Michael Tracey reports on the NATO Summit from The Hague. ------------ Read Michael Tracey's Reporting Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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| Hello, everybody. | |
| It's Michael Tracy. | |
| I am here in the Netherlands for the annual NATO Summit. | |
| That's right. | |
| I, Michael Tracy, was admitted to attend and cover this year's annual NATO summit in The Hague of all places after having been rejected from attending last year when the NATO summit was held in my home country of the United States, namely in Washington, D.C. They didn't let me into that one. | |
| They didn't let me into the one the year prior, which was in Lithuania. | |
| They did let me into the one the year prior to that, which was in Spain. | |
| So who knows exactly what the calculus is here? | |
| There's maybe some inside baseball that explains some of it that I'll share at a later date. | |
| But for now, I wanted to give you a couple of highlights of my initial forays into this year's NATO summit. | |
| As I record this, I'm about to head out for the second day of the festivities, which includes the big parliamentary style meeting of all the NATO member states. | |
| Trump is here. | |
| We're told, I'm not sure if this is true, but it's amusing. | |
| Regardless, supposedly he slept overnight at the king's residence or something. | |
| Well, don't hold me to that one. | |
| But yeah, there's a lot going on today, so I'll be heading out. | |
| But I wanted to give a couple of highlights of the first day. | |
| And so obviously one of the big topics on everybody's mind, understandably enough, is the fact that the U.S. just bombed Iran, that Israel launched a preemptive strike, as they called it, on June 12th with the U.S. aiding and abetting Israel, as usual, with overwhelming levels of coordination and intelligence and arms supplies. | |
| And then, as we all know, that culminated in Trump bombing Iran over the weekend. | |
| And now we have what is tentatively looking like some sort of a ceasefire, although it's hard to really know given how overwhelming of a deluge of genuine disinformation there has been over the past two weeks about the nature of this operation. | |
| But anyway, one of the things that I think is worth exploring about this development with respect to the NATO summit is how do the NATO member states square their constant, | |
| vigorous denunciations of Russia for they claim violating international law, violating international norms, violating the so-called rules-based order with the invasion of Ukraine, which is fair enough if you want to make that argument. | |
| However, if over and over again it's shown indisputably to never be applied with any degree of consistency, then it stands to reason that such rhetoric will probably ring hollow over time. | |
| And so I asked yesterday the Prime Minister of Sweden about this very topic. | |
| And one thing to bear in mind as you listen to this is obviously like essentially one of the foremost priorities for every European state is to bend over backwards to not do anything that could conceivably antagonize Trump. | |
| So they're all banding together to declare that they will achieve 5% of their national spending, GDP, on defense or military spending at the urging and demand of Trump. | |
| And so now that he's bombed Iran, none of these NATO member states are likely to come out and condemn Trump for doing so, even if at the same time they go around preening about the supposed sanctity of international law and norms. | |
| So here's my exchange with the Prime Minister of Sweden yesterday. | |
| Prime Minister, do you regard the U.S. bombings on Iran over the weekend as consistent with international law or the Israeli preemptive strike against Iran that then escalated into a large-scale bombing campaign that's consistent with international law? | |
| And how does that square with NATO's standing to condemn Russia as violating international law if the largest power in the bloc is committing such an act? | |
| Well, I will not be the judge on that. | |
| I think I would stick to what I've said previously, that there are a few core aspects here. | |
| One core aspect is, of course, that Iran should not be able to develop nuclear weapons. | |
| That is a core international interest. | |
| It's of extension importance to Israel, but it's also a very, very central importance also to other countries. | |
| That's one thing. | |
| The other thing is, of course, the sooner you can get back to more peaceful forms of negotiation, the better it is. | |
| And I think we might be heading in that direction right now. | |
| So do you support the U.S. bombing Iran as a detector? | |
| I'm just saying that. | |
| I think every conclusion right now, every kind of very firm, decisive conclusion right now on what's going to happen is premature. | |
| So I say that it is of vital interest to stop the Iranian nuclear developments. | |
| And it is, of course, also Much better if we can de-escalate and if we can avoid a further military development. | |
| Yeah, so the Prime Minister of Sweden's name is Olf Christerson. | |
| I should have probably mentioned that. | |
| And you notice he's hemming and hawing. | |
| He's not really giving a straight answer, which is basically what you would expect. | |
| But I think it's still illustrative that a Prime Minister from a country like Sweden, which just joined formally the NATO alliance last year, is now in a position where despite its lineage, meaning the country of Sweden's lineage of being like an international mediator or peacemaker, | |
| had been neutral officially on a military level for hundreds of years, going back to the literal era of Napoleon. | |
| Now it's joining NATO and the Prime Minister is in a position where he has to engage in mental gymnastics to rationalize or at least implicitly validate Trump bombing Iran on absurd pretenses, | |
| apparently putting a premium on Israeli intelligence as the predicate for the strike on Iran. | |
