{"id":459695,"date":"2026-07-13T13:23:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T11:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/?p=459695"},"modified":"2026-07-13T13:23:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T11:23:42","slug":"rutte-nato-flatters-trump-trips-italy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/2026\/07\/13\/rutte-nato-flatters-trump-trips-italy\/","title":{"rendered":"A short guide to Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General who flatters Trump and trips over Italy"},"content":{"rendered":"

We were still in the grip of Covid, with the first hints of a Recovery Plan and technical rehearsals for dividing up the funds that the European Council would eventually approve five years ago, on 13 July 2021. At the time I wrote a piece for zafferano.news<\/i><\/em>, the weekly webzine founded by Riccardo Ruggeri, framing Mark Rutte\u2019s recent conduct and his underlying disposition as the Dutch prime minister. I quote myself: \u2018The Dutch prime minister\u2019s vocation for governorship is a matter of ethnic genetics, so please, let us not be too scandalised. Governors, who rank a little below viceroys, have a taste for command, for the orderly and predictable path along which expectations are carried out without too much discussion… Being lesser than viceroys, governors rarely hatch court intrigues the way viceroys do. Instead they tend to obey their monarchs.\u2019 Little has changed since. And here we are again with Rutte, who, in the eyes of many, now treats NATO as a colony to be brought into line rather than a body to be managed with an eye to, and respect for, its delicate complexity.<\/p>\n

His stewardship of the Atlantic alliance turns one year old in October, closing out an eventful six months: a summit in Ankara marked by Donald Trump\u2019s outbursts, and a gaffe over Italian bases that revived Rome\u2019s distrust. There was, admittedly, a very Dutch beau geste<\/i><\/em>\u00a0along the way. Rutte and the Dutch prime minister, Rob Jetten, either declined or diplomatically forgot, in Jetten\u2019s case, to take home the awkward gift Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan and his protocol office had arranged for every participant: a Turkish pistol, the G\u00fcm\u00fc\u015fay, a historic trinket designed in 1990 by the local arms industry and chambered for .357 Magnum rounds. Six bullets came with the gift, tucked alongside the pistol. There was little doubt about it: the recipient\u2019s name was engraved on the revolver.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, there were few surprises. Rutte behaved exactly as expected and brushed aside the question<\/strong>, put to him at the press conference and shared not only by the rest of the journalists but also among allied staff<\/strong>, of how far his<\/strong> \u2018diplomacy of flattery<\/strong>\u2019 would stretch before turning into servility<\/strong>. On a summer terrace overlooking Milan\u2019s thin greenery, not nearly enough to temper the heat wave of recent days, a lady only just past sixty asked, amid the usual chatter of a summer dinner among people \u2018presumed to know\u2019: \u2018So where does this Rutte actually come from, in the end?\u2019 Her accent and the way she phrased it betrayed a longstanding southern nobility, yet the question still deserved a precise answer.<\/p>\n

Mark Rutte was born in The Hague on Valentine\u2019s Day in 1967, the youngest of seven children in a middle class Protestant family. His father was a merchant, his mother a secretary. He attended a classical grammar school with an arts specialism, took a master\u2019s in History at Leiden in 1992, chaired the VVD\u2019s youth wing and built a management career at Unilever before entering politics in 2002, in the Balkenende government. From there the climb was swift<\/strong>: leader of the VVD from 2006<\/strong>, prime minister from 2010 to 2024<\/strong>, four consecutive governments and the longest tenure in power in Dutch history<\/strong>. His fourth government fell in July 2023<\/strong>, brought down by a coalition row over migration policy<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Little is known about his private life. Unmarried, childless, he calls himself \u2018a happy bachelor\u2019, and his reticence intrigues people well beyond the Netherlands too. He has played the piano for years, neither smokes nor drinks, loves reading, and cultivates a Calvinist understatement that shows in his style too: dark jackets, no frills. His sporting heart belongs to Feyenoord of Rotterdam and to the small club ADO Den Haag. He was long known for getting about by bicycle and in an old secondhand Saab, consistent with the frugality that trailed him long before it became the label by which Europe came to know him.<\/p>\n

Rutte has been NATO\u2019s fourteenth Secretary General since October 2024<\/strong>, and the last six months have tested him on the most treacherous ground of his mandate<\/strong>: holding the Alliance together while Washington<\/strong>, under the second Trump administration<\/strong>, swings between endorsement and threats<\/strong>. The Ankara summit of 8 July 2026 sums it up neatly. Trump praises the rise in allied military spending, yet also threatens to cut trade with one ally, floats annexing another\u2019s territory, and publicly targets Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom over their supposedly weak logistical support during the operation against Iran.<\/p>\n

Rutte answers with what the Anglo Saxon press has dubbed \u2018the diplomacy of adulation\u2019. Trump becomes \u2018dear Donald\u2019, and the rise in allied spending becomes the \u2018Trump Trillion\u2019. It is not the first time. He had earlier likened Trump to a \u2018daddy\u2019 for his role in the crisis between Iran and Israel, a remark that earned him weeks of mockery online and which he later dismissed as \u2018a matter of taste\u2019. At the closing press conference in Ankara, the Danish journalist Rasmus Svaneborg<\/strong>, of Ritzau, the Danish news agency now a hundred and sixty years old, put him on the spot<\/strong>, asking whether sitting beside Trump while he threatened Greenland and Spain had not dented his<\/strong> \u2018self respect<\/strong>\u2019. Rutte replied that his job is<\/strong> \u2018to acknowledge merit where merit is due<\/strong>\u2019. The clip went viral and was read by many as yet more proof of servility<\/strong>. Criticism from within is not lacking either. Several analysts speak of a \u2018law of diminishing returns\u2019 in Rutte\u2019s strategy, arguing that it distracts him from the increasingly urgent debate on an autonomous European defence. Some allies, according to press reports, are said to show growing impatience with a style seen as far too accommodating.<\/p>\n

