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| Volume 55 Number 15, June 28, 2025 | ARCHIVE | HOME | JBCENTRE | SUBSCRIBE |
"Not a Cent for NATO! Not a Cent for
War!"
Mass demonstrations took place in The Hague to protest against the NATO Summit that was held there on June 24 and 25 [1]. A group of organisations and activists, united under the banner of the Counter-Summit Coalition for Peace and Justice, organised a demonstration and counter-summit on June 21 and 22 at The Hague comprising people from across Holland and Europe. These demonstrations continued throughout the NATO leaders' summit in spite of the largest police presence in recent times. In a statement spokesperson Olaf Kemerink explained: "While many people are afraid of further military escalation, NATO is coming to The Hague to prepare for more war. Rutte and Trump won't bring peace - they're organising a war summit to decide that even more money should go to the arms industry." [2]
Demonstration in The Hague, June 22, 2025 against the
NATO Summit
The Counter-Summit Coalition believes it is time for a different voice. Spokesperson Guido van Leemput added: "If you read the newspapers, you'd think NATO is keeping us safe. But with the arms race they are fuelling and the war rhetoric they promote, the world is only becoming more dangerous. Those who stockpile weapons will eventually want to use them." He added that now NATO member states are increasingly divided and the alliance appears to be in its biggest crisis since its founding, the need for an alternative grows. "In The Hague, they want to 'save' NATO with more defence spending, but we want solutions rooted in sustainable peace and justice," he said.
The peoples of the NATO countries are protesting against increased military spending, the war preparations and cutbacks to social programmes, very well aware that government decisions taken on the basis of the use of executive powers greatly endanger the cause of world peace and permit the US and its NATO partners to commit genocide and carry on wars for regime change to force all countries to submit to the demands of the narrow private interests they serve.
With this opposition and the internal divisions, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had previously announced that the focus of the Summit would only be on "a major new defence investment plan, raising the benchmark for defence investment to five per cent of GDP".
In the end, the NATO leaders' summit was a flop before it even got underway. It was reduced to a dinner hosted by the Dutch king on the evening of June 24 and a meeting for 2.5 hours on the morning of June 25. The final summit communiqué [3] released on Wednesday was short - five paragraphs long, compared to the 5,000-word Washington Summit Declaration from 2024.
Trump had set a target for all NATO members to increase their military spending to five per cent of GDP during his 2024 presidential campaign, saying that the US was not going to be the main funder of NATO. Rutte has been pushing hard for this target. "NATO has no opt-out, and NATO does no side deals," he told reporters in The Hague on June 24. "It is critical that each ally carries their fair share of the burden."
In previous comments, Rutte had promised a "more lethal alliance". However, reports indicate that there was no consensus on any of the matters of major concern facing the world at this time. With Donald Trump calling the shots and indicating a perfunctory attendance at the Summit, its proceedings were limited to the demand for increased spending on NATO to five per cent of GDP, on which there is no consensus either. This can at best be treated as "aspirational", accompanied by a lot of warmongering rhetoric about the "benefits" for the peoples of the NATO countries of spending on war production and war preparations.
According to Rutte, each country raising its defence spending to five per cent of GDP is a "concerted effort to ramp up defence industry across the Alliance, bringing not only greater security but also more jobs. And a continued focus on support for Ukraine, alongside the pursuit of a just and lasting end to Russia's war of aggression."
The fact remains that NATO members are not like-minded on any of the major issues facing the aggressive alliance at this time, including the issue of raising military spending.
According to the Reuters news agency, the draft deadline for achieving the five per cent of GDP mark was in fact pushed back from 2032 to 2035, and the wording of the draft and final communiqué was changed from "we commit" to "allies commit". This was prompted after Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez publicly declined to endorse the proposal to raise funding to five per cent.
Spain is among the NATO members not currently meeting the two per cent threshold. On June 22, Sanchez announced that Spain would not adhere to NATO's new objectives and instead would raise military spending to 2.1 per cent of GDP - "nothing more, nothing less". Trump criticised Spain as "notorious" for failing to meet NATO's spending targets. At the same time he argued that the US, unlike other NATO members, is exempt from the five per cent mark due to its historically high defence expenditures, Politico.eu reported.
Attempts to present a united front at the NATO Summit failed in the face of disunity around the US role in the aggressive alliance and displeasure at the unpredictable actions of US President Donald Trump. So long as all of them recognise the US as the "indispensable nation" which calls the shots, unity will escape them. Under NATO rules, it is a US aggressive military alliance which rules over their foreign policy and defence procurement and deployments. They are caught in this arrangement which they themselves perpetuate despite the fact that NATO no longer commands the attention of even those it calls partners and allies in the Pacific region.
On June 22, the President of the Republic of Korea Lee Jae Myung announced that he would not attend the NATO summit as originally planned, "[...] considering various pending national issues and uncertainty in the Middle East, the president has decided not to attend the summit," his office announced.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba followed suit and also withdrew his participation on June 23. Japan's Fuji Television said Ishiba pulled out because a planned meeting between NATO and the group of four Indo-Pacific nations (IP4: Japan, south Korea, New Zealand and Australia) was not likely to take place, and because a meeting with Trump was also unlikely.
On June 22, Ukrainian President Zelensky once again called on the NATO countries to pledge 0.25 per cent of their GDP to supporting Ukraine's arms industry, but his participation in the Summit had been limited to the inaugural dinner hosted by the King of the Netherlands and a forum with arms producers.
All of this confirms the crisis-ridden nature of NATO. It has no solutions for the problems the peoples face. It is the instigator of the use of force to sort out conflicts, all in the name of high ideals, democracy, peace, human rights and open markets. The peoples of the NATO countries and the world will continue to resist US/NATO confrontation, aggression and war to force other countries to submit to hegemonic imperialist aims which will increase under their aegis. The aspirations of the peoples of the world for peace, justice, independence and sovereignty require a world without NATO.
Notes
1. The 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, Netherlands brought together leaders from
the 32 member countries, the European Union, as well as NATO partner countries
Australia and New Zealand.
The 32 NATO member countries are: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia,
Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary,
Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, North
Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain,
Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.
NATO has expanded eastward towards Russia since the end of the bipolar division
of the world in 1990, adding 16 members in that time, including 14 countries
that were previously part of the Warsaw Pact.
2. Counter-Summit Coalition Organises Demonstration and Counter-Summit Against
NATO: "No NATO War Summit!"
https://thehaguepeace.org/tegentopcoalitie/en/2025/05/01/counter-summit-coalition-organizes-demonstration-and-counter-summit-against-nato-no-nato-war-summit/
3. The Hague Summit Declaration 25/06/2025
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_236705.htm