Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which includes several European countries, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, are gathering this week in The Hague, Netherlands, for a yearly summit amid Russia’s continued war on Ukraine and uncertainty about Washington’s future in the alliance.

The NATO summit, which starts on Tuesday and lasts for two days, is the first to be attended by US President Donald Trump since he took office in January for his second term. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister, will also chair the meeting for the first time.

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Among expected talking points are the war in Ukraine and the issue of how much member states are spending on their collective defence, a contentious point in particular for the US. Trump has long argued that the US shoulders too much of the financial burden and wants others to raise their defence spending.

But the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran, which the US joined last weekend, could shadow the summit. On June 23, Iran fired missiles at the US’s Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, a day after the US struck three Iranian nuclear facilities. Trump has since claimed that Israel and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire, but neither of the two nations has confirmed any deal.

Who is attending the NATO summit?

Amid several events planned for the two days of meetings, the main focus of NATO summits is the North Atlantic Council meeting on June 25, at which heads of state will discuss security spending, among other pressing topics.

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All 32 NATO heads of state or government, top European Union members, and Ukraine’s representatives are expected at that meeting. Notably, they include:

• UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer
• Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney
• US President Donald Trump
• French President Emmanuel Macron
• German Chancellor Friedrich Merz
• Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni
• Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez
• Netherlands Prime Minister Dick Schoof
• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
• European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen or European Council President Antonio Costa

Other NATO members whose heads of state or government are expected are:

Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden.

Additionally, a group of Asian ally states is usually invited, including Japan, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand. Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and New Zealand’s Christopher Luxon have confirmed attendance.

Will NATO leaders discuss the Israel-Iran conflict?

Yes, they are expected to address the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran.

At a media briefing on Friday, a spokesperson for the German government said NATO members would discuss the conflict at the summit, but refused to comment on any military plans.

On Friday, the three largest European nations by population, Germany, France and the UK, held talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva, Switzerland, in an effort to avert a protracted war in the Middle East.

What else is on the agenda?

Several topics are set to be discussed, including Russia’s war and NATO financing.

Support for Ukraine

The Russia-Ukraine war has dominated the summit since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and remains the key topic on the agenda.

NATO members have long reiterated that their biggest threat is Russia and have been key in funding Ukraine’s resistance.

At the 2024 NATO summit in Washington, NATO allies declared that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO” and promised long-term security assistance with at least 50 billion euros in annual funding.

Rutte said on June 12 that long-term support to Ukraine was of paramount importance ahead of the critical gathering.

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“We need to make sure that Ukraine is in the best possible position to one, [sustain] the ongoing conflict with Russia, [following] the unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine, but also to be in the best possible position when a long-term ceasefire (or) a peace deal arises, to make sure that Putin will never, ever try this again,” he said.

Although Ukraine is not a NATO member, it has long hoped to join, and the alliance agreed in 2008 that Kyiv would be admitted once it met a set of economic, defence, legal and political requirements. As a member, Kyiv would benefit from the Alliance’s Article 5 policy, which guarantees that anyone attacking a member state will be met with a collective defence response.

Ukraine’s potential membership of NATO is a key issue for Russia and one of the reasons it cited for starting the war. Russia views such an expansion of NATO towards its borders as a direct threat to its national security.

But splits in the NATO alliance have become visible since the Russian invasion: while members such as Estonia are keen for Ukraine to join and for more military support to be provided, some, like Hungary, are viewed as more friendly to Moscow. In Poland’s recent presidential election, the issue of Ukrainian refugees in the country, as well as ties with Europe, were key talking points.

Others are somewhere in the middle, fearful of overstepping and escalating the conflict into an all-member war, as Russia routinely threatens that arming Ukraine could drag NATO member nations directly into the conflict.

With Trump’s election to the White House in January, it has become increasingly unclear whether Ukraine will continue to enjoy much US support, as well.

Trump promised to swiftly end the war while on the campaign trail, but his attempts have not resulted in a ceasefire, and his attitude towards Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been less than friendly, evident in the manner in which the Ukrainian president was scolded during his White House visit in February.

Defence spending

Raising the amount each member spends on defence as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) is also a big topic.

In 2023, as Russia’s war on Ukraine entered its second year, NATO leaders agreed to raise spending on national defence budgets to at least 2 percent of GDP by 2024, up from the previous threshold of 1.5 percent. However, not all members have done so, with only 22 member countries meeting the target. Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain did not meet this target in 2024.

NATO allies have also come under fire from the Trump administration, which accuses the alliance of relying too heavily on US funding and has demanded that others step up spending to 5 percent of GDP.

The US presently contributes 15.8 percent to the NATO yearly $3.5bn spending. Trump has also cast doubts on whether the alliance should defend those countries not spending enough.

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In May, the US envoy to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, told reporters that “5 percent is our number. We’re asking our allies to invest in their defence like they mean it.”

Due to that pressure, Secretary General Rutte is likely to ask member states to set a new target of 5 percent of GDP for their defence budgets by 2032, with about 1.5 percentage points of that set aside for “soft spending” on infrastructure and cybersecurity. However, some countries, such as Spain, have rejected the hike as unrealistic.

Meanwhile, Rutte has also urged member countries to boost their production of weapons and defence systems. “We have fantastic industrial companies in the US, all over Europe and Canada, but they are not producing at speed,” he said in a June 12 statement. “So we need more shifts, more production lines.”

Some members have already announced plans to boost defence spending.

Earlier this month, the UK announced plans to bring the country to “war readiness”. Its Strategic Defence Review (SDR) includes new investments in nuclear warheads, a fleet of new submarines and new munitions factories. But while the UK has so far pledged to increase spending on defence from 2.3 percent currently to 2.5 percent by 2027 – with “an ambition” to raise it to 3 percent in the next parliament (after 2029) – it is unclear if there are plans to increase this further.

EU leadership of NATO

European countries are increasingly looking to step up their leadership roles in case Trump unilaterally pulls out of NATO, the UK’s Financial Times newspaper reported in March.

The UK, France, Germany and the Nordic countries were among those engaged in informal but structured discussions on reorganising the bloc’s finances to reflect greater European spending, and hoped to present a plan to the US ahead of the summit, the paper reported.

Although Trump has not stated the US will leave NATO, Washington’s displeased posture has seen the EU bracing for a hard drawdown from the alliance. Talks could likely touch on a possible proposal from the EU.

Already, the US is estimated to have spent 3.19 percent of its GDP in 2024 on defence, down from 3.68 percent a decade ago, when all members initially promised to increase spending following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

It would take about five to 10 years of increased EU spending to replace current US capabilities, the FT reported.