I'm John Batson, Gordon Chang, at Gordon Chi Chang, my colleague and co-host, and we are flummoxed by NATO,

and Mark Rudy, the general secretary, have made NATO in particular, because there are different

statements at different times of the week to different audiences about NATO's future, past,

present, circumstances, money. So for clarification, we welcome our long-time, very good colleague and

helpmate Victoria Coates at the Heritage Foundation, Vice President, because Victoria's got to deal

with all aspects of NATO, no matter how Mark Rudy reverses himself week to week.

Victoria, our greetings to you.

Mark Rudy is a puzzle.

When I first met him, and they talked about him taking this post, and it's a recent

assumption, he was described to me as a hawk, as a man who was dedicated to defending

Europe from the aggressor, that would be Moscow. Is that still accurate,

or is he changing in some important fashion that we need to take into account? Good day to you,

Victoria. Good day, John. Good day, Gordon. I think what we're seeing is sort of the evolution

of Mark Gerta. And we at Heritage were not particularly

enthusiastic about his nomination to be Secretary General, succeeding Yen Stoltenberg, who had been

a very good friend to Heritage. Stoltenberg came and gave two important speeches at Heritage

during his tenure. And we saw him very much Stoltenberg as a realist who worked with President

Trump during the first term, actually praised President Trump for what he did in terms of

strengthening NATO. But the problem we had with Rota's nomination was that the Netherlands, of which

he had served as the prime minister, was not at 2% of its GDP on defense. So he could be

as huckish as he wanted. But as the head of government, he was not actually getting his

country to that threshold. So we were very concerned about that. Now, he has actually been a much more effective Secretary General than I had foreseen. The NATO summit at the Hague last year was quite successful in terms of getting pledges out of the major European economies to get to 5% of GDP on defense. Now, we'll see if they actually make good on that. And he has also proven a good

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