U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press before boarding his plane at Homestead Air Reserve Base, May 21. AP-Yonhap

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio is on his latest mission to assuage nervous U.S. allies in Europe about the Trump administration’s intentions with NATO or at least put a friendlier face on whipsawing changes and uncertainty about American troop reductions.

Rubio will attend a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Sweden on Friday — the same day senior Pentagon officials are expected to brief the 32-nation alliance on plans for the U.S. military’s commitment to European defense at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.

The meeting of diplomats, which precedes a NATO leaders’ summit in Turkey in July, comes amid great uncertainty over how the war in Iran will play out and whether stalled U.S. efforts to broker an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict will resume. Resentment also still simmers on the continent over President Donald Trump’s criticism of allies and his interest in taking over Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark.

Rubio has often been called on to offer a calmer, less antagonistic presence from the Trump administration at meetings like these. He has been dispatched on several such missions this year, including the Munich Security Conference in February and, more recently, to Italy, where he met with Italian officials and Pope Leo XIV after Trump criticized the American pontiff for his stances on crime and the Iran war.

Lack of clarity about US troop drawdowns in Europe

On his departure to the meeting in Helsingborg, Sweden, Rubio declined to discuss any further changes to the American military presence in Europe, including a possible reduction in the number of troops that the U.S. will commit under the NATO Force Model, which is a contingency plan for European defense in the event of serious security concerns.

The Trump administration had decided to cancel the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops to Poland and Germany, but then the president posted on social media Thursday that “the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland.”

It was not clear whether that meant the brigade that had been stopped from going to Poland would be back on its way, whether additional troops beyond that rotational deployment could be added, or whether there would still be a drawdown of U.S. troops in Europe, but from a different country. The Pentagon referred requests for comment to the White House, which did not immediately respond to messages seeking clarity.

Earlier, Rubio did repeat that Trump and others in the administration, including him, are “very disappointed” in NATO, especially in its response to the Iran war.

Source: Korea Times News