Rutte Faces Trump's Loyalty Demand at NATO Summit
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- Mark Rutte has spent nearly two years flattering Trump to keep the US in NATO, but last month's Oval Office pitch highlighting $1.2 trillion in European and Canadian defense spending since 2017 — the so-called "Trump Trillion" chart — left Trump unmoved, the AP reports.
- Trump dismissed the money argument entirely, saying "We don't need their money — we don't need anything. I just want loyalty," and citing allies' refusal to join the Iran war that he launched alongside Israel without consultation.
- The Pentagon surprised NATO allies last month by announcing it is scaling back troops, warships, aircraft and drones it would commit to defending a member under attack, while Trump has sent conflicting signals on whether US force levels in Europe will rise or fall.
- Russia has been actively probing European defenses with drone flights near military bases across multiple countries, according to a study released Thursday, sharpening the burden on a fractured alliance.
- Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hosting the summit in Turkey, and Trump acknowledged he might have skipped it entirely if not for the Turkish president, whose personal ties to Trump are now doing the heavy diplomatic lifting.
- Rutte's predecessor Jens Stoltenberg wrote in his memoir that Trump nearly upended a 2018 summit, adding: "If an American president says he no longer wishes to defend the other allies and leaves a NATO summit in protest, then the NATO treaty and its security guarantee aren't worth very much."
- Rutte tried to counter Trump's Iran complaint by noting that up to 5,000 US planes took off from European bases before an April ceasefire, a rebuttal the article suggests has done little to soften Trump's "loyalty" test.
Why it matters: If Trump walks out of the Ankara summit or follows through on scaling back US troop commitments, Europe loses its security backstop at the very moment Russia's drone probes are intensifying. Erdogan's hosting role — not NATO's Article 5 unity pledge — is what currently keeps the American president at the table.
