Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spent the last couple of days in Brussels, representing the United States at the NATO Foreign Ministers Meeting and meeting face-to-face with various foreign dignitaries. One of the biggest messages to come from his trip? The United States is losing its patience with Russia.
A reporter asked the secretary if Putin is “dragging his feet,” and Rubio essentially told her that Donald Trump wants to end the war and that he will find out sooner rather than later whether Russia is serious about reaching a peace deal.
Is it possible to end this war on terms that are acceptable, obviously, to both sides — because you can’t end a war unless both sides agree. And that’s what we’re in the process of finding out. We will know soon enough, in a matter of weeks, not months, whether Russia is serious about peace or not. I hope they are. It’ll be good for the world if that war ended. But obviously, we have to test that proposition. So, we’re working through that process.
We had a visitor — Mr. Kirill was here this week. Had a chance to sit down with him. He met with others. He’ll take some messages back, and the message is, the United States needs to know whether you’re serious or not about peace. Ultimately, Putin will have to make that decision. The Russian Federation will have to make that decision. I think the Ukrainians have shown a willingness to enter, for example, into a complete ceasefire to create space for negotiation.
…President Trump’s not gonna fall into the trap of endless negotiations about negotiations. We will know soon enough whether or not Russia is serious about peace. If they are, that’ll be great, then we can move towards peace. If they’re not, then we’ll have to reevaluate where we stand and what we do moving forward about it. But we’ll be in no different a position than we are today or we were when he took office.
He wanted to know early in his administration, is peace possible? We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions, not their words, their actions will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later.
The “visitor” Rubio is referring to was Putin’s investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who said, according to Reuters, “that he saw a ‘positive dynamic’ in relations between Moscow and Washington, though more meetings were needed to sort out differences.”
Rubio added that Russia’s actions, not their words, will “determine whether they’re serious or not” and that it will happen at “some point here fairly soon, not six months from now.” He also said, “There are some promising signs; there are some troubling signs. It’s not gonna be easy. No one ever said this would be easy. But we’re going to find out sooner rather than later.”
On Thursday, Rubio also had a strong message for NATO. “As we speak right now, the United States is as active in NATO as it has ever been… Some of this hysteria and hyperbole that I see in the global media and some domestic media in the United States about NATO is unwarranted,” he said, adding, “President Trump’s made clear he supports NATO. We’re gonna remain in NATO.”
But the message came with something of a caveat: We will no longer be handling things on our own. The other NATO countries must step up on defense spending.
But we want NATO to be stronger. We want NATO to be more viable. And the only way NATO can get stronger and more viable is if our partners, the nation-states that comprise this important alliance, have more capability. This is a collection not just of partners and allies, but of advanced economies, of rich countries who have the capability to do more.
We understand that’s a trade-off. We have to do it every single year in our country. I assure you that we also have domestic needs. But we’ve prioritized defense because of the role we played in the world, and we want our partners to do the same. And I understand there’s domestic politics after decades of, of building up vast social safety nets that maybe don’t wanna take away from that, invest more in national security.
But the events of the last few years, our, our full-scale ground war in the heart of Europe is a reminder that hard power is still necessary as a deterrent. And so we do wanna leave here with an understanding that we are on a pathway, a realistic pathway to every single one of the members committing and fulfilling their promise to reach up to 5% of spending. That include the United States will have to increase its percentage.
Because if the threats truly are as dire as I believe they are and the members of this alliance believe they are, then that threat has to be confronted by a full and real commitment to have the capability to confront these things, to confront them. And that’s been the message President Trump had in his first administration, and it’s the one he brings into this one.
He’s not against NATO. He is against a NATO that does not have the capabilities that it needs to fulfill the obligations that the treaty imposes upon each and every member state… And no one expects that you’re gonna be able to do this in one year or two, but the pathway has to be real. This is a hard truth, but it is a basic one that needs to be said now in order for us to prove and, and in order for us to build the kind of NATO that has the capability to defend the territories of our nation-states and deter any action that would be aggressive against any one of us.
You can watch the rest of Rubio’s remarks from Friday’s press conference here. He touches on a number of other topics, ranging from Greenland to tariffs, and does a terrific job of explaining away the liberal media’s false doom and gloom headlines about all of it.
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