Europe’s rearmament push is sustaining 195,000 American defence jobs through a $300 billion order book, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said on 30 June — making an economic argument for Donald Trump to stay committed to the alliance days before its Ankara summit.
Ukraine’s improving position on the battlefield is not moving Putin toward peace, Rutte added. The only option left, he said, is to keep Kyiv as strong as possible for whenever talks eventually resume.
A Trump-fluency pitch ahead of Ankara
Rutte made the case in a Financial Times interview published 1 July, a week after he visited Washington ahead of the 7-8 July NATO summit in Türkiye.
“There is a total order book now of $300bn outstanding of European and Canadian sales from the US over the next couple of years,” Rutte said, adding the figure was supporting close to 200,000 American jobs.
The backdrop matters. Rutte’s plan to require all NATO members to spend 0.25% of GDP on Ukraine aid collapsed before the Ankara summit, blocked by the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and Canada. With the binding mechanism dead, Rutte arrived at the White House with a different instrument.
Ukraine is “doing much, much better“
On the battlefield, Rutte said the trajectory had shifted. Russia is killing or seriously injuring 35,000 of its own troops each month, and advances that were visible four to five months ago have slowed significantly.
“Ukraine is doing much, much better,” he said, adding that US President Donald Trump acknowledged as much during last week’s White House meeting.
Rutte credited Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Russian energy and military infrastructure as a source of serious difficulty for the Russian economy — an assessment Kyiv has been making for months but which carries different weight coming from NATO’s top official a week before the alliance’s leaders gather.
Russia still won’t come to the table
None of this has brought Putin closer to serious negotiations, Rutte said. The peace talks Trump launched last spring have stalled.
“Whether this will lead Putin to move in the peace process is up to him,” Rutte said. “What we can only do is sustain Ukraine in this fight and make sure that they are as strong as possible when these talks one day would start.”
Russia remains “the biggest threat that keeps me up at night,” he added, pointing to its continuing cooperation with China, Iran, and North Korea.
He also addressed European allies who restricted US military access to their airspace or bases during Washington’s war against Iran — a point of frustration Trump has repeatedly raised. Rutte acknowledged “isolated cases” of disappointment while arguing the overall picture remained positive, citing some 5,000 US flights from European bases in support of that campaign.
The Ankara summit opens 7 July. Zelenskyy has confirmed Ukraine will attend, with the financial-guarantee framework a central agenda item.
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