I don’t often encounter positive reactions to US President Donald Trump from the other side of the pond, but Paul Wells makes a case here for Mark Rutte, the current secretary general of the NATO alliance, being utterly sincere in his regard for his American “daddy”:
Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general.
Photo from Paul Wells’ substack
I haven’t seen much commentary about Mark Rutte’s weekend interview with the New York Times. It’s quite an interview. If the NATO secretary general is faking his enthusiasm for Donald Trump, he’s really committing to the bit.
I’m going to quote Rutte’s remarks in greater detail than you sometimes get, because what really stands out over the 36-minute podcast that resulted from the Times interview is Rutte’s doggedness. He doesn’t simply treat the US president as a containable problem, as European security experts sometimes do, but as nothing less than a full NATO partner and, indeed, as the hero of the alliance’s revitalization.
“President Trump deserves all the praise,” he tells interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a longtime NPR foreign correspondent before she joined the Times, “because without his leadership, without him being re-elected president of the United States, the 2% this year and the 5% in 2035 — we would never, ever, ever have been able to achieve agreement on this.”
Does he regret that Trump posted what the AP and a lot of others called a “fawning” text message in which Rutte wrote to Trump, “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win”? “Not at all, because what was in the text message is exactly as I see it.”
Is the integrity of NATO’s defense perimeter solid? “But it’s not that the Estonians are left to themselves. It would be the full force of NATO, including the full backup of the United States, which will come to the rescue. Putin knows this.”
Garcia-Navarro keeps pushing. Full backup of the United States, she says? You bet, Rutte says. In “everything I’ve discussed over the last six months with the new U.S. administration” there is “absolutely no shiver of a doubt that the U.S. is completely committed to NATO, is completely committed to Article 5,” the Alliance’s collective-defence principle.
Isn’t there a “fundamental disconnect” between the way Trump views the world and the commitments needed to make NATO work? Rutte answers: Nope! “President Trump put in place an excellent foreign-policy team, including Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth,” he offers.
But “what we are seeing,” Garcia-Navarro insists, perhaps in reference to this or this, “is the United States pulling back from Europe.”
“I really have to correct you,” Rutte insists in turn. “The United States is not pulling away from Europe.”
Where does Rutte stand on the credibility and prospects of Russia-Ukraine peace talks? “With the risk that I’m again praising President Trump: He is the one who broke the deadlock with Putin. When he became president in January, he started these discussions with Putin, and he was the only one who was able to do this. This had to happen.”
