The US president’s bombastic persona has cast a shadow on the military bloc’s top-level meetings
NATO leaders could stop gathering annually due in part to the “drama” associated with US President Donald Trump, according to Reuters.
The US president is a vocal critic of the military bloc, calling it a “paper tiger” and describing fellow members as “free-loaders” who failed his latest test by refusing to assist the US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran. Trump has injected controversy into a number of summits since being elected president for the first time in 2016.
“Better to have fewer summits than bad summits,” a European diplomat told Reuters.
Last week, NATO’s de facto think tank, the Atlantic Council, suggested that less “high-profile summitry” would “dial down the drama.” The article also proposed four other ways to make the upcoming Türkiye summit a success – including having a military parade of the kind Trump is known to appreciate.
Trump ‘drama’ at NATO
At his first summit as president in 2017, Trump was filmed shoving Montenegro’s then-prime minister, Dusko Markovic, during a photo op.
During the leaders’ photo shoot, then US President Donald Trump pushes Montenegrin Prime Minister Duško Marković aside to move to the front row.New NATO Headquarters, Brussels | 25 May 2017 pic.twitter.com/AOI2Qg1yu3
— The Notorious (@camlibelive) March 9, 2026
In 2018, he unnerved member states by threatening to withdraw the US from the bloc – a pressure tactic that Trump has since repeatedly bragged about.
He left the 2019 summit early and called then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “two-faced” after Trudeau was caught on a hot mike complaining to other leaders about Trump’s behavior.
Last year, Trump forced other NATO nations to pledge 5% of their GDP to defense spending. The target is partially fiction, since only 3.5% is required in direct military spending, while the extra 1.5% is “defense-related” and can include, for example, a project for a bridge linking Sicily with the Italian mainland.
Drama beyond Trump
Other leaders have also contributed to turning NATO gatherings into spectacles. French President Emmanuel Macron infamously described the bloc as “brain-dead” ahead of the 70th anniversary meeting in London – the same that Trump stormed out of.
Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has been a recent fixture, ever eager to berate weapons donors for offering insufficient support for Ukraine’s war effort against Russia. The Vilnius summit of 2023 produced a stark reminder of how lonely a Western proxy can be, with a photo of Zelensky in his military-style clothing seemingly lost among the guests in formal attire.
NATO has held annual summits since 2021 plus two emergency meetings over the Ukraine conflict in 2022. The leaders convened just 12 times from the organization’s creation in 1949 to 1991, the year the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
