April 8 (UPI) — NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was set to kick off a visit to Washington on Wednesday with a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump after European allies’ lack of support for the Iran war prompted fresh threats to pull the United States out of the defensive alliance.
Rutte was expected to use the meeting, at which U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will also be present, to try to smooth over trans-Atlantic tensions stoked by the refusal of several NATO countries to let U.S. military planes to use their airspace or bases.
Allies also declined to take part in military action to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, effectively blockaded by Iran since the start of the war on Feb. 28, and provide naval vessels to escort oil and gas tankers through the key sea lane.
Trump’s frustration with what he views as a NATO relationship that is unfairly weighted in European allies’ favor boiled over last week after the spat over the strait, with him questioning the point of U.S. membership and saying he would rethink how much the United States contributes to the alliance going forward.
Rubio has also adopted an increasingly hawkish stance calling it a “one-way street” where the United States was always there for other NATO members but was told ‘no’ when it needed to use their military bases, begging the question why it was in the alliance.
The position of European NATO allies is that they were not consulted before the United States launched its airborne offensive in Iran — with the majority of states were not even informed beforehand — and that as a purely defensive alliance, the action has no relevance to NATO.
Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker told Euronews that vocal criticism of military action against Iran expressed by countries including Germany, France, Spain and Finland ran counter to their own interests.
“The messaging from Europe has been terrible,” said Volker, explaining that it created an opening for Trump to deflect blame onto partners who refused assistance, if his Iran gambit backfires.
“The Europeans could have said, ‘we all have a stake in this and let’s see how we can help,'” added Volker who said this could have been achieved without getting pulled into direct military confrontation with Iran.
Patrick Bury, Senior Associate Professor in Warfare at Bath University, said Rutte had a delicate balancing act to perform of persuading Trump of the alliance’s value while as diplomatically as possible defending members’ right to stay out of the war
“His job is to keep the U.S. in NATO. He represents the alliance as a whole, rather than individual member states,” said Bury.
Matthew Kroenig, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, said if any one could talk Trump down it would be Rutte, calling him a “Trump whisperer.”
