Rutte heads to Washington to cool Trump-NATO tensions before summit

Mark Rutte met Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday as NATO tried to keep a brewing clash over Iran, U.S. troop levels in Europe and burden-sharing from spilling into next month’s leaders summit in Ankara. The NATO secretary-general was in Washington from June 23 to 25, and the trip also included meetings with senior U.S. administration officials, members of Congress and the Atlantic Council.

The diplomacy was aimed at a president who has called NATO a “paper tiger” and again threatened to leave the 77-year-old alliance. Trump has been angry that allies did not back the United States in the Iran conflict or help reopen the Strait of Hormuz after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, giving Rutte a familiar but delicate task: keep the alliance aligned without triggering another public rupture.

A fresh Pentagon review added pressure to the talks. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently ordered a six-month review of U.S. troop deployments in Europe, a move that sharpened worries among allies already bracing for possible American drawdowns. For Rutte, that made Washington less about ceremonial optics than about showing Trump that NATO is moving toward his demands before the July summit.

The alliance has already locked in a new spending target meant to answer those demands. At the 2025 summit in The Hague, NATO allies agreed to invest 5% of gross domestic product annually on core defense requirements and broader defense- and security-related spending by 2035. Under that framework, 3.5% is meant for core defense and 1.5% for wider security-related items. NATO says the alliance has used a common definition of defense expenditure since the early 1950s, an important detail as members argue over how spending should be counted.

Rutte has cultivated a reputation as a “Trump whisperer,” and that skill is now being tested by the gap between Trump’s transactional approach and NATO’s consensus politics. Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said Rutte was trying to get on the same page with Trump so the summit succeeds rather than becoming a “wipeout.”

The spending fight is not abstract. Rutte was also preparing a classified assessment of allied progress toward the new target as defense ministers meet, with Spain, Slovenia, Albania and the Czech Republic seen as vulnerable to criticism for lagging behind pledged levels. With Ankara only two weeks away, Rutte’s Washington stop was as much about managing Trump’s expectations as about managing the alliance itself.