Mark Rutte

The problem is, of course, that he, and I'm really commended for that, he broke the death lock with Putin.

He started to dialogue with him.

He had the meeting in Alaska testing him.

But somehow we have not been able yet to get them to the table.

And there should be a table not in Russia, but somewhere in the world where at least Zelensky and Putin are sitting down and discussing the difficult issues.

How to end the war.

And Zelensky is willing to do that.

Putin clearly is not.

And that means that we have to up the pressure on the Russians to make sure that he will come to the table.

And I'm fairly confident we will get there at a certain moment.

And the president's efforts here are extremely important.

It was absolutely clear what he felt.

I mean, I was prime minister when he was Trump 45, and we discussed this many times.

He was always in favor of NATO, and Trump 47 was in favor of NATO, but he had an expectation.

The expectation was, hey, you guys in Europe, you have to spend the same we are spending.

What Jens Stoltenberg did, he started this process in NATO assessing what do we need to be able to do if Article 5 would ever be triggered.

So this is called the capability targets.

Each country, what do they have to deliver?

This led to the 3.5 hard defense spending, 1.5 defense related spending, this total of 5%.

When in The Hague, under President Trump's leadership, NATO was able to agree on this 5%, this irritant was done, was gone.