Rutte Is Too Calm Before The Storm

Churchill may or may not have said – it’s an aphorism with cloudy provenance – that “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte may or may not believe it. After all, as American threats to obtain Greenland, a member of NATO via the Danish commonwealth, grow increasingly bellicose, the “Trump-whisperer” is all but silent. 

Adopting a ‘nothing to see here’ attitude with almost monkish flair, Rutte told reporters during a visit to Zagreb that NATO is “not at all” facing an existential crisis over the possibility of a NATO-on-NATO attack, saying “I think we are really working in the right direction.” Donald Trump, meanwhile, is “doing the right things” for the alliance, Rutte said heaping praise on the president for his ‘encouragement’ of NATO nations to up their defence spending. In what hardly registers as a breaking of his silence on the matter, Rutte has calmly brushed off the standoff; it is merely one of those possibilities America fancies before coming around to the right thing. 

There is, of course, a professional logic to Rutte’s composure. Attempting to speak for all 32 members of the alliance, whilst its largest member toys with the idea of an imperialistic land grab, is a tightrope not many would – or could – walk. 

But, and as one EU official said, “He wasn’t supposed to be this quiet.” Rutte is too calm before this North Atlantic storm. In being so, he risks misdiagnosing the nature of the threat; for all the geopolitics, it’s ego politics driving Trump. And unfortunately, egos are tricky things to appease. 

Denmark would happily give America all the military facilities it needs, as well as access to Greenland’s critical minerals, to better ensure the security of the self-governing territory. There is nothing militarily that America could gain through an invasion that they do not already have.

Trump’s claims that there are swarms of Russian and Chinese ships circling Greenland have been dismissed. Besides, there are talks about beefing up NATO’s presence in the Arctic, whilst European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen insists that “Greenland can count on [the EU] politically, economically, and financially.” In short, there is no strategic case for annexation. 

Trump, however, isn’t one to let strategy get in his way. Greenland is not so much a military necessity as it is a psychological one for the president who once told interviewers: “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’” He has threatened the easy way “or the more difficult way”, stated that “if it affects NATO, it affects NATO”, and claimed that “anything less than [annexing Greenland] is unacceptable.” This is not the tough-love language of a leader seeking leverage – though Trump is wont to bluff – but the spiel of a man, emboldened by the ease with which he extracted Venezuela’s Maduro, hell bent on ripping up the rules-based international order.   

Coercing the Danes to sell Greenland would bring NATO to its knees. An outright assault would be its end. How could an alliance based on mutual defence survive one member attacking another? Were such a precedent set, US security guarantees would become worthless at precisely the moment Ukraine’s future hangs in the balance and Eastern European states observe Russia with mounting unease. It would be politically, psychologically, and culturally fatal. 

Rutte’s quasi-silence, then, gives way to an unnerving calm. In many ways, it is a blessing – for Trump to act with impunity, for Trump to get his own way, for the death knell of NATO to ring. That alone should be enough to motivate Rutte to do what his office demands and dismiss any fantasies of an always just and always good America. Sovereignty is sacrosanct; if NATO believes that, its Secretary-General should say it. Loudly and plainly and now.

Image: Flickr/NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Alliance)

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