BRUSSELS, Belgium — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News said he is not ruling out nuclear weapons for Ukraine, and that ultimately it is up to President Donald Trump.
“I’m not here to declare anything on or off the table. That’s not my job. That’s the president’s job. He’s the leader, he’s the master negotiator and dealmaker,” he said.
He added, “Some of us are out there to help set certain types of conditions that could make a deal more likely and that’s what I’ve tried to do here in the context of NATO.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week Ukraine should be given NATO membership or nuclear weapons as a security guarantee against a future Russian invasion as part of a peace deal.
But Hegseth on Wednesday outlined some U.S. positions ahead of negotiations, including that Ukraine should not be offered NATO membership.
He also said a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is “unrealistic,” that no U.S. troops would be deployed to Ukraine, and that European peacekeepers in Ukraine should not be part of a NATO mission that could trigger Article 5 and thus, U.S. military intervention.
Hegseth’s remarks dashed some of Zelensky’s key hopes. On February 4, the Ukrainian president said his country should be offered NATO membership or nuclear weapons as a security guarantee against further Russian invasion.
If joining NATO would take “years” or “decades,” he said, “Then let them give us nuclear weapons.”
Hegseth’s remarks, at a meeting of NATO allies and partners who support Ukraine, sent shock and dismay across Europe, which has stood firmly behind Ukraine in the war against Russia but relied heavily on U.S. leadership, and financial and military support to keep Ukraine in the fight.
But Hegseth said his remarks should not be construed as red lines, but of the reality of the situation.
“I’m not the one that declares a red line or not. I work with the president, as we work through these issues, but we believed that it was useful just to speak some reality into the conversation,” he said. “Ultimately, President Trump is the only one who’s gonna determine if there’s wiggle room or movement on any particular position.”
He said his remarks did not mean Ukraine could not join NATO in the future.
“I think what I articulated yesterday, in consultation with senior leadership in the White House and the Oval Office of the president, was the reality of the moment — that NATO membership was unlikely considering the realities of where we are. No one’s throwing a stake in the ground for 25 years from now or any defined period of time,” he said.
“It’s just a recognition that if you want if we want a negotiated peace, you want a ceasefire, you want an opportunity for enduring peace, realistically, right now that’s not in the cards — just like going back to the 2014 borders realistically right now is not in the cards. That’s not a that’s not a definitive value statement.”
He said Trump was a dealmaker who lives “in the real world.”
“You can talk about things in an ideal world or you can talk about things in the real world. And that’s where President Trump is,” he said.
He said criticism that Trump negotiating with Russia was a sign of weakness “is just wrong and opposite on its face.”
“The reason Vladimir Putin and Zelensky are at the table is because of President Trump’s strength, because of American strength. It didn’t happen under Joe Biden. It didn’t happen for years,” he said, adding:
Putin knows that President Trump is strong, which is why this invasion would have never happened under President Trump in the first place. In 2014, Vladimir Putin invaded under Obama. Nothing happened for four years under Trump, and then 2022, you get the invasion under Joe Biden.
President Trump is elected and he shows up, and the conversation completely shifts, which, again, if you want to make a cheap sort of uninformed anti-Trump argument that somehow this takes a card off the table and looks like weakness, that’s all it is — a cheap shot from the cheap seats — not seriously engaged in what sophisticated, high-level negotiations actually look like in the realm of reality.
“[Trump] is a brass-tacks dealmaker,” Hegseth said. “The one thing you have to know from President Trump is that he’s always negotiating from a position of strength. He’s not going to walk into a deal and fold. He’s going to walk in and realize the incentives from both sides and be honest about those incentives.”
He also hit back at critics who say that any peacekeeping mission not under a NATO umbrella would not deter Putin.
“It’s a sort of a cheap, easy, argument to make. … This is from the same people who have presented no new ideas. … What is your idea — endless trench warfare?”
Hegseth said his role in the negotiations was a “sliver” of an overarching approach led by Trump.
“You’re going see some of the conversations our treasury secretary has had, and the vice president, and the secretary of state, with Zelensky that I think will demonstrate American investment and interest in Ukraine, which has a whole other level of guarantee than just, ‘We like you, so we’ll support you.'”
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