| Because remember, it was reported in the New York Times and elsewhere that the administration suddenly insisting that Iran was, quote, weeks away for potentially acquiring a nuclear weapon was a product of Israeli intelligence or Mossad intelligence that had been filtered through to the United States and contradicted much of the U.S. intelligence that had come out. | |
| Infamously, Tulsi Gabri testified at her Senate hearing in March to present her national intelligence estimate and flatly contradicted these subsequent appraisals of the intelligence with respect to Iran. | |
| But then even she decided to be a good team player and put out a tweet last Friday echoing the Israeli intelligence that contradicted her own American intelligence assessment from just a few months prior, in which she said that they had not found Iran to be acquiring a nuclear weapon. | |
| And so that's something that also has been coming up at this NATO summit, or at least I've been bringing it up, which is what does it say about the nature of the U.S.-Israeli relationship that intelligence which, | |
| again, flatly contradicts the United States' own intelligence is being used as the justification or pretext for an unprecedented American strike on Iran. | |
| And I was able to ask Senator Chris Coons, Democrat from Delaware, who's, I believe, only one of two senators who is here. | |
| The American delegation, as far as I've been able to tell, is somewhat smaller than it's been in the past. | |
| So maybe I haven't seen everything, but based on what I've known and observed so far, it's only Senator Chris Coons and Senator Gene Shaheen of New Hampshire, both Democrats. | |
| And they were both at a big chummy politico happy hour function last night that I was also at, which I'll cover in greater depth someplace else. | |
| But for now, here's my exchange with Chris Coons. | |
| In terms of the Iran action, there have been reports that the predicate for the Trump administration strike relied more on an Israeli intelligence assessment that claimed that Iran was within weeks of acquiring a nuclear weapon that may well contradict the U.S. intelligence assessment, | |
| as I'm sure you know with intelligence as a predicate for such an action, | |
| even if it might contradict U.S. intelligence as breathing intelligence principally | |
| based on Prime Minister Netanyahu and whatever was conveyed to him by Israeli intelligence. | |
| If that contradicted directly the advice he got from the American intelligence community and his military advisors, that'd be concerning. | |
| But I don't know that. | |
| I mean, I don't know these details. | |
| This is all conjecture. | |
| What would that tell you about the nature of the US relationship? | |
| Let me speak to you. | |
| It's exceptionally close to the point where now that provokes some worry in terms of sourcing something as vital as a pre-war intelligence assessment to afford the nation. | |
| The president's responsible for his decision. | |
| The fact manner in which this becomes more concerning is the running is planned that they relocated this material before the strike which raises the very possibility that Prime Minister Minister Intelligence might in the future say back in the bus boys. | |
| We have found them. | |
| Here they are. | |
| Now you need to take another strike at this site, which we've just discovered. | |
| So as you might have heard there, I was in a sort of strange situation when that interview was going on. | |
| Funnily enough, I arrived yesterday on one of the White House Press Corps' chartered buses because part of the press affairs here are being handled, at least from the American standpoint, and in terms of like how I'm managing this. | |
| The situation is being handled by, in part, the White House press operation. | |
| And so they took us on a bus to the NATO Summit yesterday from the hotel that we're staying at. | |
| And they brought us to the incorrect entrance. | |
| So we were delayed from getting in by about two hours. | |
| Because initially they brought us to the main delegate entrance, which is where Chris Coons and Gene Shaheen happened to be. | |
| And they let us off the bus. | |
| And I just figured that I would go up and get a quick interview in with Senator Coons there. | |
| And then all of a sudden we were being corralled back into the bus and banished and told to go find our like our media entrance, which was, you know, a logistical hassle to even figure out how to get through. | |
| So that's one of my little, maybe not that interesting anecdotes, but one that I figured I would share anyway, because, hey, why the hell not? | |
| Finally, and there's so much more material that I'm going to be coming out with in various capacities, but just wanted to give you and Glenn and all the viewers a little bit of a taste of the highlights from just the first day. | |
| Remember, the second day has yet to start. | |
| At least as I'm recording this. | |
| Another interesting thing that happened is there was a press briefing held with a NATO official, and we were instructed, demanded, required, without even asking our consent in advance that by attending this press briefing, we were not to refer by name to this NATO official. | |
| We were instructed that he can only be referred to as a senior NATO official. | |
| Well, I haven't really been able to give it enough thought to conclude one way or another whether I'm going to uphold that dictate that was just handed down to me or imposed on me without my even being consulted in advance. | |
| But at least for now, I'll give you the disembodied voice of this person who is a NATO official who was holding a press briefing. | |
| And just as a little bit of context for the question that I ended up asking, it was much different, radically different from any other questions that were asked within this NATO press briefing room, as I guess would be expected, given that you're plopping me in the middle of all these people, and I don't really have the same mentality as to the everlasting virtue of NATO or the unquestioned moral supremacy of everything that's going on here. | |
