Mark Rutte, incoming secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), during a transition ceremony at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. Mark Rutte, the affable and meticulous former Dutch premier, has a daunting task ahead to keep the defense alliance a global force.
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NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte hailed newly inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump’s warning on Wednesday that Russia could expect more tariffs and sanctions if it did not end the war in Ukraine.
“I was very, very happy with the position of Trump to put more sanctions on Russia. We know that the Russian economy is doing terribly bad[ly], and the sanctions will help,” he told CNBC on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.”
He expressed hopes that Europe will now also “step up” with sanctions in a bid to “choke off the Russian economy” and lessen Moscow’s war coffers.
“Trump is right, Ukraine is closer to Europe, but Trump is also right that it is a geopolitical conflict so I’m sure the U.S. wants it to end with a good and strong deal,” Rutte added.
Trump on Wednesday said that, if no deal were reached to end the Russia-Ukraine war soon, the U.S. would “have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”
“Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with!,” Trump said on the Truth Social platform. “We can do it the easy way, or the hard way – and the easy way is always better.”
Trump has previously boasted that he could end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” of being elected, as well as threatening to cut military funding for Kyiv. Concerns have mounted in Europe that a financially and weapons-deprived Ukraine could be pushed into a bad peace deal involving territorial concessions to Russia.
February will mark the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion, and while war fatigue has grown among some allies, the war has shown no sign of ending soon with Russia looking to make gains, and Ukraine prevent further territorial losses, ahead of any possible peace talks.
When asked for his current assessment of the war between Ukraine and Russia, NATO chief Rutte said “at the moment, it is moving not in the right direction.”
“At the moment, it [the war] is moving not in the right direction, [the frontlines] should be moving eastwards and it moving westwards … We have to change that, we have to change the trajectory of the war,” he said.
Trump’s relationship with the Western military alliance was acrimonious during his first presidency, with the Republican leader frequently lambasting NATO member states, and particularly those in Europe, for not abiding by a target, agreed in 2014, to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense every year.
Ahead of his second term in office, Trump signalled that the thorny debate over military spending — and Trump’s perception that NATO members are over-reliant on the U.S. for their own security — will be back on the agenda, stating in January that NATO’s 32 member countries should spend even more on defense.
“I think NATO should have 5% [as a target],” he said. “They can all afford it, but they should be at 5%, not 2%”, he said at a press conference (the one in which he refused to rule out using military force to seize the Panama Canal or Greenland, a territory that belongs to NATO member, Denmark).
