Of course not all of our friends have been happy about this—or about Donald Trump generally—and they were fortunate to receive a reality check this week from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. The former prime minister of the Netherlands spoke at a meeting of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs and security committees in Brussels. Here’s an excerpt from the official transcript:
On my relationship with the President, hey, listen, if somebody is doing good stuff, and President Trump is doing a lot of good stuff, I believe. I know I’m irritating a lot of you again, but I think so, because as I said, also in Davos, the 2% reached by all NATO countries now at the end of 2025 would never, ever, ever have happened without Trump. Do you really think that Spain and Italy and Belgium and Canada would have decided to move from 1.5 to 2%? Italy spending 10 billion more now on defence at the beginning of the year without President Trump? No way. It would not have happened. And do you really think that in The Hague we would have come to the 5% commitment without President Trump? No way. So, I think he is very important to NATO.
He is totally committed to NATO. He had one big irritant, one big pebble in the shoe, which is there since Eisenhower, the fact that the Europeans were not paying up. And with the NATO defence commitment in The Hague, the outcome of The Hague summit on spending, and also on industrial production in Ukraine, but particularly here on spending, we are now equalising with the US. So that irritant is gone. So, there is a total commitment by the US to NATO Article Five, but also an expectation that Europeans and Canadians will pay more. And we are doing so.
… when President Trump is doing good stuff, I will praise him. And I don’t mind him publishing text messages.
And if anyone thinks here, again, that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming. You can’t. We can’t. We need each other. And why do we need each other? I tell you, first of all, because also the US needs NATO. And the US is not only in NATO to prevent a mistake after the First World War, not to re-engage with Europe, and then again, the long arm of history reaching out to the US again in the Second World War — as Churchill famously said in his speech in 1941 in the US Congress. They are also in NATO because for the US to stay safe, and by the way, Arctic region is evidence here, they need a secure Arctic. They need a secure Euro-Atlantic, and they also need a secure Europe. So, the US has every interest in NATO, as much as Canada and the European NATO Allies. But for Europe, if you really want to go it alone, and those who you are pleading for that, forget that you can never get there with 5%. It will be 10%. You have to build up your own nuclear capability. That costs billions and billions of euros. You will lose then in that scenario, you would lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the US nuclear umbrella. So hey, good luck.