By Michael Birnbaum, Ellen Francis, The Washington Post · (c) 2024
BRUSSELS – Seeking to frame robust support for Ukraine as “a good deal” that might appeal to President-elect Donald Trump, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Tuesday said any potential peace deal with Russia should not give U.S. adversaries reason to celebrate, as he outlined a suite of ideas intended to be attractive to the alliance skeptic once he’s back in the White House.
NATO, officials here said, is eager to stay on Trump’s good side after a first term in which he at one point caused some European leaders to fear he might pull the United States out of the group altogether. With his imminent return to power, leaders have begun strategizing about how to keep Washington invested in Europe’s defense.
Rutte flew to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort, in late November, becoming the first European leader to meet with him since the election. Rutte said Tuesday that he told Trump that when they discuss what comes next for Ukraine, they also need to consider how the outcome of this conflict will be interpreted by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, all U.S. adversaries, and some of which Trump has tangled with in the past.
“They’re all working together,” Rutte told reporters ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers. “And Russia is paying for this, for example, missile technology, which is then being used by the North Koreans to threaten not only us or … South Korea and Japan, but also the U.S. mainland.”
Rutte said he tried to persuade Trump that any deal to stop the fighting in Ukraine will embolden China and North Korea, each a focus for the incoming U.S. president.
“Whenever we get to a deal on Ukraine, it has to be a good deal, because what you can never have is high-fiving Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping, and whoever else thinking that it is a bad deal, because that might get other people thinking about what they could do,” Rutte said, referring to the leaders of North Korea and China.
Trump has vowed to stop the war in Ukraine in “24 hours” and last week announced Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general, as his envoy to try to end the fighting.
Kellogg has said that Ukraine may need to temporarily abandon some of its hopes to regain full control of its territory in exchange for peace and Western security guarantees. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said in recent days that if Ukraine could gain NATO membership – a distant prospect for now – that such an outline for peace could work.
But some NATO officials said they are unsure whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is interested in a negotiation anytime soon.
“We really don’t think that Putin is serious about negotiations right now,” one senior NATO official said, speaking, like others, on the condition of anonymity to be frank about internal discussions. “I think Vladimir Putin is willing to talk, but I think so long as he believes that he is winning, then he doesn’t have a lot of incentive to negotiate.”
In Brussels, Ukraine and its closest NATO supporters are angling for an invitation to the alliance, though many diplomats here said that was unrealistic, given uncertainties about Trump’s position and skepticism from some countries, such as Hungary and Slovakia, that are more sympathetic to the Kremlin.
European officials say Rutte and other European leaders have sought to convey the idea to Trump that pushing Ukraine to take a bad deal could haunt his second presidency. European leaders want to ensure that they are involved if the Trump administration does push for negotiations, and that they can have a means to influence any conversation.
Rutte, who for 14 years was Dutch prime minister and is viewed as a master of building coalitions from his nation’s fractious political parties, is charged with creating a connection to Trump.
“He’s always building bridges, so he did that again in Mar-a-Lago,” one senior NATOdiplomat said.
With recognition growing among some of Kyiv’s European backers that anytalks will probably involve concessions of Ukrainian territory, the closed-door discussions in European capitals have turned to what security guarantees they could give Ukraine to deter Russia from future attacks.
During his trip to Mar-a-Lago, another message from Rutte was that much had changed since Trump’s first term, and that Europeans had gone a long way to strengthen military capabilities and defense spending to bear more of the burden, officials said.
Rutte said Tuesday he acknowledged to Trump that the current NATO spending guidelines aren’t high enough, although any attempt to increase them might spark a fight from countries such as Germany that remain well short of the existing bar.