NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the former Netherlands prime minister, acknowledged that Donald Trump's criticism of Europe's lack of defense spending "is right" and that NATO is going to have to step up to maintain Ukraine's sovereignty.
"He is right of course, that the problem is not the U.S. and the problem is Europe," Rutte said at a breakfast discussion about Ukraine at the World Economic Forum on Thursday.
Earlier at the session, Trump's envoy for "special missions, Richard Grenell," criticized Rutte over the Netherlands' defense spending and his own lack of effort to meet NATO defense spending targets when he was Dutch prime minister.
"We have the NATO secretary-general talking about adding Ukraine to NATO," Grenell told the Davos panel via video link from Los Angeles. "The American people are the ones that are paying for the defense. You cannot ask the American people to expand the umbrella of NATO when the current members aren't paying their fair share, and that includes the Dutch who need to step up."
"And so when [...] we have leaders who are going to talk about more and more, we need to make sure that those leaders are spending the right amount of money," he added.
"Thanks partly also to [Trump] and maybe to a large extent, we have seen this upturn in spending in NATO on the European side," the NATO chief said.
When Rutte was Dutch prime minister, his country regularly failed to hit the 2% of GDP defense spending goals. In 2023, the U.S. spent 3.4% of its GDP on defense.
Rutte also suggested that NATO should buy weapons for Ukraine from U.S. stockpiles.
"If this new Trump administration is willing to keep on supplying Ukraine from its defense industrial base, the bill will be paid by the Europeans, I'm absolutely convinced of this, we have to be willing to do that," he added.
Every president since Ronald Reagan has jawboned NATO nations to pay their fair share. It's incredible that with the biggest war on the European continent since World War II, NATO is so sanguine about defending itself.
Rutte also pointed out the obvious.
"He [Trump] felt that basically the U.S. was getting a bad deal and that Europe basically was funding its social model, its health care system, its pension system [while] we're underfunding in defense. The problem, of course, is that we are not yet all at that 2 percent. That's problem No. 1. Problem No. 2 is that 2 percent is not nearly enough," Rutte said.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also laid into NATO and Europe, saying the continent “needs to step up” and “learn how to take care of itself so the world can’t ignore it.”
Indeed, Europe is in danger of becoming a backwater of American interests.
Referring to last year’s IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, the annual inter-governmental security conference held in Singapore, Zelenskyy said the U.S. delegation had named the Asia-Pacific region as their top priority, followed by the Middle East and only then Europe — and that was under the Biden administration, which was broadly more committed to supporting America’s traditional European allies than the Trump administration promises to be.
“Europe can’t afford to be second or third in line for its allies. If that happens, the world will start moving forward without Europe, and that’s a world that won’t be comfortable or beneficial for Europeans,” Zelenskyy said.
While reiterating his gratitude for Europe’s help in Kyiv’s war against Russia, Zelenskyy noted that “it’s not clear whether Europe will even have a seat at the table when the war against our country ends.
It's simple: If you don't play the game, you don't make the rules. Europe has been out of the game for decades, and now the U.S. may move beyond the Western world and refocus its attention more on the East.