| So, you know, most of the questions were basically just the standard thing of asking how Ukraine can be more fulsomely supported with arms provision or like how do we get them more ammunition and all this stuff. | |
| And this person, this NATO official, made a point to give a elaborate assessment or estimate of Russian casualties thus far. | |
| And maybe the estimates are right. | |
| Maybe they're not. | |
| I don't know for sure. | |
| Nobody really does because it's a fog of war. | |
| But I noticed that he said nothing at all about the Ukrainian casualties. | |
| So he gave an estimated figure for the number of Russian casualties over the course of 2025. | |
| So I simply asked, okay, can you give us the equivalent Ukrainian figure? | |
| And as you'll hear, he doesn't answer the question because he says he would have to defer to the Ukrainian authorities on that matter. | |
| So NATO is admitting that at least in their public-facing communications, they are not going to make any independent assessment of Ukrainian casualty figures, even at this stage of the war. | |
| We're over three years now. | |
| And untold resources expended on the conflict from these NATO member states, not least the U.S. And still they are, like, on principle, refusing to offer any independent assessment of the rates of Ukrainian casualties. | |
| Only the Russian casualties are what they'll inform us about, not the Ukrainian. | |
| So you'll hear that. | |
| And you'll hear a few other interesting exchanges, I think. | |
| So here is me with the vaunted senior NATO official. | |
| Here you go. | |
| Hi. | |
| Since you've given estimates for Russian casualties over the course of 2025, what is the estimate for Ukrainian casualties over that equivalent time frame and in general? | |
| You mentioned the pause on U.S. intelligence sharing from March. | |
| What were the impacts of that pause while it was underway? | |
| And finally, in terms of these increasingly audacious long-range Ukrainian drone attacks, to what extent does NATO play any kind of supplementary role in enabling Ukraine to carry out those longer-range attacks? | |
| So first, let me start at the end there. | |
| NATO is not a party to this conflict. | |
| And so when it comes to NATO is some allies are providing assistance to Ukraine in terms of materiel and intelligence and other things like that, but NATO itself is not playing any enabling role in the conflict. | |
| On Ukrainian casualties, generally speaking, I leave that to Ukrainian colleagues to answer. | |
| But President Zelensky has, earlier this year, talked about 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, 380,000 that have been wounded. | |
| He previously mentioned that Ukraine sees at least 50 to 100 combat losses a day. | |
| And UNHCR has said that over 40,000 Ukrainian civilian casualties have occurred, about 13,000 dead. | |
| The real number is probably higher than that. | |
| And recent months have shown some of the highest numbers due to the deliberate drone and glide bomb strikes on populated areas that Russia has been carrying out. | |
| On the impact of the pause of U.S. intelligence, I think it is probably best to leave that to Ukraine to describe as well. | |
| I mean, there were, I think as we all know, it wasn't a complete and total shutdown. | |
| And so certain defensive things were still enabled. | |
| So I think I would leave it to Ukraine to further describe that. | |
| So you'll notice that I also ask about these recent longer and longer range strikes that Ukraine has been perpetrating deep inside Russia, hitting strategic nuclear bases most infamously in the past month. | |
| And you would think, given the elaborate interconnection between NATO and Ukraine, that there could be some potential intelligence sharing that might have gone into Ukraine marshaling the resources to conduct that operation. | |
| but according to this person, they still are sticking by the talking point that NATO is not in fact party to the war, which is kind of an amazing thing to still be claiming. | |
| And then I also asked him about the... | |
| I'm trying to refresh my memory because I'm in a bit of a manic haze. | |
| Oh, about the American intelligence pause. | |
| So you'll recall in early March after Zelensky's meltdown meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, there was what was referred to as a pause or a suspension of U.S. arms and intelligence support for Ukraine. | |
| It wasn't a full pause. | |
| I think he mentioned like there were still some, let's say, defensive capabilities and intelligence sharing that was active at that point. | |
| But like it'd still be interesting to know what the impacts of that, I think it was nine-day pause were in real time operationally. | |
| We still don't have a clear picture of that. | |
| Now, the Trump administration later rescinded that pause, and U.S. arms provision to Ukraine continue at roughly comparable rates as they had been flowing during the Biden administration. | |
| But it is still a curiosity as to what impact that temporary pause really had. | |
| But yet again, this NATO official says, like, oh, somehow I'm the only one who comes up with questions that he can't answer out of deference to Ukraine. | |
| You know, everything else that he was asked by the journalist at that meeting, he was more than happy to answer because it was like, oh, like, how many drones do you think that Russia could produce per day if it continues at the current level of manufacturing capacity, that kind of thing? | |
| So he had no issue answering that, even with speculative answers. | |
| But my questions, he had to politely defer to some unknown Ukrainian authority who wasn't there, who wasn't accessible, etc. | |
| So those were just some highlights from today's or yesterday's session. | |
| And I have more, hopefully, in the coming days. | |
| So stay tuned. | |
| You can go to my website, mtracy.net, for more information as it comes in. | |
| And I'm sure also some of that will be broadcast here on system updates. | |
| So it's a grand old time here in the Netherlands. | |
| Very fitting that we're in The Hague. | |
| That's where we all belong. | |
| So with that, I will see you later. |