On the opening day of the NATO Summit in Washington, three defense ministers from Europe’s most vulnerable countries showed how thoroughly they’ve already prepared to make their case to Trump if he returns to the presidency.

At a panel in Washington hosted by POLITICO and the German newspaper Welt, the top defense officials from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania made a forceful case for the NATO alliance that was conspicuously Trump-friendly. They laced their remarks with tough love for countries that aren’t spending heavily on defense and muted any direct critique of Trump’s quasi-isolationist instincts.

One minister employed vocabulary that was clearly aimed at the golf-loving former president, a real estate developer and hospitality executive by trade.

“NATO is a club. When you have club rules, then you respect the rules and you expect that everyone will also respect the rules,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said. “When you pay your fee in the golf club, you can play. It doesn’t matter how big is your wallet.”

“This is my understanding also,” he added.

NATO countries that failed to reach the alliance’s 2 percent GDP defense spending target were a main point of contention for Trump during his first term in office, leading the former president to once threaten to pull the U.S. out of the alliance if nations didn’t pay their fair share.

Pevkur called on the alliance to raise the minimum defense spending target, even as nine countries are projected to fall short of the 2 percent of GDP goal this year.

“Two percent is not enough,” Pevkur said. “We have to go to 2.5, maybe even 3 percent.”

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced in a meeting with President Joe Biden last month that a record 23 NATO countries will reach the spending target this year. When Trump departed office in 2021, less than half of the alliance was hitting those goals.

The defense ministers repeatedly expressed confidence that Washington will remain committed to its most vulnerable European allies even if Trump returns to the White House, pointing to how the U.S. increased its engagement in the Baltics during the first Trump administration.

The “United States is indispensable for us,” Latvian Defense Minister Andris Sprūds said. “At the same time, I would say, it’s vice versa. We believe also that NATO is indispensable for the United States.”

Pevkur also rejected the notion that the Baltics should be concerned about Trump’s reelection, claiming that the war in Ukraine is an existential fight in support of liberal democracies and the ability to have democratic transitions of government.

“We should not be afraid of elections,” Pevkur said.

In an interview with POLITICO, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre also hit the theme that NATO needs to make the case for its relevance — and to put money behind it.

“NATO has been successful at proving its value to all member states since 1949,” he said. “I believe for any [American] administration, there are obvious advantages to having 31 of the world’s most modern states as your close and committed allies, who will invest in technology, stay united politically and support you on the big international issues.”

Instead, the ministers reserved their sharpest criticism for the Biden administration and its approach to Ukraine.

Pevkur said that the West must choose whether it wants to help Ukraine fight for “as long as it takes” — echoing a line often repeated by Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken — or whether it wants to give Ukraine what it needs to win the war.

“There is a technological superiority in the West over Russia, but we are not giving that to Ukraine at the moment,” he said. “This is our [strategic] question for the future.”

“My understanding is that ‘as long as it takes’ is not enough,” he added. “That means we need not only political commitment but political decisions.”