Confusion at NATO: Rutte, Russia and Delusions about Trump

It was a speech unhinged in millenarian zeal. It was unapologetically hysterical in urging war while claiming to protect peace. It was also delivered with a note of profound self-denial: the US administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy had belittled Europe’s efforts in terms of ensuring its own security, not least of all its claims to civilisational supremacy. President Donald Trump has tirelessly insisted that the continent bloat the military industrial complex and confront its demographic problems.

From the opening, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte reflects on a piece of the Berlin Wall kept in NATO headquarters. “It was a barrier to keep people in, and ideas out. Now it is a monument to the force of freedom, a reminder of the power of unity, and a lesson that we must stay strong, confident and steadfast.” He might have gone further to explain how the collapse of the Berlin Wall was also a chance to stabilise Europe and temper the tensions with the then ailing Soviet Union. Assurances by NATO members and respective US administrations that eastward expansion toward Russia would be eschewed, were never honoured. NATO became Washington’s spear of hubris, a post-Cold War entity of triumphalism. It would only grow, making Moscow ever more anxious.

The message is one of foaming agitation. Russia and “the dark forces of oppression” again coming to the fore. The mission of the alliance reinvigorated. Claiming that NATO was “to stop a war before it starts,” he proceeded to fan the flames. “We are Russia’s next target, and we are already in harm’s way.” Russia, a country bleeding in war, burdened by sanctions, with an economy hovering in size between Canada and Italy, would seemingly wish to plunge a continent into an infernal maelstrom.  

Rutte is wilfully blind to this point, purposely elevating the threat posed by Russia despite its loss of over 1.1 million casualties since the war’s outbreak in February 2022, with a daily average loss of 1,200 troops a day in 2025. “Think about that, more than a million casualties so far, and 1,200 a day, killed or wounded, this year alone.” Think about that, and it makes remarks that Europe had to prepare “for the scale of war our grandparents or great-parents endured” grotesque and misplaced.

In the Rutter strategy, it becomes axiomatic to link Ukraine’s decidedly gloomy fate to that of NATO, a false link one has come to expect in that dubious, often mendacious discipline called international relations. Russia’s ambitions on Ukrainian territory become synonymous with the Kremlin’s feverish designs on Western and Central European capitals. “Allied defence spending and production must rise rapidly, our armed forces must have what they need to keep us safe, and Ukraine must have what it needs to defend itself – now.” He proudly mentions NATO allies agreeing to push defence expenditure to levels of 5% of GDP by 2035, an insular, wasteful measure. “But this is not the time for self-congratulation, I fear that too many are quietly complacent, and too many don’t feel the urgency, too many believe that time is on our side.”

Whether by design or ignorance, Rutte’s smug civilisational rhetoric ignores the threatening shadow of Trump’s National Security Strategy, which takes aim at alleged anti-democratic practices of European states. (The phrasing here, as with much of the document, is conceptually confused and a travesty of language.) “The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.” Peace was demanded by the European majority, “yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes.”

The NSS comes close to dismissing Europe as an ailing patient on the verge of expiring, abominating the European Union and those “transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”  

This can hardly sit well with Rutte and NATO’s European component, seeing as the Trump administration envisages an unrecognisable continent in the next two decades, doubting that “certain European countries will have economies strong enough to remain reliable allies.” Rarely has such an explicit statement on abandonment been made.

The howling subtext here is Ukraine’s increasing irrelevance to US foreign policy, evident in the parallel lines of European-Ukrainian negotiations on the war, and US-Russian discussions that sup from a different cup. Washington would support European allies in preserving “freedom and security” and restore “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” but would have its main eyes trained on asserting and enforcing “a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.” Latin America promises to suffer most, given this brash assertion of hemispheric domination.

Rutte, bless him, is putting on a brave face. In an interview with the BBC following his Berlin address, he remained industriously oblivious. Trump was “good news for collective defence, for NATO and for Ukraine.” Under the US President’s stewardship, NATO was “stronger than it ever was.” Time for a dose of that stiff medication called “reality”.

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