WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump's first appearance at NATO since returning to the White House was supposed to center on how the U.S. secured a historic military spending pledge from others in the defensive alliance — effectively bending it to its will.
But in the spotlight instead now is Trump's decision to strike three nuclear enrichment facilities in Iran that the administration says eroded Tehran's nuclear ambitions as well as the president's sudden announcement that Israel and Iran had reached a ''complete and total ceasefire.'' The sharp U-turn in hostilities just hours before he was set to depart for the summit is sure to dominate the discussions in The Hague, Netherlands.
The impact of the strikes had already begun to shape the summit, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte dancing around the issue even as hundreds of people showed up in The Hague on Sunday to denounce the conflict in a protest that was supposed to be focused on defense spending.
Still, other NATO countries have become accustomed to the unpredictable when it comes to Trump, who has made no secret of his disdain for the alliance, which was created as a bulwark against threats from the former Soviet Union.
Trump's debut on the NATO stage at the 2017 summit was perhaps most remembered by his shove of Dusko Markovic, the prime minister of Montenegro, as the U.S. president jostled toward the front of the pack of world leaders during a NATO headquarters tour.
And he began the 2018 summit by questioning the value of the decades-old military alliance and accusing its members of not contributing enough money for their defense — themes he has echoed since. In Brussels, Trump floated a 4% target of defense spending as a percentage of a country's gross domestic product, a figure that seemed unthinkable at the time.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will also attend the NATO summit this week. She said if Trump does anything to sow division within the alliance, it would benefit Xi Jinping of China, which NATO countries have accused of enabling Russia as it invades Ukraine.
''That does not help America, does not help our national security,'' Shaheen said in an interview. ''What it does is hand a victory to our adversaries, and for an administration that claims to be so concerned about the threat from (China), to behave in that way is hard to understand.''