Mark Rutte Continues to Do the Opposite of His Job

Mark Rutte’s obligation as NATO Secretary General is not to flatter power, manage egos, or buy time through personal rapport. It is to defend the alliance’s integrity by making betrayal costly and resistance credible. That is the starting point—and it is precisely where Rutte has failed.

If President Trump is allowed to continue acting against the alliance, NATO will not be destroyed by external force. It will be dismantled from within, through normalization of coercion, degradation of trust, and the quiet substitution of personalistic bargaining for collective defense. That outcome cannot be prevented by charm. It can only be prevented by clarity, boundaries, and the public reinforcement of democratic opposition inside the United States.

Rutte is doing the opposite. He is actively making my job as a loyal American harder to do.

What Rutte should be doing

First, Rutte should be speaking with institutional clarity, not personal deference. The Secretary General does not exist to praise leaders; he exists to articulate the alliance’s red lines. When threats are made against allied sovereignty, when private communications are weaponized for public humiliation, or when coercion is framed as leadership, the correct response is not flattery. It is to state, publicly and plainly, that such behavior is incompatible with the alliance’s rules.

Second, Rutte should be making democratic resistance easier, not harder. The central question the world asks—why Americans are not pushing back harder—has a clear answer: Americans are pushing back through courts, states, journalism, and civil society. What undermines that effort is elite cover. When NATO’s top official appears to validate Trump, it collapses the distinction between lawful opposition and partisan dissent. It tells foreign audiences that resistance is optional because the alliance itself seems to accept the conduct.

The Secretary General’s duty, therefore, is not neutrality. It is to ensure that American opponents of alliance sabotage are seen as aligned with NATO’s founding principles—not as outliers arguing against a supposed consensus.

Third, Rutte should be shifting the narrative from personalities to commitments. NATO is not a relationship with a man; it is a treaty with obligations. The correct frame is not whether Trump feels respected, but whether Article 5 remains credible. Every public intervention should return to that point: commitments are binding; coercion is unacceptable; alliances do not operate by extortion.

Finally, Rutte should be coordinating openly with democratic institutions inside the United States. That does not mean interfering in domestic politics. It means refusing to launder anti-democratic behavior as “effective leadership,” and instead reinforcing the legitimacy of constitutional checks and alliance-aligned opposition. Flattery does the opposite: it isolates domestic resistance and emboldens the saboteur.

Why time-milking fails

Rutte’s apparent strategy is to milk time—to flatter Trump, keep him nominally engaged, and hope the storm passes. This is not strategy; it is avoidance. It assumes that Trump’s behavior is a temporary mood rather than a structural threat.

As long as Trump remains in power, Rutte knows the alliance is in crisis. He knows that trust is eroding, that deterrence depends on credibility, and that allies cannot plan their security around a leader who treats them as bargaining chips. Yet he continues to offer praise because he believes time itself is the scarce resource.

Time is not the scarce resource. Credibility is.

Every day that coercion is rewarded with validation, the alliance’s credibility decays. Every public compliment teaches the lesson that threats work. Every attempt to normalize sabotage makes the eventual rupture more catastrophic.

The domestic dimension

NATO will not survive if its fate depends on flattering a single American leader. It will survive only if American democracy itself enforces limits on that leader’s behavior. That is why Rutte’s actions are so damaging.

By providing Trump with cover, Rutte does not actually stabilize the alliance; he instead weakens the domestic forces that could actually save it. He makes it harder for Americans to argue—credibly and effectively—that Trump’s conduct is a betrayal of alliance norms. He turns a clear moral and strategic conflict into a muddle of tone management and elite accommodation.

This is exactly backwards. The Secretary General should be amplifying the signal that alliance sabotage is unacceptable, not muting it. He should be increasing the political cost of betrayal, not lowering it through praise.

The Chamberlain error

History does not condemn Neville Chamberlain because he sought peace. It condemns him because he mistook appeasement for stability and purchased time at the expense of deterrence. The result was not safety, but a more destructive reckoning.

Rutte is now making the same structural error. He is attempting to preserve NATO by accommodating the very behavior that destroys it. He is substituting flattery for firmness, and private management for public principle.

If NATO fails, Rutte will not be remembered as the man who held it together. He will be remembered as the man who normalized its erosion while insisting he was preventing worse.

The line that must be drawn

NATO does not need a whisperer. It needs a line in the sand.

That line is simple: threats against allies are unacceptable; coercion is not leadership; treaties are not bargaining chips. Saying this publicly does not weaken the alliance. It strengthens it by aligning words with purpose and empowering democratic resistance where it actually matters.

If Mark Rutte cannot draw that line—if he continues to ride Trump’s dick in the hope of buying time—then he is not defending NATO. He is ensuring that when Trump finally tears it apart, the alliance will already have been hollowed out from the inside.

The job of the Secretary General is not to survive the moment. It is to protect the institution.

On that measure, Rutte is failing, and he is doing so in a spectacular manner.

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