Mark Rutte, At This Point If You Need to Lie, Lie About the Size of the Deliveries
- john raymond
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Let’s pretend I don’t know shit about shit. Model me however you like. Treat me as hostile, naïve, irrational, too angry, too certain, too profane, too whatever. It does not matter. The concept I am arguing is simple enough that any idiot can understand it, and it is simple enough that the Secretary General of NATO has no excuse for getting it wrong.
A general is not a general because he speaks well. A general is a general because he marshals men and materiel and makes deliveries happen on time. If his units do not move when ordered, if ammunition does not arrive when promised, if the plan exists only as a narrative, then he is not a general at all—he is a clerk with epaulettes. Command is not mood-management. Command is throughput.
That is the entire bridge between the two poles of knowledge people hide behind: “I know everything” and “we know nothing.” The first pole is the courtier’s trick—trust me, I have access, I have insight, I can’t show you, but you must defer. The second pole is the coward’s refuge—we can’t be sure, so we can’t commit, so we can’t bind, so we can’t act. Both are forms of paralysis. Both are ways of spending time without producing power.
Power, in the only sense that matters in deterrence, is harm divided by time. The clock is the enemy because time is what turns intention into irreversible fact. So the proof standard cannot be a private assurance of trust, and it cannot be an endless meditation on uncertainty. The proof standard is deliveries: dated, measurable, executed commitments that reduce the adversary’s freedom of action and increase yours.
This is why I cannot accept the Secretary General of NATO speaking as if trust rhetoric is the operating system. On January 22, 2026, at Davos, Reuters reports Mark Rutte describing a Greenland/Arctic “framework” that requires NATO allies to step up Arctic security with tangible progress within 2026, while noting commanders would now define what additional measures are needed. Reuters also reports him saying of President Trump: “You can always take Donald Trump at his word.” A year-marker is not nothing. But a year-marker without a public milestone cadence is still an attempt to tranquilize the audience. The enemy does not fear your reassurances. The enemy fears your calendar.
Rutte can say the right things about Russia and Ukraine—and he does. NATO’s own Davos transcript has him calling Russia NATO’s main adversary and stressing Ukraine’s urgent needs, including interceptors. But correctness is not competence. A sentence does not intercept a missile. A sentence does not surge production. A sentence does not pre-position stockpiles. In a war of tempo, words that do not become deliveries are worse than useless, because they create the sensation of action while time is still being lost.
So here is the standard, stated in terms simple enough for anyone to apply, including people who hate my tone.
If you want me to trust you, do not ask for trust. Publish the milestones. Hit the milestones. If you want me to believe you understand the power equation, do not tell me you have a framework. Show me that the framework has a schedule, a procurement cadence, and a deployment plan that has already begun to execute. If you want me to stop writing, do not persuade me. Deliver.
And if you feel tempted to lie—if you are trapped in political theater, if you are trying to manage a volatile president, if you believe you must oversell—then at this point the only lie that is even rhetorically compatible with deterrence is a lie about output. Lie about the size of the deliveries. Inflate the numbers and then force reality to catch up. Announce deadlines that embarrass you if you miss them. Because that kind of “lie” does not ask the public to submit; it binds leadership to a scoreboard. It turns rhetoric into accountability.
This is what a general does. He does not ask his soldiers to believe in him. He arranges the conditions under which their belief becomes irrelevant—because the trains run, the supplies arrive, the units move, the plan executes. If that is not happening, then no amount of “trust me” language matters. A general who cannot marshal his men and deliver is no general at all.
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