Trump to Meet NATO Leaders Following US Strikes on Iran

Could the U.S. strikes in Iran overshadow NATO's agenda? It's certainly something that's hanging over this meeting. There are a few topics that could sort of derail things, of course.

Iran is sort of one of them, and it's taking a lot of the focus, probably from the president of the United States. But of course, a lot of the European allies who are very affected, um, in terms of the economic consequences

of the war in Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. And, of course, that is something that is hanging over this conversation, of course, is going to preoccupy the president of the United States.

There is, of course, a lot of anger from the president of the United States that the NATO allies did not participate in the sort of war in Iran and were not supportive enough by his sort of allegation. That is something we've heard from the president a few

times, but so far so good in terms of the NATO alliance, in terms of not upsetting the presence of the United States. We've had a couple of moments of friction. We've had, of course, the question of Greenland come up

yet again. The president saying that he really believes that the US is going to be the rightful owner of Greenland and those sorts of things, but really progressing, I think, in the right directions as far as NATO is concerned.

And of course, the sort of main thing that we watching are some of the meetings a little bit later today. But these are the questions that still hang over the leaders as they are here today.

And for the Europeans, of course, this is about sort of honoring the commitments that they got from the that they fought that the president effectively force last year to get that 5% spending across all of NATO allies. Okay.

So, so far so good or not upsetting Trump, but what more can you tell us about the deals the defense deals in general? Yeah, as you mentioned, I mean, this was the promise that the mark Russia had laid out ahead of this

meeting here. You'll remember that the secretary general of NATO has spent a huge amount of energy trying to keep Trump onside over the last year and a half. In the lead up to this meeting, he spent a

lot of time in Washington, DC with the president. And when he opened this sort of ceremony on Monday evening, he said that there's going to get a lot of defense deals, that a lot of money would be signed.

And that is exactly what we got yesterday at this industry forum, just outside of where the presidential palace is, is, is here where $50 billion worth of contracts and deals were signed in the defense industry. What those deals tell us are something very interesting.

On the one side, it shows you some of the capability gaps that still exist on the European side of NATO. They don't have the capabilities on air defense, long strike missiles, those sorts of things.

Those are the kinds of contracts that will still keep going to the United States. But as the United States asks for European to take more responsibility on their own shoulders, the Europeans are also thinking about where they spend that money.

They don't want to spend all of that money on the other side of the Atlantic. So you saw, for example, NATO and some of the allies getting rid of some of the old Boeing aircraft and replacing them now with some European aircrafts from Saab.

So this is part of the story, and it's a balancing act for the Europeans. On the one side, keep America onside, pick up more of the burden, spend more of the money. But they want to spend more of that money here