By Annie Linskey and Alexander Ward

THE HAGUE -- What a difference one night in a Dutch palace can make.

President Trump departed Washington early Tuesday in a bad mood, swearing at Israel and Iran for endangering the cease-fire he had brokered and sweating from a heat wave blanketing the capital.

Once he settled into his royal digs here, where temperatures dipped into the 60s, the cease-fire was holding and he basked in praise from European leaders he had clashed with for years.

"I came here because it was something I'm supposed to be doing," said Trump during an hourlong press conference at the end of his brief trip to the Netherlands. "But I left here a little bit different."

The biggest difference was his new verdict on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

"It's not a rip-off," Trump said, reversing his past broadsides against the alliance.

Trump even got a pass on his profanity from NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who compared the Iran-Israel situation to disciplining children, explaining, "Daddy has to sometimes use strong language."

The first NATO summit of Trump's second term indicates he and his European counterparts have finally reached an understanding: If allies pay more for their own defense, the U.S. will remain a committed leader of NATO. In a bonus for Europeans, Trump bashed Russian President Vladimir Putin as the main reason war still rages in Ukraine.

" Vladimir Putin has been more difficult," Trump said. "Vladimir Putin really has to end that war."

But getting to this point took immense effort, and some European officials privately bristled at how much this year's summit was geared toward personally satisfying Trump.

One day earlier, on Trump's flight to the Netherlands, he had equivocated about his commitment to NATO's core tenet, mutual defense, enshrined in its founding treaty. "Depends on your definition. There are numerous definitions of Article 5," he said.

Organizers compressed the gathering to just one day, under U.S. pressure to focus on European military spending and European desire to minimize chances of conversations getting confrontational, as they did at NATO's 2018 summit. The final agreed-to text was five paragraphs, one of the shortest communiqués in the alliance's 75-year history.

Europeans also employed copious flattery.

"You are a man of strength, but you're also a man of peace," gushed Rutte.

Even Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president who has clashed with Trump, issued a statement brimming with praise after a bilateral meeting. Trump, for his part, said he held a good meeting with Zelensky and committed to sending the country more Patriot air-defense systems, American equipment that Kyiv has long requested.

But not everyone was ebullient.

Former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said one of the headline commitments -- spending 5% of economic output on defense within 10 years -- must be achieved sooner.

"All other options are disappointing or too weak," he said.

And Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania's former foreign minister, said gratifying Trump had distracted from the bigger picture: confronting Russia's military resurgence.

"The problem is our expectation at the summit was to win a political battle with Trump to appease him," Landsbergis said in an interview after the gathering. "The real battle is actually Putin, who is out there blasting Ukraine every single day, and I don't think we achieved much on that front."

He cited European intelligence that Russia is rearming at levels beyond what it needs to fight in Ukraine. The buildup should have been the main focus of the summit, Landsbergis said, not Trump.

The summit occurred as Trump was toggling priorities, including pushing lawmakers in the U.S. to support his legislative agenda, negotiating an effort to push member nations to increase military spending while also monitoring a fragile peace in the Middle East.

The only apparent cloud darkening the presidential mood was a leaked preliminary intelligence report that found the U.S. military's strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities only set back Tehran's nuclear ambitions by a few months. He blamed the reports on "idiots at CNN" who broke the story and other new outlets who followed it. And, while Trump didn't dispute the validity of the intelligence reports, he stressed that they were preliminary and cited other reports from Israel and Iran describing significantly more damage.

Just as NATO members voted to lift spending commitments, the White House put out a statement from the Israel Atomic Energy Commission saying the U.S. strikes on the Fordow nuclear site in Iran made it "inoperable" and set Iranian nuclear ambitions back by "many years." Trump read from the statement during the news conference.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that a formal leak investigation has been launched to learn how the sensitive intelligence became public.

Trump's mood was notable for a president who during his first term showed dislike for traveling to big international summits. During the Group of Seven summit in Canada earlier this month, Trump was annoyed he had to sit through a lengthy meeting about fire prevention and repeatedly asked aides what was going on in the outside world with the war.

"We've gotta go," he said, explaining the decision to leave, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

Staff from some other delegations rolled their eyes as Trump's team left early. His helicopter flew over a barbecue for the remaining delegations at the summit.

Trump said Wednesday he was genuinely pleased with the Dutch trip. "This was a tremendous summit, and I enjoyed it very much," he said after several hours of meetings in The Hague. "I stayed through every one of those speeches, every one. And some were good."

Typically, U.S. presidents don't sit through all of the speeches, but instead pop out for bilateral meetings.

Trump appeared upbeat from the lavish dinner upon his arrival Tuesday. He and other leaders gathered at the 17th century Royal Palace Huis ten Bosch, in a hall decorated with floor to ceiling paintings and lighted by chandeliers. Trump, who favors grand rooms, was photographed looking up to take in the splendor.

He overnighted there as the guest of Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima and dined again with them in the morning. "I actually had breakfast today with a king and a queen who were beautiful, beautiful people. Central Casting."

Trump even had praise for the foliage. "I saw the most beautiful trees," Trump said. "In fact, I want to bring some back with me."

Write to Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 25, 2025 15:52 ET (19:52 GMT)

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