Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
Brussels, Belgium
NATO Headquarters
SECRETARY GENERAL RUTTE: Good morning, Mr. Secretary. Dear Marco, a warm welcome to NATO, your first foreign ministers meeting. But before I continue, let me express my condolences about the four U.S. soldiers who died during exercises in Lithuania. Our thoughts are with their family, their friends, their colleague soldiers, and we have the deepest respect for their service. I also want to highlight the work being done by the U.S., Lithuania, but also Poland and Estonia, to work around the clock basically to do everything to make sure that they would be recovered. But again, we are very sad about their death.
Marco, I want to commend you for your tireless diplomacy over the last couple of months. You have traveled the whole world. And I also want to thank you for what you did before as a senator supporting NATO, and we will have a lot to discuss over the coming two days – of course, Ukraine. As I said before, President Trump, the team you (inaudible) you started a process of negotiations with our full support to bring the Ukraine war to a lasting, to a durable peace. And in the meantime, the Europeans are stepping up providing a lot of military support into Ukraine, and we have seen the latest numbers coming in that overall NATO Allies have provided in the first few months, over $20 billion in support to Ukraine to make sure they can stay in the fight as long as it continues.
We will also discuss the other threats over the next two days – of course Russia, which is our long-term threat, but also the increasing problems we have with China, of course, North Korea, Iran. And all of these four are getting more and more connected, and these two theaters getting more and more connected and working intertwined.
We know that United States is a staunch Ally in NATO. I had a very good meeting with the President, with President Trump. But that commitment comes with an expectation, and the expectation is that the European Allies and Canada need to spend more. Since (inaudible) the aggregate extra spending from Canada and Europe has been several hundred billion up to now. But when you look at the hundreds of billions of euros/dollars now rolling in in the last couple of months, this is probably the biggest surge in defense spending we have seen in Canada and Europe since the Cold War, since the Berlin Wall came down. So that is good news but still we need to do more.
And then, of course, we will meet with the partners from Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand also to discuss another important issue, which is defense industrial production and how we can do more with them and to work together. So a lot of ground to cover. But again, a warm welcome. Please.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Thank you. And thank you, and I’m glad you had a good meeting. I know I was out of the country while you were there, but I know you had a good meeting with the President. Thank you for your condolences of the four Americans who tragically lost their lives in an important training exercise. We honor them.
And it also reminds us that the United States is in NATO. We are active. As we speak right now, the United States is as active in NATO as it has ever been. And some of this hysteria and hyperbole that I see in the global media and some domestic media in the United States about NATO is unwarranted. President Trump has made clear he supports NATO; we’re going to remain in NATO. He’s made clear – our first ambassador, a guy out of the United States Senate, is our ambassador to NATO who joins us here today on his first day on – his first hour on the job. So all of that is a testament to it.
But we want NATO to be stronger. We want NATO to be more viable. And the only way NATO can get stronger and more viable is if our partners, the nation-states that comprise this important Alliance, have more capability. This is a collection not just of partners and Allies but of advanced economies, of rich countries who have the capability to do more. We understand that’s a tradeoff. We have to do it every single year in our country. I assure you that we also have domestic needs. But we’ve prioritized defense because of the role we’ve played in the world, and we want our partners to do the same.
And I understand there’s domestic politics after decades of building up vast social safety nets that maybe you don’t want to take away that and invest more in national security. But the events of the last few years – a full-scale ground war in the heart of Europe – is a reminder that hard power is still necessary as a deterrent. And so we do want to leave here with an understanding that we are on a pathway, a realistic pathway, to every single one of the members committing and fulfilling a promise to reach up to 5 percent in spending. That includes the United States will have to increase its percentage. Because if the threats truly are as dire as I believe they are and the members of this Alliance believe they are, then that threat has to be confronted by a full and real commitment to have the capability to confront these things, to confront them.
And that’s been the message President Trump had in first administration and it’s the one he brings into this one. He’s not against NATO. He is against a NATO that does not have the capability that it needs to fulfil the obligations that the treaty imposes upon each and every member-state. And it wants – no one expects that you’re going to be able to do this in one year or two, but the pathway has to be real. This is a hard truth but it is a basic one that needs to be said now in order for us prove – in order for us to build the kind of NATO that has the capability to defend the territories of our nation-states and deter any action that would be aggressive against any one of us.
So I hope to have a chance to engage on that here today in our conversations. I’m sure we will. Of course, we’re also happy to be joined by our Indo-Pacific partners who have become great partners to the Alliance, as we also see increased threats to both freedom of navigation and territorial integrity in the Indo-Pacific. So we look forward to engaging them as well in this context. And thank you for the chance to be here on my first visit. I hope it will be very productive. Thank you very much.
SECRETARY GENERAL RUTTE: It will. Absolutely. Thank you so much.
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