Alexander Stubb, fitness buff and decent golfer, looks younger than his 56 years. President of Finland since March 2024, he has tried to be an interlocutor between President Trump and Europe. As a new member of NATO, Finland is still figuring out its place in the alliance. But as a golfer, Mr. Stubb has built an odd but important relationship with a president who spends an enormous amount of time on his own links.
Mr. Stubb urges calm even as rhetoric has grown high among European and NATO leaders about the failings of the trans-Atlantic relationship under Mr. Trump.
The mood became even more fraught after Mr. Trump’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, which again pressed his intention to seize Greenland whether Denmark, a NATO ally, liked it or not.
After that speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada won plaudits when he spoke of “a rupture” in traditional Western relations. For Mr. Stubb, rupture means complete disorder, he said in an interview in February at the Munich Security Conference — and that is a dangerous prospect as the West faces a militarized Russia, a war in Europe and a rising China.
“We don’t need to use the bulldozer here,” Mr. Stubb said. “The difference between Mark and me is he talks about a rupture and I talk about a transition, because I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bath water.”
Yet trying to find a middle way is not easy. Mr. Stubb has found himself publicly at odds with the secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, over whether Europe can defend itself without the help of the United States.
At the end of January, in a speech to the European Parliament, Mr. Rutte mocked European leaders who might think they could defend the continent against Russia without the active involvement of the United States.
“If anyone thinks here, again, that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the U.S., keep on dreaming,” he said, adding: “You can’t. We can’t. We need each other.”
Otherwise, European nations would have to spend 10 percent of their national income on the military, Mr. Rutte said.
Mr. Stubb disagrees. While he believes NATO would be greatly weakened should Mr. Trump withdraw from the alliance or even hesitate to meet its obligations, he said Europe could defend itself against Russia on its own.
“Can we defend ourselves? My answer is yes, we can,” Mr. Stubb said at Davos. Without the Americans? He answered: “Without the Americans.”
Finland, he argues, provides a good example of a whole society engaged in deterrence and defense, with conscription and with regular exercises between the military, the police, the medical services and the politicians. These are lessons other nations bordering Russia, like Poland, are learning.
At the same time, Mr. Stubb has little time for the cultural criticisms Trump officials have made about Europe heading toward “civilizational erasure,” in the words of the White House’s National Security Strategy.
And he sharply disagrees with the Trump administration’s contempt for multilateral institutions and international law as somehow disadvantaging the United States, the country that led their creation after World War II and dominated them since.
“I still want the United States to be the leader of the global West,” Mr. Stubb said. “But of course, ideologically, the current administration will not necessarily take on that task — or it’s a different type of leadership,” he continued. “Then I have to ask myself the question, ‘Can anyone replace the U. S.?’ Well, not per se, but the European Union can take a role in defending those values.”
That would include European support for a peace in Ukraine that preserves the country’s independence and denies Russia a victory. Finland lost territory to the Soviet Union in battle but preserved its own independence and sovereignty. Still, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland had to remain militarily nonaligned and it lost some of its autonomy, a policy that came to be known as “Finlandization.” A sovereign, independent Ukraine should not have to face that choice, Mr. Stubb has said.
If Ukrainians “come out of this war with security guarantees from both Europe and the U.S., if they come out of this war with E.U. membership, and if they come out of this war with a big reconstruction package, that would not be bad,” he said.
Given his relationship with Mr. Trump, Mr. Stubb has been important to European efforts to convince him not to force Kyiv to make unreasonable concessions.
Still, Mr. Stubb recognizes, the world has changed, perhaps forever, and Europe is not Washington’s priority. Europe comes only third, after the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, with the Middle East fourth and Africa fifth, he said.
So Europe, Mr. Stubb said, must do more for its own conventional defense to ensure a more resilient relationship with Washington.
A more varied world order needs institutional reform, however, Mr. Stubb says. He lays out an optimistic, even slightly utopian plan in a new book, “The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order.”
In his view, the triangle consists of the global West, the global East and the global South. The first is powerful but divided; the second, led by China, is autocratic or dictatorial; the third, with half the world’s population but less than a quarter of global income, is rising and pivotal for the future.
The global South, he argues, “holds the power to decide in which direction the pendulum will swing.”
Mr. Stubb wants to preserve a multilateral world of rule-based cooperation, while allowing more agency for the global South.
The institutions of the multilateral world order are weakened but not broken, he said. To strengthen them, more influence should go to so-called “middle powers,” like India, Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria, he said, in part by expanding the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and reducing the power of the veto there.
If Mr. Trump does not always agree with Mr. Stubb, he listens to him, a respectful relationship that developed after they first played golf together a year ago. A former golfer on his college team, Mr. Stubb, who had not played in a while, put on a good show and impressed the U.S. president.
I asked Mr. Stubb once if Mr. Trump, as sometimes alleged, cheats at golf. He laughed and said diplomatically that they were on the same team. He said he was “very positively surprised with the charisma and the charm and the generosity” of Mr. Trump, who like most people, he said, could have a different persona in private than in public.
Europe, he said, should “work with the United States where we can — for me, that is NATO, defense, minerals, icebreakers, tech — and then agree to disagree on climate change, on international institutions, rules and norms.”
Then he quickly added: “But don’t get too emotional about it. Be cool, calm and collected.”
Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.
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