NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte is heading to Washington D.C., in hopes of smoothing things over between the White House and European members of the alliance.
Rutte will arrive on Wednesday to speak with President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
The secretary-general, who has cultivated an image as somewhat of a Trump whisperer, said last month that alliance members “will always have different views,” but that all parties can agree on “not accepting Iran having a nuclear and missile capability.”
“What the United States is doing now is degrading that capability […] yes, I applaud that,” Rutte said.
The meeting will come just days after Trump said that NATO is nothing but a “paper tiger.”
During Monday’s press conference at the White House, Trump revealed that his ire toward the alliance began with Denmark’s refusal to cede Greenland to the United States and reached a boiling point with Europeans’ opposition to Operation Epic Fury.
“Look, we went to NATO,” Trump recalled. “I didn’t ask very strongly, I just said, ‘Hey, if you want to help, great.’”
“‘No, no, no, we will not help,’” the president recalled being told, adding that some countries have “actually gone out of their way not to help” operations against the Islamic Republic.
Trump previously said that U.S. membership in NATO is “beyond reconsideration,” a phrase he has not clarified since.
Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto expressed doubt this week that Trump could unilaterally rescind his country’s NATO membership, saying the president would “need the approval of Congress, and it is unlikely that such a move would gain support.” But he cautioned that a “decision could be made to withdraw troops from Europe.”
“That would make us weaker, less protected,” Crosetto said. “At the moment, we are not capable of acting together to replace them.”
Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares told La Sexta TV on Tuesday that, while “NATO is a mutually beneficial alliance for both Europeans and Americans,” the White House’s “remarks and new positions on Euro-Atlantic security are inviting us Europeans to take a leap in terms of our sovereignty and defense matters.”
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Albares floated the idea of a pan-European military that would conscript from individual countries for the sake of mutual defense, warning that “we must take our citizens’ security and dissuasion into our own hands.”
Trump’s frustration has not been limited to Europe or even the wider NATO alliance. The president named Japan, South Korea, and Australia as similarly unhelpful to U.S. efforts to curb Iranian nuclear capabilities.
