Dear Mark Rutte, What in the Actual Fuck Are You Still Doing Here?
- john raymond
- Jan 21
- 4 min read
You are the goddamn Secretary General of NATO. Your job is not to be an auxiliary public-relations agent for President Trump at Davos, and it is not to engage in personality maintenance that can be screenshot, posted, and repurposed as leverage against the alliance.
Yet that is precisely what happened when President Trump published your private message—one laced with flattery (“what you accomplished in Syria today is incredible”), an offer to use your “media engagements in Davos” to highlight his work “in Gaza, and in Ukraine,” and a closing signal that you are “committed to finding a way forward on Greenland.”
NATO has reportedly confirmed the message’s authenticity, eliminating any pretense that this is about “misquoting” or “fake screenshots.”
This is not a story about etiquette. It is a story about institutional integrity under asymmetric attack. You are standing at the choke point between alliance cohesion and alliance corrosion, and you just handed a corrosive actor exactly what he needed: proof, on his own social feed, that NATO’s top civilian figure will flatter him, amplify him, and signal “movement” on a sovereignty-adjacent dispute—privately, personally, and without the visible insulation of formal alliance process.
President Trump then explained the point of posting these private messages in explicitly instrumental terms: he said he posted them because they “made my point.” His point is not subtle: I can make you dance, and I can publish the dance.
The Greenland backdrop makes your posture worse, not better. In the same time window, President Trump publicly linked Greenland pressure to tariff threats and then, at Davos, claimed a “framework” or “outline” for a future deal involving Greenland after engagement with you—while simultaneously describing the situation in ways that have rattled allies and markets.
Reuters reports President Trump saying he discussed Greenland with you by phone. So when your message says you are “committed to finding a way forward on Greenland,” it does not read as neutral or procedural. It reads as acquiescence to pressure, packaged in the language of personal rapport, in a moment when the alliance needs process discipline, not court politics.
Under the Raymond Method, your idiotic mistakes are 100% legible.
Pillar One, Regime Security: President Trump’s incentives are personal dominance and survival, not alliance health. In that environment, allies who flatter him in private become raw material. They are trophies that can be posted to demonstrate submission, to intimidate other leaders, and to signal to his domestic audience that even NATO bends.
The leak is not a breach; it is a tactic. Trump is training the alliance to communicate with him as if every sentence is a hostage note.
Pillar Two, Asymmetric Warfare: the target here is trust—because trust is the invisible infrastructure of collective defense. When the head of NATO can have his private text messages broadcast by the U.S. President, confidential coordination becomes riskier, slower, more self-censored, and more brittle. That is an operational degradation of alliance capacity.
We see that Putin do not need tanks to harm NATO; he only needs Trump to poison its bloodstream.
Pillar Three, Byzantine Traitor-General: an alliance is a coordination machine designed to survive deception and internal compromise. The single worst failure mode is when a central node behaves like the system is still symmetric—like the incentives are normal, like the exchange is good-faith, like flattery is harmless.
In a Byzantine environment, however, flattery is not politeness; it is a signature on a vulnerability. It becomes evidence that the you, Mark Rutte, can be manipulated, and therefore the network can be steered by malign actors.
This is why the “narcissism” frame is inadequate. Narcissism is a personality story; the alliance is a systems story. The systems story is that President Trump is demonstrating he can compel deference, weaponize private channels, and extract performative cooperation from NATO leadership while he pressures allies on core sovereignty questions.
Your message helped him do that, and then your private channel became part of his public coercion theater.
So here is the hard question the alliance deserves to ask of you: what exactly are you still doing there—if “there” means inside a compliance pattern that predictably strengthens the disruptor and weakens the institution?
If you believe you must stay, then your mandate changes immediately: stop acting like a courtier managing a volatile monarch, and start acting like the guardian of a rules-based alliance. That means, at minimum, an explicit reversion to formal process and public institutional boundaries: no personalized praise; no private offers of Davos media support; no language that implies NATO’s Secretary General is bargaining over Greenland’s future; and no private-channel intimacy with a leader who has demonstrated he will publish and weaponize it.
The logic is not moralistic; it is minimax. When a proven adversarial actor has shown you the exploit, you assume he will use that exploit again—because that is what works.
If that posture is impossible inside your office, then resignation is not melodrama. It is systems hygiene. NATO cannot afford a Secretary General who is functionally compelled to trade in flattery and personal reassurance to keep the lights on.
That is the definition of institutional capture-by-incentive: the alliance adjusts itself around the disruptor’s needs and personal leverage, and then calls the adjustment “diplomacy.”
The alliance does not need performance. It needs fucking spine. And you do not appear to have one.
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