NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is scheduled to visit Washington next week, after the US President Donald Trump threatened to withdraw the United States from the alliance.
Rutteʼs trip to the US was confirmed by NATO and the White House, Reuters reports.
NATO spokeswoman Allison Hart says the visit was planned for a long time. But before that, in an interview with The Telegraph, Trump said that he was seriously considering withdrawing the United States from NATO, and called the Alliance a "paper tiger". The reason was the Allianceʼs refusal to participate in the war against Iran.
According to five sources, NATO diplomats are not overly concerned about the US leaderʼs threats. One European official called the situation "Groundhog Day", recalling that Trump has made similar statements before.
However, diplomats cannot completely ignore such words, because the US presidentʼs political decisions are sometimes made very quickly.
Some allies believe Trump wants to force allies to help open the Strait of Hormuz. Others believe it is because NATO countries did not provide the US with air support during the Iran war.
In turn, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the collapse of NATO one of the points of "Putinʼs dream plan".
“The threat of NATO disintegration, the easing of sanctions against Russia, a massive energy crisis in Europe, the cessation of aid to Ukraine, and [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán’s blocking of a loan for Kyiv — all this looks like Putin’s dream plan,” Tusk wrote in X.
What preceded
Earlier, Donald Trump said that NATO faces a “very bad future” if the Alliance countries do not help the United States unblock the strait. Then he made such a request to the United Kingdom, France, China, Japan and South Korea.
At that time, The Telegraph wrote that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused Trump. France, Germany and South Korea also did not agree. And Reuters wrote that Japan and Australia also rejected the idea.
On April 2, it became known that the United Kingdom is organizing an international meeting with the participation of 35 countries to discuss ways to restore the Strait of Hormuz.
The meeting concerns countries that previously signed a joint statement on their readiness to facilitate the safe passage of ships through the strait. The United States is not included in this list.
Author: Veronika Dovhanyuk
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