Pity the Poesy: Mark Rutte, NATO and Spending for War

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting” (1919)

There have been politicians who have fancied themselves as poets. There was Herman Van Rompuy in April 2010 who, when President of the European Council, imposed an anthology of haiku poetry unimaginatively titled Haiku on family members, friends, dignitaries and members of the press. Japanese diplomats were predictably diplomatic in their reception. “A poet perhaps remains best away from politics, at least from political action,” Van Rompuy claimed daringly, despite being picked to become the first European Council president in November 2009. He reconciled this dilemma with some crafty muddling. “In that sense I am a politician-haiku poet rather than a haiku poet-politician.”

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte seems to have been tempted, albeit briefly, by this notion of the poet-politician or the politician-poet. While his speech at the Concert Noble in Brussels last December can never qualify for any decent anthology of poetry, it illuminates his, and NATO’s position, on ongoing war in Ukraine. Rutte is a martial type keen to advance the rule of the gun in the service of the alliance. The result is the evil of banality delivered in poesy.

A chief function of NATO’s public relations efforts lies in justifying its own existence. Instead of dismantling or finding more peaceful pursuits at the end of the Cold War, it became the groomed emissary of US power in Europe, while never being explicitly described as such. Former Warsaw Pact countries still aching from the legacy of Soviet garrisons and the influence of Moscow gathered around the NATO flame like abused patients seeking counselling. Despite assurances to a weakened Russia by the United States and a number of Western European leaders that no eastward expansion of the alliance would take place, country after country was added. The index of animosity and suspicion accordingly rose in The Kremlin.

It falls on Rutte to make things look bleak and suitably dismal, especially when it comes to threats facing the alliance. “I’ll be honest: the security situation does not look good,” he solemnly declares. “It’s undoubtedly the worst in my lifetime. And I suspect in yours too.”

Flagging the phobia of invasion and the march of dark forces indifferent, if not openly hostile to democracy, the Secretary General notes that the distance from Brussels to Ukraine can be driven in one day. Ukraine at war is the epicentre of his concern, as is Ukraine facing authoritarian forces acting in concert. “That’s how close the Russian bombs are falling. It’s how close the Iranian drones are flying. And not much further, the North Korean soldiers are fighting.”  

With Ukraine seen as civilisation’s post child – and a Western one, no less – we get a picture of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s efforts of “trying to crush our freedom and way of life.” He is keen on erasing Ukraine altogether, “trying to fundamentally change the security architecture that has kept Europe safe for decades.”  

This is, like so much poetry that seeks to depict war with a propagandist’s mind, fantastically absent of context. It is an absence that continues to magnify the dangers of opponent and foe, seeing them as historical reminders of other aggressors. Be wary of appeasement; be wary of giving ground. In Rutte’s words, “for too long, we did not act.” Not in Georgia in 2008 or Crimea in 2014. “And many did not want to believe that he would launch all-out war on Ukraine in February.”

Worry is expressed at Russia’s war economy, the very economy that European and US sanctions was to miraculously cripple. Russian military spending as a share of GDP would be 7 to 8%. Its industry was prolifically busy in tank production, armoured vehicles and ammunition. The purpose: a “long-term confrontation” with Ukraine and NATO.

To show that NATO’s eyes are not cast merely towards Moscow, Rutte picks on that other bogeyman located even more eastwards. Here, he sounds like an official on secondment from the Pentagon, Washington’s eager megaphone in Europe. “From 200 warheads in 2020, China is expected to have more than 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030.” They are investing heavily in space-launch technology. They are bullying Taiwan. And just to colour in the rest of the paper, we are reminded about North Korea and Iran. Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran, all keen “To chip away at our freedom” and “reshape the global order.”

This concern is palpable, perhaps understandable given US-NATO efforts to reshape the global order after the Cold War and the disappearance of the bipolar order. With the US in sole charge, its administrations packed with neoconservative vigilantes keen to redraw boundaries, maps and “chip away” at any architectural foundation they disliked, the rise of this axis of opposition is clearly distressing.  

That distress takes one clear form. NATO must become even more militaristic. “It is time,” Rutte declares, “to shift to a wartime mindset.” Time to “turbo-charge our defence production and defence spending.” To not “spend more together now to prevent war, we will pay a much, much, much higher price later to fight it.”On meeting greater production targets and increasing defence expenditure, he is confident. Those virtuous arms for freedom will be found in Thales in France, a Rheinmetall factory in Italy, and Turkish Aerospace Industries in Türkiye.  

Overall, Rutte’s wretched speech-poem glorifies war, which NATO is already engaged invicariously through Ukraine, seeing a healthy, thriving military-industrial complex as indispensable to fight foes and “maintain long-term deterrence.” Europe, in a long slumber, had “hollowed out” its defence industry through “underinvestment and narrow industrial interests”.  

The slaughter, in other words, must be kept up in Ukraine, not merely for its bloodied sake, but for desk mandarins in Washington and Brussels and all those grateful arms manufacturers keen to make a steal. “The pity of war, the pity war distilled,” wrote Wilfred Owen, the First World War poet who knew more than a thing or two about the subject. Pity that Rutte did not acknowledge that side of it.

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