Why Trump left NATO summit on a positive note after seething about Iran, Spain and Greenland

By Kevin Liptak, CNN

Ankara, Turkey (CNN) — As European leaders were walking into Wednesday’s NATO summit here, the mood was dark.

President Donald Trump was seated just outside the conference hall doors, angrily unspooling every grievance he had with the defense alliance, from its refusal to give him Greenland to the refusal of Spain to allow its bases to be used in the Iran war, a conflict he also threatened to restart.

As they caught wind of what he was saying to reporters, Trump’s counterparts braced themselves for the lashing many expected to come at this summit but had still hoped to avoid. Worse, they feared Trump would tell them he was pulling out of NATO altogether.

As it turned out, Trump behind the scenes was a little less bombastic than Trump in front of cameras.

Sitting around the circular table, he made no mention of Greenland, according to people familiar with his remarks. Nor did he bring up Spain.

He did complain that the countries represented at the conference hadn’t backed him up against Iran. And he vented at the state of the agreement with Tehran he signed three weeks ago, framing the accord as now in full collapse after Iran struck multiple ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

But he did not threaten to withdraw the US from NATO entirely, something Trump technically can’t do unilaterally but was still a serious concern for European officials. And he appeared impressed when leaders described their own attempts at investing more in defense, which NATO chief Mark Rutte repeatedly attributed to Trump’s yearslong pressure on allies to step up.

Among the president’s few complaints: the press wasn’t allowed in to witness the session.

“They like the job I’m doing,” Trump recounted as the day was ending. “They said, ‘We love, sir, we love you.’ These are grown people saying that. Isn’t that nice?”

That may be an exaggeration of how the Europeans actually spoke to him behind closed doors. And Trump, in a moment of acute self-awareness, seemed to acknowledge the leaders may have been trying to butter him up.

“Maybe they were trying to get to me,” he shrugged. “And, in a way, they did.”

Still, under the guidance of Rutte, a renowned Trump flatterer, their lavish praise for Trump appeared to work — even if many officials privately see Europe’s dignity as a casualty of the arrangement.

By the time Trump was sitting alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a few hours later, he even let slip he was preparing to allow Kyiv to manufacture its own Patriot missile interceptors — a veritable coup for a man who was being berated by Trump in the Oval Office 16 months ago.

“I just want to say there was tremendous love in that room,” Trump said before departing the summit.

How long the love lasts is an open question. Trump spent a Group of 7 summit in France three weeks ago extolling the Iran agreement he now says is dead, a sign that outcomes from these diplomatic conferences are often fleeting.

But even if the good feelings last long enough for Trump to reconsider his threats — the president privately floated cutting US forces in Europe by a third ahead of the meeting — it could be considered a win.

That, in the end, was about the best Rutte could have hoped for, even if the summit got off on a sour note. It was also the outcome he’d spent the last year trying to engineer, ever since Trump departed the 2025 summit in the Netherlands sounding uncharacteristically friendly about the alliance.

Rutte was joined in his efforts by an unlikely partner, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has also caused headaches for NATO over the years. Trump considers Erdogan a good friend and repeatedly stated he was only participating in the summit because Erdoğan was hosting it.

The US president’s begrudging attendance did not portend a particularly warm gathering. Nor did the feuds he’s spent the last few weeks nurturing, including with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose photo he posted on social media before the summit with the caption: “RESTRAINING ORDER NEEDED.”

The air between them had not been cleared by the time Trump and Meloni were sitting around the same table at a Tuesday evening dinner, nibbling on Turkish specialties like pide flatbreads and manti dumplings. It’s not clear whether they ever found time to reconcile.

“Cordial” was how the Italian leader described her relationship with Trump as she returned to her hotel after dinner.

Erdoğan, an autocrat who has cracked down on dissent and whose main political rival is in prison, is not a stranger to Trump-style flattery. Just as in Washington these days, buildings in Ankara hang banners with the president’s face.

When Trump touched down in his new Qatari-donated Air Force One, an honor guard stood at attention, riders on horseback accompanied him to Erdoğan’s palace and jets zoomed overhead a turquoise welcome carpet expelling red, white and blue smoke.

Trump, however, appeared most taken with Ankara’s infrastructure, repeatedly praising the capital’s airport and roads.

“Everything was beautiful,” Trump exclaimed.

He also came bearing a generous gift for his host: heavy signals he planned to allow Turkey back into a program for buying F-35 fighter jets, something Erdoğan has been pestering four successive American administrations to allow. Of course, a congressional ban could still foil any nascent plans.

In the end, Trump’s presence in Ankara amounted to a master class in how to manage a mercurial president and minimize damage.

It’s a lesson clearly not absorbed by, or of much interest to, Iran. After weeks of calling the country’s leaders “rational” and “smart,” Trump had an about-face, describing them instead as “scum” and “cuckoo” after they repeatedly fired on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

At least that was Trump’s official explanation. Throughout the day, he repeatedly mentioned his status as Iran’s “number one” target for assassination, a reality driven home over the weekend when chants for his death broke out at funeral ceremonies for the slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

It wasn’t clear what prompted Trump’s renewed attention to Iran’s designs on him. Ankara is about 1,000 miles from the Iranian border, and it’s possible the proximity to people who want to kill him saturated his mindset.

Trump flew out of Turkey aboard the older version of Air Force One instead of the new Qatari plane, prompting a flurry of questions about whether a threat had caused the change. Reporters aboard were told to lower their window shades while taking off.

When a reporter asked about the shift in plans during Trump’s press conference concluding the summit, he avoided making the link. He said the swap was merely meant to show off the new model to troops at an air base in Britain.

But as he prepared to board the old plane home, Trump lingered on the looming peril.

“I’m number one on the kill list for Iran. They’re lovely people,” he said, before shrugging it all off: “I don’t really care, because I’m doing my job.”

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