Mark Rutte

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.

This was there since Eisenhower.

He was able to solve it.

So I think it was one of his biggest foreign policy successes.

So he was already committed to NATO.

But this irritant, this big pebble in the shoe was there, and it had to be removed.

Yes, I always felt confident about NATO, but I think President Trump coming into office has really helped.

Because I spoke to many countries in November, December, not yet on 2%, all 2% from 2014.

We had to achieve by 2024, 2025.

who told me, oh, difficult mark, I'm not sure we can get, oh, how do we do this?