Trump also said that he was slapping new tariffs<\/a> on Greenland’s European backers, but later dropped his threats after a \u201cframework\u201d for a deal<\/a> over the mineral-rich island was reached, with Rutte’s help. Few details of the agreement have emerged.<\/p>\n The 32-nation military organisation is bound together by a mutual defence clause, Article 5 of NATO\u2019s founding Washington treaty, which commits every country to come to the defence of an ally whose territory is under threat.<\/p>\n US President Donald Trump attends the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (Source: Getty)<\/p>\n At NATO’s summit in The Hague in July, European allies \u2014 with the exception of Spain \u2014 plus Canada agreed to Trump\u2019s demand that they invest the same percentage of their economic output on defence as the United States within a decade.<\/p>\n They pledged to spend 3.5% of gross domestic product on core defence, and a further 1.5% on security-related infrastructure \u2013 a total of 5% of GDP \u2013 by 2035.<\/p>\n “If you really want to go it alone,\u201d Rutte said, “forget that you can ever get there with 5%. It will be 10%. You have to build up your own nuclear capability. That costs billions and billions of euros.\u201d<\/p>\n France has led calls for Europe to build its \u201cstrategic autonomy\u201d, and support for its stance has grown since the Trump administration warned last year that its security priorities lie elsewhere and that the Europeans would have to fend for themselves.<\/p>\n Rutte told the lawmakers that, without the United States, Europe \u201cwould lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the US nuclear umbrella. So, hey, good luck!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte insisted on Tuesday that Europe is incapable of defending itself without US military support…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[65,42,43,64,40,38,41,39,1745],"class_list":["post-253402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-donald-trump","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-north-america","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-uk-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"US](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/us-president-donald-trump-attends-the-world-economic-forum-i-SKZODFN3CVCAHMJUEQIR5PQO7Y.jpg\")
<\/p>\n