President Donald Trump welcomed NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte to the White House just a week after his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, signaling an intense round of diplomacy amid growing global security challenges.
When asked about the recent U.S. strikes on alleged narco-terrorist vessels in the Pacific Ocean, Trump delivered a firm response.
“We have legal authority. We’re allowed to do that. And if we do by land, we may go back to Congress. This is a national security problem. They killed 300,000 Americans last year. Drugs,” he stated, defending the decision.
According to U.S. officials, this was the eighth known American strike on suspected drug-trafficking ships in Latin American waters since September. The most recent attack reportedly killed two individuals and took place Tuesday evening on the Pacific side of South America. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the incident on X (formerly Twitter), noting that at least 34 people have died in the ongoing U.S. operations targeting narco-ships in the region.
Trump’s meeting with Rutte also came on the heels of heightened tensions with Russia. Just days earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that Moscow would not agree to any ceasefire in Ukraine unless what he called the “root causes of the conflict” were resolved.
This statement followed President Trump’s decision to cancel a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin in Hungary, underscoring the strained ties between Washington and Moscow.
Despite the diplomatic strain, Rutte expressed confidence in Trump’s leadership, saying he believes the U.S. President is “the only one” capable of negotiating an end to the war that has devastated Ukraine for nearly four years.
Meanwhile, reports from The Wall Street Journal suggest that the Trump administration has quietly eased restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western-supplied long-range missiles, allowing Kyiv to conduct more aggressive strikes against Russian targets.
The change was made without public announcement, but Ukrainian forces recently demonstrated the shift by using a British-made Storm Shadow cruise missile to hit a Russian explosives and rocket fuel plant in Bryansk. Ukraine’s General Staff celebrated the operation as a “successful hit,” saying it breached Moscow’s air defenses.
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