The Court Jester of the West

There is a kind of humiliation that goes so far it stops being personal and becomes a political category. Mark Rutte, Secretary General of NATO, has crossed that line - not once, not by accident, but systematically and with visible conviction.

Today, Rutte travels to the White House to calm Donald Trump two weeks before the NATO summit in Turkey. Trump has once again threatened to leave the 77 year old military alliance - this time arguing that European allies refused to help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which has remained closed since the Iran war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth escalated the pressure last week in Brussels and announced a six month Pentagon review of the American troop presence in Europe. He criticized the allies for refusing to make their bases in Europe available for strikes on Iran - even though NATO had not been consulted before the war began on February 28.

Read also our article: The Review That Is a Threat: Hegseth, Brussels’ Loudmouth Who Leaves Before Zelenskyy Arrives

Rutte's method in situations like this is well known. He flatters. He praises. He surrenders preemptively. On Fox News - the network Trump is known to consume daily - he appeared Tuesday evening and praised Trump as the real leader of NATO, declared that he stood "completely behind him" in the Iran conflict, and described criticism surrounding the base issue as "isolated cases." That is not the language of a man negotiating. It is the language of a man asking for permission.

But Rutte goes further. At last year's NATO summit, he called Trump "Daddy." He sent him private text messages written in Trump's peculiar style - with randomly capitalized WORDS - and wrote:

Trump published that one as well.

You have to picture the scene: The Secretary General of the most powerful military alliance in the world sends private messages of submission to a U.S. president who publicly displays them like trophies. And Rutte allows it to happen. More than that: he repeats it. This is no longer diplomacy. It is self surrender as strategy.

Philosophical tradition knows this type. Hegel described the relationship between master and servant not as a stable hierarchy but as one that ultimately corrupts the servant and alienates the master from reality. What Rutte practices is a variation of that: He gives Trump a sense of superiority in the hope that Trump will not destroy the alliance. Whether that gamble works, nobody knows. What it costs is obvious.

NATO was founded in 1949 to counter the Soviet threat to European security. Its center is the collective defense clause - an attack on one is an attack on all. It has been invoked only once: in 2001 after the attacks on New York and Washington, when Europe stood with America. Today, an American president threatens to leave the alliance because European countries refused to provide bases for a war they had not even been informed about. And the Secretary General of that alliance responds with what read like love letters.

Trump also pressured European allies last year to raise defense spending to five percent of gross domestic product by 2035. Rutte thanked him for it. Trump threatened to annex Greenland - territory belonging to Danish allies. Rutte absorbed it. Trump has his defense secretary question the troop presence in Europe. Rutte travels to Washington and praises.

There is a charitable reading of this posture: Rutte is holding the alliance together by paying the price of personal dignity. Perhaps. But that reading assumes that an alliance held together only through the permanent humiliation of its Secretary General still functions as an alliance. Whether that is true will be shown at the summit in Turkey.

Until then, Mark Rutte writes messages. And Trump publishes them.