Trump announces plan to sell NATO countries weapons for Ukraine
“This is, again, Europeans stepping up. ... This is only the first wave, there will be more,” said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
“This is, again, Europeans stepping up. ... This is only the first wave, there will be more,” said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
“Stop running around being worried about the US,” echoed NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. “They are there. They are with us.”
Mark Rutte also appeared to accept that the US will go through with plans to withdraw its forces from Europe, but in a way that won't leave "capability gaps."
“We will decide, at the NATO summit, [on] the spending, and we already know we need to spend much, much more if we want to fulfill all these [capability] targets,” Rutte said on the sidelines of the defense ministerial.
One official from an eastern NATO nation told Breaking Defense that a plan to create two different pots of spending could actually cause problems for nations who are planning to exceed the new defense target.
Trump’s dislike of NATO will likely lead to uncertainty over the future of the alliance, though it remains to be seen if this time around, he will again threaten to pull the US from the institution.
New NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte already publicly congratulated President-elect Donald Trump, praising his push to get more members towards spending more on defense.
"The deepening military cooperation between Russia and North Korea is a threat to both the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic security," said Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General.
One defense analyst previously told Breaking Defense that Rutte is often referred to in Dutch circles as the "little oil man" who "greases all the wheels in the machinery so they can run smoothly."
NATO announced today its members had agreed Mark Rutte, the outgoing Dutch prime minister, will lead the alliance come October.
CDAO’s Advana data analytics platform is ingesting data from about 500 DoD business systems.
Rutte is "perfectly aligned for the job," said Dutch analyst Patrick Bolder. "He is respected as an honest person, especially in his expressions and his dealings with all the heads of states and heads of government."
With the support of Hungary's Victor Orban, few issues appear to stand in the way of Mark Rutte taking the post over from longtime NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.