On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth, the newly appointed US Secretary of Defense, comes at NATO headquarters for his first talks with the goal of pressuring European countries to increase military spending and assistance for Ukraine.
With President Donald Trump vowing to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine and demanding that NATO more than double its spending objective, Washington’s allies are anxiously awaiting answers from his administration.
Hegseth’s two days of meetings in Brussels with his NATO and Ukrainian counterparts are part of a series of high-level U.S. official trips to Europe this week.
Those will culminate with Vice President JD Vance meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a security conference in Munich on Friday.
The Pentagon chief on Wednesday will sit down with an international coalition of Ukraine’s backers before huddling with the 31 other defence ministers from NATO Thursday.
Trump’s return to the White House has caused anxiety as he has questioned US security commitments in Europe and pushed his “America First” agenda.
By declaring tariffs and, in Denmark’s instance, stating his desire to annex Greenland, he has already shocked allies.
Hegseth is expected to convey that Washington wants European countries to do more in regards to Ukraine and their own defense.
“We’re going to have straight talk with our friends,” Hegseth said Tuesday as he kicked off his European trip at a US military base in Germany.
“The European continent deserves to be free from any aggression, but it ought to be those in the neighbourhood investing the most in that individual and collective defence.”
His combative boss has long accused allies of underpaying and says NATO should ratchet up its defence spending target from the current two percent of GDP to five percent.
That goal appears well out of reach for most — but NATO chief Mark Rutte is expected to highlight spending increases to show Washington Europe is stepping up.
Spurred on by Russia’s grinding war on Ukraine, last year 23 of NATO’s 32 members reached the two-percent level.
Given the level of the threat from Moscow there is a clear acceptance that spending must rise and Rutte has already said it could need to go “north” of three percent.
Diplomats say they hope Hegseth will lay out the administration’s demands, firing a starting pistol on negotiations for setting a new target at a June summit in the Netherlands.
“The most difficult issue remains defence spending,” said one European diplomat at NATO.
“We badly need to understand that without genuine commitment on significant increases of defence budgets on national and EU level we will cause major problems for ourselves.”
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