Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sent a message to NATO’s European members on Wednesday that the U.S. is not “primarily focused on the security of Europe.”
Hegseth offered a couple minutes of opening remarks ahead of Wednesday’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Belgium, the first he’s attended since assuming the role of secretary of defense. The remarks shed a light on the Trump administration’s intentions toward the NATO alliance.
“We’re also here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe. The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must – and we are – focusing on the security of our own borders,” he said.
The Pentagon has deployed a couple thousand service members to the southern border to assist the Department of Homeland Security in stopping illegal immigration and carrying out the deportations of migrants who illegally entered the country.
A day earlier, Hegseth told reporters that there were no plans to reduce the U.S. military’s presence in Europe, though he acknowledged the department was conducting force posture reviews worldwide.
“We also face a peer competitor in the Communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific,” he added. “The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail.”
President Trump has advocated for NATO to increase its defense spending benchmark from 2% of a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 5%. No country in the alliance hit 5% defense spending in 2024, though 23 of the 32 did hit the 2% benchmark.
Hegseth also said that if peacekeeper troops are deployed to Ukraine, they should be “deployed as part of a non-NATO mission” and ruled out the possibility that U.S. troops would be deployed there. Any security forces “should not be covered under Article 5,” he added. Article 5 is a key component of the NATO alliance that says an attack on one NATO ally will be viewed by the other members as an attack on itself.
Hegseth said the U.S. “will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency,” and he added, “Rather, our relationship will prioritize empowering Europe to own responsibility for its own security.”
The secretary also urged the country’s European allies “to double down and re-commit yourselves not only to Ukraine’s immediate security needs, but to Europe’s long-term defense and deterrence goals.”
Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke with leaders Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky about bringing an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately,” Trump said of his call with Putin, later adding that Zelensky “wants to make PEACE.”
The Kremlin released a statement saying Trump “spoke in favor of stopping the hostilities as soon as possible and solving the crisis peacefully,” adding, “In turn, Vladimir Putin pointed out it was necessary to eliminate the root causes of the conflict and agreed with Donald Trump in that a sustainable settlement could only be reached via peaceful negotiations.”
The president said he tasked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, national security adviser Michael Waltz, and Ambassador and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to lead those negotiations.
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Hegseth said the U.S. does not “believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement” and said it is “an unrealistic objective” for Ukraine to pursue the pre-2014 borders that refer to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
The comments do not seem to suggest Ukraine will have significant leverage in the negotiations, given two of Zelensky’s previous preconditions for starting negotiations were future ascension into NATO and not agreeing to sacrifice land.