EXCLUSIVE — With President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans deadlocked over a proposal to authorize new funding to provide weapons for Ukraine, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg thinks he knows the argument that will carry the day: jobs, jobs, jobs.
“Ukraine is a good deal for the United States,” Stoltenberg told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. “And most of the money the United States is providing to Ukraine is actually invested here in the U.S. — buying American equipment which we are sending to Ukraine. So this is making us all safer, and, [making] the U.S. defense industry stronger.”
Stoltenberg is in the United States in part to discuss preparations for the next summit of NATO leaders, who will visit Washington in July to mark the 75th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic alliance. His itinerary includes an address at the Heritage Foundation, the longtime conservative think tank that has emerged in recent years as a bastion of nationalist policy proposals amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war in Ukraine.
“He knows right now that the most important audience will be those MAGA Republicans and American nationalists who don’t want to support Ukraine and who have questions about NATO and Americans’ membership in NATO,” Hudson Institute senior fellow Luke Coffey, who worked at the Heritage Foundation for a decade but left the organization following an internal dispute over their policy stance on Ukraine aid, told the Washington Examiner. “I think that’s probably why he picked Heritage [as a venue]. And, you know, well done to Heritage for giving him a platform to speak to the public and also to that side of the [conservative] movement about the importance of Ukraine and NATO.”
Stoltenberg will take his diplomatic tour beyond Washington with a visit to a Lockheed Martin facility in Arkansas, “where actually European allies are buying a lot of stuff,” as he put it, and Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, happens to serve as governor.
“NATO allies are making [the] U.S. defense industry stronger and all of us safer because NATO is creating a big market for the U.S., for the American defense industry,” Stoltenberg said. “Just over the last two years, NATO allies have agreed to defense contracts [valued at] more than $120 billion. So, it’s in the [U.S.’s] security interest, it’s [in the] economic interest — it’s good for the United States.”
This argument is emerging as a predominant refrain of European diplomacy. Stoltenberg is making the trek to Arkansas just months after the top diplomat from Estonia, a small NATO ally with a strategic location bounded by Russia and the Baltic Sea, made his own trip to the Natural State to tour the Lockheed plant that will manufacture the $200 million worth of artillery systems that Estonia is purchasing from the company.
“The people in U.S. are not thinking of how much this cooperation with European Union and European countries actually [is] creating jobs,” Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna told the Washington Examiner during that October 2023 trip.
Stoltenberg and Tsahkna didn’t plan the overlap, according to embassy officials, but the new diplomatic strategy is gaining popularity.
“There’s some coordination between the European allies to also make these attempts to tell our side of the story … about the European collective and our country’s individual role in helping Ukraine,” Estonian Ambassador Kristjan Prikk told the Washington Examiner.
The envoy estimated that he had 14 speaking engagements last week, clustered around a visit to the region to open an “honorary consulate” at Appalachian State University’s Hickory campus in North Carolina.
“The opportunity presented itself because there certainly was interest in our understanding of the trans-Atlantic security and Ukrainian war,” Prikk said. “So, of course, I was eager to discuss these issues.”
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The economic facts of NATO defense cooperation have strategic ramifications, Stoltenberg emphasized.
“NATO’s a good deal for the United States,” the NATO chief said. “It makes you safer. And if Putin wins in Ukraine, it will embolden other authoritarian leaders. It means that we need to then invest more in defense. So the price for our security will go up.”