NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will meet with US President Donald Trump next week, setting up potentially tense talks after Trump’s repeated attacks on NATO allies’ support for the war in Iran.
Rutte will travel to Washington to meet with Trump on Wednesday, Rutte’s office announced in a social media post. He will also meet with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
The meeting comes days after Trump said the idea of pulling the US out of NATO was “out of the question,” and threatened to blow up the key military alliance.
“I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were paper tigers,”he told The Telegraphinterview published Wednesday.
Since the start of the war in Iran, Trump has been criticizing NATO and its European allies for withholding support for a joint US-Israeli military operation. He is especially angry with America’s traditional allies for not getting involvedhelp in the Strait of Hormuzan important waterway that Iran has effectively closed since the start of the war through which most of the world’s oil travels.
But Trump’s suggestion that the United States may leave NATO caused great concern among member states. Finnish President Alexander Stubb called Trump on Wednesday after the interview was published to have a “constructive discussion” about NATO.
Trump did not directly attack the Atlantic alliance in his keynote speech earlier this week buthe told POLITICO in a one-time interviewlater that he was disappointed in the organization.
“I don’t have any thoughts about NATO. I’m disappointed by it,” Trump said. “I’m not confused. I couldn’t care less. I didn’t need them. But if I ever needed them, they wouldn’t be there. And we had a lot of money every year in NATO, so I learned a lot. … So did America.”
Officials on both sides of the Atlantic have said the administrationhas not made preparationsleaving NATO, which the United States helped found in 1949.
Rutte has been a staunch supporter of Trump despite the president’s attacks on NATO. In an interview withCBS News in MarchRutte praised Trump’s efforts to “make the whole world safe” and signaled that he believed Europe would “come together” behind the president’s plans in Iran.
But as he navigated U.S.-NATO relations through Trump’s threat to annex Greenland and his willingness to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin on terms of ending the war in Ukraine, NATO allieshe looked at Ruttefor looking too civilized with Trump.
