NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte praised President Trump’s commitment to the military alliance during a recent interview and said the president deserves credit for pushing the 32-nation members to spend more of their gross domestic product on defense.
Rutte, in an interview with The New York Times released Saturday, said he is “confident of the fact that Trump very much realizes that for the U.S. to stay strong and safe, there is this embeddedness with European security and working together to keep the Indo-Pacific safe.”
Rutte, who invoked the word “daddy” when celebrating Trump’s f-bomb when discussing Israel and Iran’s ceasefire on live television, argued the president’s leadership helped NATO allies commit to spending five percent of their gross domestic product on defense by 2035.
“I think when somebody deserves praise, that praise should be given. And President Trump deserves all the praise, because without his leadership, without him being re-elected president of the United States, the 2 percent this year and the 5 percent in 2035 — we would never, ever, ever have been able to achieve agreement on this,” Rutte told the newspaper.
Trump has been pushing NATO allies to spend more on their military and better share the burden of collective defense, arguing European nations have not chipped in enough.
While members have committed to spending more on defense, some NATO nations have not yet surpassed the 2 percent threshold set for 2014.
The president shared a private message from Rutte in June where the NATO chief congratulated Trump on greenlighting U.S. strikes on Iran’s three crucial nuclear sites. In the message, Rutte said Trump’s decision “makes us all safer.”
In the message, Rutte, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, said Trump was “flying into another big success in The Hague … It was not easy, but we’ve got them all signed onto 5 percent.”
When asked if he minded that Trump made the text public ahead of this summer's NATO summit, Rutte told The Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “not at all, because what was in the text message is exactly as I see it.”
“One, that he did an excellent job on Iran with the bombing of the nuclear facility,” the NATO head added. “And as I said in that text message, you are now flying into another big success, which is a NATO summit, which will commit to 5 percent defense spending, and this is transformational.”
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