A top globalist politician once hailed as the “Trump whisperer” who is now the Secretary General of NATO says he foresees a good relationship with whoever wins the U.S. Presidential elections next month, disarming some legacy criticism that Donald Trump is somehow a danger to the Western alliance.
Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has been the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) for 11 days, a position he secured to some extent on his strength as a rare internationalist-globalist who publicly made nice with President Trump while he was in office. He visited London on Thursday for talks with the British Prime Minister and with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and while there appeared to lay groundwork to continue his working relationship with Trump should he be President again.
Rutte told The Times of London that: “I’ve worked very well with him for four years … it will work out [whoever becomes president] because in the end they both want to keep the US safe and to keep the US safe they need Nato.” He said he’s had a “good relationship” with Trump in the past, and said: “I respect him a lot and I think if he gets elected I can work with him”.
Trump having a good attitude to NATO is not just a matter of personal relationships, Rutte claimed, saying in an increasingly unstable world the alliance would simply become even more important to Washington. He told the paper: “For all allies in Nato, big or small, you cannot do it alone. You have to be a member of strong alliances and organisations like Nato … This goes back to Trump, I know that he knows it…. In a harsh, uncompromising world, he needs the alliance”.
While the former Dutch Prime Minister said he was confident things would go well whoever won the White House, he also showed he was onboard with Trump talking points on NATO, signalling he was fully conversant with the former President’s long-stated position that the two-per-cent spend on defence for each alliance member should be consigned to history. It is “not enough”, Rutte stated, saying a discussion had to happen where NATO members decide whether that means the new spending floor should be two-and-a-half or three per cent.
“I think it has to go up … we have more to do and we have to make sure that there is no capability gap”, Rutte is reported to have said.
As previously reported on Rutte’s attitude to Donald Trump:
Perhaps one of Rutte’s greatest strengths for the job is his skill as what has been called a “Trump whisperer”, quite likely to be an important quality for the head of NATO in the coming years. While the men may not agree on their political views, Rutte has been diplomatic towards Trump in the past and even chided other European leaders for their non-stop criticism of the former President.
In 2019, Rutte said he felt annoyed by the “white wine-sipping elite” who rolled their eyes at Trump’s criticism of bodies like NATO, saying the President was right to point out they had problems and needed to improve. Rutte said then, rather than simply complaining “Trump is very wrong” on everything, it would be better to make use of Trump’s presence to fix the flaws in multilateralism in NATO, the World Trade Organisation, and the European Union.
Last month Rutte was standing apart from the European leadership class’s opinions on Trump again, pointing out that, in fact, the former President was right to point out how little some European states pay for their defence, in defiance of their NATO treaty obligations. Amid the news cycle of comentators losing their heads over Trump’s latest NATO comments, which as a report at the time noted the more grounded leaders realised should be taken “seriously but not literally”, Rutte had said “We should stop moaning and whining and nagging about Trump”.
In the past, Trump critics have taken his criticism of the alliance as proof that he is a danger to NATO, that his telling its members they needed to shape up weakened it. Yet the early criticism that saw Trump scorned since proved to be well founded, and NATO figures — even those who may not have been natural Trump supporters — conceded he had pushed the alliance into doing more.