime minister will be the first to praise the President’s heroics in making that happen, if he hopes it will keep in his good books.

But........

© LBC