As world leaders, ministers and observers poured into The Hague for NATO‘s biggest summit of the year, hardly anyone appeared to be watching.

Instead, all eyes were on whether U.S. President Donald Trump would make the journey across the Atlantic, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East under Iranian fire and whether the brittle ceasefire between Iran and Israel would hold.

Once Trump arrived—after many of the other heads of state—U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the condensed conference “the Trump summit.” Throughout Wednesday, most had an eye out for a glimpse of Trump, waiting for him to stride out on stage and mete out judgment on whether Europe had done enough to placate him.

It looks like most of Europe has. Trump praised not just “wonderful speeches from the heads of a lot of wonderful countries,” but a “terrific” Mark Rutte. The NATO chief is credited by attendees in The Hague with almost single-handedly herding NATO’s member states toward an agreement that, even a few months ago, was an outlandish suggestion.

NATO heads of state on Wednesday officially signed off on a new pledge to raise defense and related spending to 5 percent of GDP in the next decade. A 3.5 percent chunk of it will be for military capabilities, or “hard defense,” while the remaining 1.5 percent will be funneled into defense-related investment, including on cyber capabilities or making sure bridges can bear the weight of tanks and armored vehicles.

In an unusually brief communique issued on Wednesday, just before Trump stood with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in front of the world’s cameras, NATO doubled down on an “ironclad commitment” to collective defense.

Trump had raised eyebrows on the way to the summit by dodging a question about his commitment to Article 5, which obliges each country in NATO to see an attack on one as an attack on all: “Depends on your definition,” he said.

But it is worth saying that the spending pledge signed off on Wednesday is truly no small feat. The summit is “absolutely a turning point,” Ulysse Ellian, a Dutch lawmaker from the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy previously led by Rutte, told Newsweek.

NATO’s European members have for decades allowed defense spending to lapse, and there had been real questions swirling around whether so many countries, all with competing interests and constraints, could come to such a demanding agreement together.

“This is historic,” Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon official, told Newsweek. “But you’re not going to see it,” he added, because “everything’s overshadowed by Trump.”

But Trump, flanked by Hegseth and Rubio, did not linger on the mammoth effort European nations have inked in The Hague.

“Things have been accomplished,” Trump said, opening Wednesday afternoon’s press conference. It was a “highly productive” summit, he added, briefly praising Rutte, the Dutch royalty and the Netherlands before swiftly moving on to U.S. strikes on Iran over the weekend.

It was “very, very successful,” he said. “No other military on Earth could have done it.”

Questions from the audience homed in on intelligence assessments of U.S. attacks on three of Iran’s major nuclear enrichment sites, Trump’s appetite for a deal with Tehran, a ceasefire in Ukraine and domestic issues like his spat with Fed chair Jerome Powell.

When he did reference NATO’s European spending hikes, Trump said his reelection in November kicked off the process leading to what even he acknowledged to be a “very historic milestone.” Once fulfilled, the spending increases will add $1 trillion to NATO’s collective defense each year, Trump said.

“They said, ‘You did it, sir, you did it. Well, I don’t know if I did it, but I think I did,” he added. “This is a monumental win for the United States,” he said, before qualifying it was also “a big win for Europe.”

Trump can rightly claim some credit for pushing American allies to the pledge.

“It’s something that Trump is going to tout as an achievement, and he wouldn’t be wrong in doing so,” said Jasmine El-Gamal, a foreign affairs analyst and former Middle East adviser at the Pentagon during the Obama administration.

“It was clear that Trump is the mover and shaker and that he sets the tone and agenda,” El-Gamal told Newsweek. This is “not a great vote of confidence in Europe’s ability to lessen its dependence on the U.S.”

The subject of Trump’s ire, though, was Spain. The country’s embattled prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said just before the summit that Madrid would not be held to new spending targets.

Spain’s government has said it will be able to fulfill the new capability targets agreed on earlier this month without reaching 3.5 percent of GDP on core defense spending. Rutte told journalists on Monday that the alliance was “absolutely convinced” it could not, a feeling echoed by Ellian.

Exact NATO capability targets, assigned to each country, are classified. But Rutte said the alliance needed to increase its air defense capabilities five-fold, get hold of thousands more tanks and armored vehicles and millions of new artillery rounds.

Spain, as of 2024, did not meet the current 2 percent threshold each alliance member is, on paper, supposed to reach. While not a military powerhouse in Europe, Spain’s insistence that it does not need to spend 5 percent on the military put Madrid in Trump’s crosshairs.

“They want to stay at 2 percent—I think it’s terrible,” Trump said. “I don’t know what the problem is. I think it’s too bad.”

Countries on NATO’s eastern flank, close to Russia, have stormed ahead with steep hikes to defense spending, while western and southern Europe have lagged behind. Spain, geographically far from Russia, looks south to Africa more than toward the north and east.

Trump said he would “make them pay twice as much” in a trade deal currently being negotiated.