NATO chief ‘very happy’ with Trump’s sanctions threat to Russia
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.
Rutte said that the outcome of any peace deal had to be “sustainable,” noting that Russia’s allies, including China and North Korea, would be “high-fiving,” otherwise.
“We have to get to a position where Russia will never, ever, ever again try to catch one square kilometer of Ukraine, so it has to be a strong deal,” Rutte said.
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.
Defense spending
Trump’s relationship with the Western military alliance was acrimonious during his first presidency, with the Republican leader frequently lambasting NATO member states for not abiding by a 2014 target to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense every year.
Ahead of his second term in office, Trump signaled 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 contribute even more toward 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.
US President Donald Trump arrives for the NATO summit at the Grove hotel in Watford, northeast of London on December 4, 2019.
Christian Hartmann | AFP | Getty Images
Rutte said he agreed with Trump’s call for higher defense spending among NATO members, saying countries that have still not reached the 2% target, such as Spain, Italy and Canada, “have to get to 2% in the coming months. It has to be done this year.”
“Luckily, thanks to Trump in his first term, we have stepped up defense spending. … but we all have to get to the 2%,” he said, adding that Europe also needed to ramp up its defense industrial base.
Rutte has himself faced flak over why Dutch defense spending was consistently below the 2% NATO target for much of the time when he was the country’s prime minister. Alliance data shows Dutch defense spending hovered below the NATO target for 2014-2023, but is estimated to have hit 2.05% of the nation’s GDP in 2024.
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