Rex Tillerson will visit Russia in April but won’t be present for NATO meeting

Rex Tillerson the US Secretary of State has a busy schedule ahead of him. He will be leaving for Italy soon in order to attend the G7 summit. A few days later he will be leaving for Moscow. But before either of these trips, he was supposed to attend a NATO summit where 28 NATO allies would be gathered. This would have been his first meeting with the group. The meeting will take place in Brussels on April 5-6. But Tillerson will not be there.

According to Reuters he is reportedly skipping the summit in favor of attending the meeting between Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. It was stated by a State Department spokesperson that acting deputy secretary Tom Shannon will be representing the US in the NATO meeting instead of Tillerson. But though Tillerson will forgo the NATO meeting, he will still meet ministers of 26 out of 27 of the NATO countries this Wednesday during a Global Counter ISIS Coalition summit.

This announcement comes at a time when the Trump administration is embroiled in a scandal regarding the relationships of certain Trump campaign officials with Russia. It also follows in the wake of fresh controversy as Donald Trump claims that Germany awes NATO vast sums of money. This dubious claim hasn’t gone down well with the NATO. Tillerson skipping the NATO meet and going to Russia might be considered as a snub and send the wrong message to US allies. It might be perceived that US is prioritizing its ties with big powers and ignoring the smaller nations. US relationship with NATO under Trump administration has already started off on a shaky ground as Trump had made his stand clear even during his campaign. Even though NATO’s mutual defense clause calls for a response by the group in its entirety in case of an attack on one of the member nations, Trump said during his campaign that he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”

Use This Content For Free. Refer to the License below for details:

This Gusture News or Analysis Content by Gusture is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.