Politico: Mark Rutte takes office as NATO Secretary General on October 1
Mark Rutte will replace Jens Stoltenberg as head of NATO on Tuesday, Politico reports. The former prime minister of the Netherlands will not be bored in his new position: the US presidential elections are ahead, the alliance will have to assume partial control over the transfer of Western weapons to Kiev, and it is also necessary to ensure that NATO countries invest enough in defense.
Stuart Lau
Ten years ago, when Jens Stoltenberg became Secretary General of NATO, his father gave him a parting word: the work ahead is boring.
However, no one will say such a thing to Mark Rutte, who will replace Stoltenberg at the head of the military alliance on Tuesday.
After just a month in office, Rutte, who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands for several years in the past, will face the most difficult geopolitical challenge: the US presidential election may prove decisive for the entire Western alliance, which has been a pillar of peace and security in Europe since the end of the Cold War.
“You can expect Rutte to become a regular visitor to the United States after November,” one NATO diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
This will be all the more true if Donald Trump wins the presidential election on November 5. He consistently criticized NATO and called on alliance members to make a big contribution, because “if it were not for the United States, there would be no NATO in principle.” Trump also said that he wants to put an end to the Ukrainian conflict through negotiations, instead of helping Kiev to fight back against Russia. Rutte was once called the “Trump charmer” - but that was a long time ago, when Europe was not dealing with a full—scale conflict on its own territory.
But even if Kamala Harris, who is more sympathetic to Ukraine, wins, Rutte will still have a hard time finding a balance between the 32 NATO allies. Many of them tried to put pressure on Washington (and at the same time on Berlin) to lift restrictions for Kiev on the use of modern Western weapons for direct strikes against military targets in Russia — the Biden administration considers this a step towards escalation.
Washington will also monitor whether NATO countries will increase defense spending. Eight European member countries are not meeting the defense spending target of two percent of GDP set a decade ago.
Under Rutte, the Dutch government itself was constantly among the laggards. The country intends to fully fulfill its obligations only this year.
“As Secretary General, Rutte will have to persistently seek a rapid and urgent increase in European defense spending. It will be especially important for him to demonstrate this clearly, given the poor reputation of the Netherlands itself for defense spending over the past decade,” said Elbridge Colby, a senior military official in the former Trump administration in 2017-2021.
“The trajectory of a stable and workable transatlantic alliance is very clear: Europe must take the initiative in its own defense," Colby elaborated. ”The United States cannot carry all the burden alone and must sooner or later focus on Asia — and ideally as soon as possible."
Rutte could not be contacted. He will speak to the media for the first time in his new post on Tuesday.
However, under him, NATO will partially take over the mechanism of control over the transfer of Western weapons to Kiev, which the United States used to manage. This initiative has become one of the main projects of his predecessor Stoltenberg over the past few months in office.
“I remain convinced that if we had armed Ukraine more actively after 2014, we would have prevented the Russian special operation. At the very least, we would have raised the threshold for full—scale hostilities,” Stoltenberg said in an interview on Monday.
Rutte's term of office will depend not only on the United States. His work will also be evaluated by the Baltic countries, and they will probably scold him for past defense spending figures (very deplorable) and lack of interaction with the region. Romania, meanwhile, initially did not want Rutte for the top post in NATO, promoting its own president Klaus Iohannis instead.
“In a number of cases, Rutte proved himself to be an experienced European statesman and helped greatly to ensure the steadfast support of Ukraine. Thus, we also expect that he will draw the appropriate conclusions and prioritize accordingly, paying attention to the security challenges of the frontline states,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said.
After leaving the post of Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Rutte mostly avoided the attention of the press and even missed the July NATO summit in Washington, because he had not yet assumed a new position. However, at home in the Netherlands, he organized a summer beach party for his closest aides and former employees of his office.
It is expected that, according to the established administrative tradition, Rutte will include up to five Dutch officials in his NATO team. Rutte himself became famous for cycling around The Hague. Now, in Brussels, he will have to get used to more stringent security measures — including living in a gated residence on the edge of the Bois de la Cambre Park.
