Alexander Stubb, fitness buff and decent golfer, looks younger than his 57 years. President of Finland since March 2024, he has tried to be an interlocutor between President Trump and Europe. As a new member of NATO, Finland is still figuring out its place in the alliance. But as a golfer, Mr. Stubb has built an odd but important relationship with a president who spends an enormous amount of time on his own links.<\/p>\n
Mr. Stubb urges calm even as rhetoric has grown high among European and NATO leaders about the failings of the trans-Atlantic relationship under Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n
The mood became even more fraught<\/a> after Mr. Trump\u2019s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, which again pressed his intention to seize Greenland whether Denmark, a NATO ally, liked it or not.<\/p>\n After that speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada won plaudits when he spoke<\/a> of \u201ca rupture\u201d in traditional Western relations. For Mr. Stubb, rupture means complete disorder, he said in an interview in February at the Munich Security Conference \u2014 and that is a dangerous prospect as the West faces a militarized Russia, a war in Europe and a rising China.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t need to use the bulldozer here,\u201d Mr. Stubb said. \u201cThe difference between Mark and me is he talks about a rupture and I talk about a transition, because I don\u2019t think we should throw the baby out with the bath water.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet trying to find a middle way is not easy. Mr. Stubb has found himself publicly at odds with the secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, over whether Europe can defend itself without the help of the United States.<\/p>\n At the end of January, in a speech<\/a> to the European Parliament, Mr. Rutte mocked European leaders who might think they could defend the continent against Russia without the active involvement of the United States.<\/p>\n \u201cIf anyone thinks here, again, that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the U.S., keep on dreaming,\u201d he said<\/a>, adding: \u201cYou can\u2019t. We can\u2019t. We need each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Otherwise, European nations would have to spend 10 percent of their national income on the military, Mr. Rutte said.<\/p>\n Mr. Stubb disagrees. While he believes NATO would be greatly weakened should Mr. Trump withdraw from the alliance or even hesitate to meet its obligations, he said Europe could defend itself against Russia on its own.<\/p>\n \u201cCan we defend ourselves? My answer is yes, we can,\u201d Mr. Stubb said at Davos. Without the Americans? He answered: \u201cWithout the Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n Finland, he argues, provides a good example<\/a> of a whole society engaged in deterrence and defense, with conscription and with regular exercises between the military, the police, the medical services and the politicians. These are lessons other nations bordering Russia, like Poland<\/a>, are learning.<\/p>\n At the same time, Mr. Stubb has little time for the cultural criticisms Trump officials have made about Europe heading toward \u201ccivilizational erasure,\u201d in the words of the White House\u2019s National Security Strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n And he sharply disagrees with the Trump administration\u2019s contempt for multilateral institutions and international law as somehow disadvantaging the United States, the country that led their creation after World War II and dominated them since.<\/p>\n \u201cI still want the United States to be the leader of the global West,\u201d Mr. Stubb said. \u201cBut of course, ideologically, the current administration will not necessarily take on that task \u2014 or it\u2019s a different type of leadership,\u201d he continued. \u201cThen I have to ask myself the question, \u2018Can anyone replace the U. S.?\u2019 Well, not per se, but the European Union can take a role in defending those values.\u201d<\/p>\n That would include European support for a peace in Ukraine that preserves the country\u2019s independence and denies Russia a victory. Finland lost territory to the Soviet Union in battle but preserved its own independence and sovereignty. Still, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland had to remain militarily nonaligned and it lost some of its autonomy, a policy that came to be known as \u201cFinlandization.\u201d A sovereign, independent Ukraine should not have to face that choice, Mr. Stubb has said<\/a>.<\/p>\n If Ukrainians \u201ccome out of this war with security guarantees from both Europe and the U.S., if they come out of this war with E.U. membership, and if they come out of this war with a big reconstruction package, that would not be bad,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Given his relationship with Mr. Trump, Mr. Stubb has been important to European efforts to convince him not to force Kyiv to make unreasonable concessions.<\/p>\n Still, Mr. Stubb recognizes, the world has changed, perhaps forever, and Europe is not Washington\u2019s priority. Europe comes only third, after the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, with the Middle East fourth and Africa fifth, he said.<\/p>\n So Europe, Mr. Stubb said, must do more for its own conventional defense to ensure a more resilient relationship with Washington.<\/p>\n