Mr Rutte goes to Brussels

Meet NATO's new secretary general, Mark Rutte. Will our former prime minister be able to keep that sinking ship afloat?

It’s been confirmed:

Acting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has been officially appointed as the next NATO secretary general, replacing the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg, the US-led military bloc has announced. Rutte will take up the post on October 1.

The decision to appoint the 57-year-old veteran politician, the longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history, known for his staunch support of Ukraine and consensus-building skills, was made on Wednesday by NATO’s main political decision-making body.

(“NATO confirms new chief”, RT, 26 June 2024)

Some of us saw this coming. A tweet of mine from January 2023 flagged a meeting with Joe Biden at the White House during which this comical and revealing photo was taken:

Given that NATO has for more than two years been actively engaged in a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, you might think that its secretary general would need to have at least a modicum of military knowledge and experience, but Rutte is wholly unencumbered in this regard. To be fair to him, neither had his predecessors, Jens Stoltenberg and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, both of whom were characterized by their stridency and mindless boosterism. The secretary general of NATO is a political post, obviously.

I’ve seen some comments on social media that Rutte is cut from the same cloth as those two, but I don’t think this is entirely accurate. Mark Rutte is not an ideologue, far from it; he is first and foremost a careerist and an opportunist, someone greatly skilled at bureaucratic wheeling and dealing. He may occasionally make an intemperate remark, but that would more likely reflect the contingencies of a given moment rather than his true beliefs, insofar he has any. Rutte got the job not because he has ideas or vision, but because he is a good crisis manager; he knows how to put out bureaucratic fires. Don’t ask Mark Rutte for a long-term strategic plan to ensure stability and peace in Europe based on solid, non-threatening relations with its neighbors. He won’t have one.

Mark Rutte meets Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Source Reuters

The RT piece cited above speaks of his “consensus-building skills” and this refers to his success in building governing coalitions — four times — in the course of his fourteen years as the leader of the center-right VVD party. However, whether the skills he developed in pulling together and leading coalitions within the rarefied, concensus-oriented political culture of the Netherlands will be sufficient to deal with the fracturing NATO alliance is the big question. NATO’s protege Ukraine, a de facto member, is losing the war. Important NATO member Turkey is distancing itself from the debacle, Hungary is dissenting as well. Neither Italy nor Spain want further escalation. French president Emmanuel Macron, who recently proposed crazy schemes to try to reverse Ukraine’s sinking fortunes on the battlefield, has been dealt a punishing defeat in recent elections. The Biden administration primary interest now appears to be try to prolong the inevitable denouement of this tragic, wholly avoidable conflict until after the November elections. The EU’s new foreign minister is the strident Russia hawk Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, one the intensely Russosphobic “Baltic chihuahuas”, will be pulling the EU and NATO in a destructive direction with no diplomacy in sight.

Mark Rutte may think he has made a brilliant career move, but I think he has been handed a poisoned chalice.

I’ve written extensively about our now former prime minister in this space. If you would like to read more, you might start here:

In other news…

Apropos of parliamentary elections last November, which resulted in yet another agonizingly long negotiation, it appears we finally have a new governing coalition, and the new Cabinet will be sworn in this week. I will try to put together a short piece on that development over the next few days.