The New Yorker:
The NATO secretary-general goes all in on strategic self-abasement while meeting with his American “Daddy.”
By Susan B. Glasser
Over the past decade, as I watched ambitious, embattled, fearful, or just plain weak interlocutors deal with Donald Trump, it became obvious that many of them have reached the same conclusion about how best to manage the capricious President: with suck-uppery—the more egregious, the better, and ideally combined with a few strategic rounds of golf that Trump is allowed to win. This has proved to be a much safer choice than actually standing up to him. Just ask Volodymyr Zelensky. Or Angela Merkel. Or Mike Pence. In Trump’s first term, Poland proposed to name a new permanent U.S. military installation Fort Trump in his honor. Israel thanked him for recognizing its occupation of the Golan Heights by unveiling a new settlement called Trump Heights. At this point in the Trump era, the path of over-the-top praise has been well-trodden by everyone from Lindsey Graham to the late Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, who, in 2018, nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize for pursuing a nuclear-disarmament deal with North Korea that did not, in fact, happen. They know what we all know by now: Trump is a reverse-Machiavelli who prefers the praise of the flatterer, no matter how insincere, to the hard counsel of unpleasant truth.
But, even in the voluminous catalogue of world leaders who have engaged in ego-wilting acts of Trump sycophantism, this week’s performance by Mark Rutte stands out. Rutte, the secretary-general of nato and former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, hosted the American President on Tuesday and Wednesday in The Hague for the alliance’s annual summit. To be fair, this was no easy assignment. Trump, a longtime nato skeptic, threatened to pull out of the alliance altogether at its 2018 gathering; he began his second term demanding billions more in defense spending from nato allies. Otherwise, he said at one of his 2024 campaign rallies, the alliance’s main adversary, Russia, ought to be free to “do whatever the hell they want” to any country that didn’t pay up. In response, Rutte and the allies designed the summit around avoiding a blowup with Trump—agreeing in advance to his demand for a new goal of five per cent of G.D.P. to be spent by members annually on their defense budgets, pre-negotiating the summit communiqué so that it could not be derailed by a last-minute Trump tantrum, and making the formal sessions as short as possible. “I would call this ‘the Trump Summit,’ ” Marco Rubio, Trump’s dual-hatted Secretary of State and national-security adviser, bragged before the official meeting had even begun.
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