NATO Secretary General with 🇺🇸 US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, 13 FEB 2025

Remarks by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte with U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth at the meeting of NATO Ministers of Defence in Brussels, 13 February 2025. 🗣 | NATO Secretary General: Good morning. It's a real pleasure to welcome Pete Hegseth again today to NATO. We had a wonderful dinner last night. We discussed a lot of things, obviously, defence spending. Clearly, we have to do more. We have to ramp up defence spending, because we know we cannot protect ourselves four or five years from now if we don't. Also, we need to ramp up defence spending because it is clear that the US rightly requires us to do more here on the European side and the Canadian side of NATO. It's only fair. It's only sensible. We also will discuss defence industrial production because we simply do not produce enough. This is including the US, and up to and including Türkiye, and everything in between. We need to really get more output from our huge defence industrial base to keep up with Russia and the Chinese and others. And then during the lunch, we will of course discuss Ukraine. What happened yesterday, of course, here in the meeting, and also coming out of the White House will lead to debates. But there is a clear convergence emerging, and I'm very happy about this. And the convergence is one, we need peace in Ukraine. Two, we have to make sure that Ukraine is in a position of strength. And three, as you Pete said yesterday, we can never, ever, ever again have a Minsk Three situation where a peace is not durable. So collectively, we'll work on that. We will discuss this amongst Allies. I look forward to that. Pete, again, welcome to NATO. Welcome on board. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ SUBSCRIBE to this channel https://bit.ly/NATOsubscribe SUBSCRIBE to NATO News https://bit.ly/NATONewsSubscribe SUBSCRIBE to NATO History https://bit.ly/NATOHistorySubscribe Connect with NATO online: Visit the Official NATO Homepage: https://bit.ly/NATOhomepage Receive NATO updates via email: https://bit.ly/NATOemails Find NATO on FACEBOOK: https://bit.ly/NATOfacebook Follow @NATO on X/TWITTER: https://bit.ly/NATOtwitter Follow NATO on Instagram: https://bit.ly/NATOinstagram Find NATO on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/NATOlinkedin Find NATO on Flickr: https://bit.ly/NATOflickr #NATO #OTAN #DefMin