Trump’s push to acquire Greenland<\/a>, from spiraling into lasting crises.<\/p>\nTensions between Washington and NATO have escalated in recent months. After NATO allies refused to back Trump’s Iran campaign, which he began without prior consultation, Trump openly questioned whether the U.S. should \u200cstand by NATO’s mutual defense pact and said he was considering leaving the alliance.<\/p>\n
I know there have been isolated cases about which you are really disappointed, but generally speaking your European \u2060allies have been there.\u2013NATO <\/p>\n
Another point of tension has been \u200bthe increasing pressure from Washington on Europe to handle more of its security as the United States believes there is an “unhealthy co-dependence” by Europe on U.S. forces.<\/p>\n
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week berated “free-riding” allies at a NATO meeting and announced a six-month review of U.S. troop deployments in Europe that could result in some reductions of American forces. That followed a decision by the U.S. to shrink the pool of U.S. military capabilities available to the alliance in a crisis, leaving members grappling with how to fill gaps.<\/p>\n
July summit<\/p>\n
The alliance heads into the July 7\u20138 summit under unprecedented strain, with some European countries concerned that Washington may withdraw outright, a move that would throw into question the future of the alliance.<\/p>\n
Speaking to reporters after his meeting, Rutte said Trump was “committed” to \u200bNATO, even as the Republican president earlier cast doubt on whether he would attend the summit if Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, whom he considers an ally, was not hosting it.<\/p>\n
“What we went through over \u200cthe last two \u200cmonths with the various countries…I would \u2060not have gone for most people,” Trump said. He expressed particular disappointment with the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Spain, while praising Poland.<\/p>\n
At last year’s summit in The Hague, NATO leaders backed the big increase in defense spending that Trump demanded, pledging to spend 5% of GDP on defense and defense-related measures within a decade. But while some European countries have sharply increased defense spending, others have lagged behind.<\/p>\n
When Trump reiterated his frustration on Wednesday about insufficient funding, Rutte highlighted Germany’s plans to double its defense \u200cspending between 2021 and 2029 and other significant \u200bincreases planned by the Netherlands, Poland, the Nordic states and the Baltic countries.<\/p>\n
“It’s a bit of \u200ca mixed bag, but most of them \u2060have been doing it, and the \u200balliance is so much stronger because of this man,” Rutte said.<\/p>\n
Contributing: by Andrea Shalal, Andrew Gray and Lili Bayer<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte sought to calm tensions with President Donald Trump at the White House…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2899,2898,2257,2900,383,1081,2678,66,54,50,2663,2902,2074,2901,2896,2903,2897],"class_list":["post-3612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-finance","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-military","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}