U.S. President Donald Trump holds a bilateral meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, January 21, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, where he faced off against President Donald Trump's claims against NATO.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been in place since after World War II, with the specific purpose of working to face threats to Europe and the U.S. They were huge players after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which the U.S. invoked the Article 5 agreement for an attack on Afghanistan.
Former U.S. Representative to NATO, Ivo Daaler, told CNN on Thursday that it does appear the only way people can speak rationally with Trump is through charm and flattery.
Daaler hoped this was the tactic Rutte was deploying to steer Trump in the right direction. NATO's biggest foe over the years has been the former Soviet Union and, now, Russia. The country has long endeavored to undermine the group. Trump told the press last week that Russian President Vladimir Putin had convinced him to withdraw from the group, a move that can only be accomplished with congressional approval.
The fear, Daaler has, is that things are different."The breach is bigger. And, I think it's no longer flattery that is going to do things. And I think he was trying to explain what NATO was about, and I'm not sure if the president was listening."
The White House is angry about NATO refusing to back its war with Iran. Daaler had suggestions for how to fix that.
"I think the White House should be looking at its own behavior to explain it," Daaler explained. "If you decide to go to war, that is generally regarded as illegal under international law and unnecessary because there were many other routes to try to achieve the goals that you were trying to achieve."
In the recent example, Trump went to war with Iran and didn't even inform NATO or allies in the region, which likely would have withdrawn diplomats and soldiers from the region.
"Don't be surprised that they may wake up the next day and say, well, wait a minute, we're not part of this. We weren't involved. We weren't asked to be involved. We weren't informed about what it is you were going to do, and now you just want to go out and make sure that you use our airspace and the bases on our territory to do that. We have some questions," said the former ambassador.
Trump has used NATO's lack of engagement in IRan to justify his claims that NATO is a burden and not a benefit to the United States.
Now, Trump is looking for ways to "make Europe Pay for his own mistakes," said Daaler.
"And as a result, the alliance is so much weaker than it has been for so long because the president of the United States is basically saying, you sort out your own security, we sort out ours," Daaler continued. "The problem is that for the United States to sort out its own security, it actually needs NATO. It needs Europe. It can't conduct the war that it has just conducted for five and a half weeks without access to European bases and European airspace. And so he should spend some time figuring out exactly what it is that Europe does, even when they don't support the United States in the."