NATO’s New Leader Isn’t up to the Task

W e now have confirmation that the outgoing Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, will become the next secretary-general of NATO when Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg steps down this fall. Rutte is regarded as a calming influence, someone who has an instinct for harmony, for pouring oil upon troubled waters. Famously, he earned a reputation for himself back in 2018 as the “Trump Whisperer,” credited with easing a conflict over NATO defense spending between Trump on the one hand and Macron and Merkel on the other. Since European leaders have worked themselves into a lather over the prospect of a second Trump presidency, Rutte’s presence at the NATO helm has won widespread approbation.

Perhaps we should hold the applause for now. Looking back at Rutte’s tenure in Dutch politics, one sees an inveterate compromiser and, moreover, one who seemingly embodies in full the values that European voters — including voters in the Netherlands — are now starting to reject. He is a man that the “Eurocrats” of Brussels can do business with, and so too the Biden administration, that, critically, stamped his appointment with its seal of approval. Perhaps that is an essential condition for the NATO job, but it opens the door to doubt. Although Rutte has said the right things about the varied threats facing the alliance, he seems ill suited to lead — emphasis on the word “lead” — NATO through the likely perils of his upcoming four-year term.

Contrary to what most European leaders seem to believe, those perils neither begin nor end with the possible election of Donald Trump this fall. Everything they apparently fear may come to pass. Trump might take a wrecking ball to NATO, although a close reading of his previous statements, for example, his 2017 Warsaw speech, which was never fairly reported, would suggest otherwise. But while Joe Biden has sometimes professed his commitment to NATO, his actions tend to suggest, unsurprisingly, a profound absent-mindedness, if not outright incoherence, when it comes to the challenges facing NATO.

The real perils facing NATO in the next four years have less to do with who leads the U.S. and much more to do with the division and indecisiveness among its members. NATO came into existence as a means of deterring Soviet aggression in the aftermath of World War II, and it was hugely successful. We’re accustomed to crediting Ronald Reagan’s leadership with victory in the Cold War, and justifiably so — he grasped early on that the Soviet Union would fail utterly if challenged to match expanding U.S. military capabilities.

However, President Reagan could also rely on solid support in Europe and, particularly, the significant frontline military capabilities provided by West Germany and the United Kingdom. With the U.S. Seventh Army astride the Fulda Gap and the Bundeswehr and the British Army of the Rhine firmly planted on the North German plain, NATO presented a daunting conventional barrier to Soviet adventurism. NATO was all about deterrence in Europe, about keeping the Cold War “cold” in the theater where this mattered most, and it succeeded.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO lost its way. Attempts to redefine NATO’s mission, particularly the search for “out of area” missions, served mainly to highlight the lack of unity, of shared purpose, once the Soviet threat had disappeared. Even NATO support for the war in Afghanistan, significant as it came to be, underscored the search for a mission rather than success in finding one.

While NATO countries sharpened their special-warfare skills in places like Helmand Province, maintaining significant conventional warfare capabilities no longer seemed relevant. No wonder that defense expenditures as a percentage of GDP dwindled sharply — special-operations forces don’t cost nearly as much to acquire as planes, tanks, and missiles, and they don’t support the maintenance of a robust defense–industrial base.

Then came Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Suddenly, unmistakably, Europeans confronted a revival of their worst Cold War fears. One may dismiss the invasion of Ukraine as a harbinger of further Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, but it should suffice that the Eastern Europeans themselves take the threat very seriously. The Poles and the Baltic states are girding themselves for war, spending well in excess of the 2 percent of GDP target. The Danes are sending their best artillery to Ukraine, and the Swedes and the Finns exchanged decades of neutrality for NATO membership. Joe Biden may not take the threat seriously — his hot and cold support for Ukraine suggests as much — but the frontline states certainly do.

Not everyone in NATO seems to share their concerns, and herein lies the problem with Mark Rutte as the new NATO secretary-general. Maybe the inherent divisions within NATO, the differences between the frontline states and everyone else, all argue for a “compromiser in chief” simply to keep the alliance together. But what NATO really needs at this critical hour is not another Eurocrat but a true leader, someone who sees the threat clearly and has given voice to this repeatedly and eloquently. Someone like Estonia’s Kaja Kallas, who was considered, apparently, and then rejected.

In choosing Mark Rutte, NATO has found someone who embodies that most incoherent, most “moronic” of Obama-era oxymorons: the notion of “leading from behind.” The Obama holdovers who animate U.S. national-security policy today may well applaud this, but the rest of us might wish NATO had opted for a genuine leader.