The most concrete item of the past six months is the commitment, confirmed in Ankara after the green light given in The Hague in 2025, to raise defence and security spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 (3.5% of \u2018core\u2019 spending plus 1.5% on related items). Rutte presents this as proof that \u2018NATO keeps its promises\u2019, with the total already up to 4% just a year into the ten year path. The target is welcomed by the Baltic states and Poland, long in favour of more aggressive spending given the Russian threat, while Spain considers it excessive, feeding Trump\u2019s direct attacks on Madrid during the summit.<\/p>\n

Even Rutte\u2019s appointment in 2024 was not a foregone conclusion. Orb\u00e1n\u2019s Hungary threatened to veto it over Rutte\u2019s past criticism of the Hungarian rule of law and of legislation restricting LGBT rights, going so far as to say the aim was to \u2018bring Budapest to its knees\u2019. The veto was withdrawn only after a private meeting on the sidelines of a European Council. His image as a progressive hawk on civil rights has always coexisted with an almost total pragmatism at the negotiating table<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Within the Alliance two issues remain on which Italy has direct skin in the game, and on which Rutte\u2019s mediation is anything but settled<\/strong>. The first is whether the 5% target is even sustainable<\/strong>. Rome currently declares defence and security spending at 2.8% of GDP (2.09% strictly military plus 0.71% on a broader perimeter), well short of the 2035 mark. The economy minister, Giancarlo Giorgetti, calls it \u2018a blanket too short to cover the whole bed\u2019: every extra euro spent on weapons weighs on health and pensions, while debate continues over whether SAFE loans are cheaper than government bonds, and whether the rise is compatible with exiting the EU\u2019s excessive deficit procedure. It is a row that splits both the governing majority and the opposition, with Giorgetti acting as a brake on Crosetto\u2019s Atlanticist enthusiasm.<\/p>\n

The second dossier is the<\/strong> \u2018Southern flank<\/strong>\u2019. For months Giorgia Meloni has been asking NATO to look at the wider Mediterranean<\/strong>, at Libya and at Africa with the same attention paid to the eastern front<\/strong>, arguing that today\u2019s threats are \u2018hybrid\u2019 and do not come from the East alone<\/strong>. Rutte, absorbed by Moscow and by Trump, has so far not given this Italian request the same weight as the eastern flank, feeding a feeling in Rome that NATO\u2019s agenda remains too focused on the Baltics. So the Italian chapter stays the most contentious part of Rutte\u2019s story<\/strong>, and its roots go back to 2020. As Dutch prime minister and leader of the so called \u2018frugal countries\u2019 (alongside Austria, Sweden, Denmark and later Finland), Rutte led the toughest opposition to non repayable grants under the Recovery Fund, arguing that Italy should receive only loans and \u2018learn to manage on its own\u2019 at the next crisis. The remark triggered a united reaction from Italian parties and a public clash with the then prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, who shot back tersely: \u2018that is exactly what we will do\u2019. Dutch sources leaked to the press at the time described the Italian proposal as \u2018unworkable\u2019.<\/p>\n

The memory turned even more bitter thanks to a video, widely shared on Italian social media, in which Rutte laughed while joking about the idea of \u2018no money for Italians and Spaniards\u2019, an image that fed the narrative of the Netherlands as a country scornful of southern Europe for years afterwards. The deal was struck all the same: \u20ac750bn in total, with the grant share cut from \u20ac500bn to \u20ac390bn. It was a compromise the frugal countries claimed as a victory, and one Italy pocketed as the largest aid package in its recent history, though it kept the political scar of the clash. Rome was not a one off case. Rutte applied the same rhetoric about \u2018fiscal responsibility\u2019 to Greece, Spain and Portugal too, in keeping with the line The Hague had already taken during the Greek debt crisis. A paradox often raised by observers: Dutch household debt, at roughly 107% of GDP, ranked among the highest in Europe, well above Italy\u2019s, at around 41%, a figure that fuelled the charge of a fiscal moralism not always matched by the numbers at home.<\/p>\n

If one episode brought Rutte and Rome\u2019s tension back to 2020 levels in the past six months<\/strong>, it is the affair of the Italian bases tied to Operation Epic Fury against Iran<\/strong>, in June 2026. In an interview with Fox News, Rutte revealed that around 500 American aircraft had taken off from bases on Italian soil in support of the operation, citing Italy as the most significant case in Europe out of a total of between 4,000 and 5,000 allied missions. The account set off a domestic political storm. Italy\u2019s defence ministry denied it, speaking only of \u2018logistical and technical activity, with no combat role\u2019, and Giorgia Meloni publicly corrected the NATO Secretary General, saying he had \u2018mixed up different facts\u2019 in an account that was \u2018too enthusiastic\u2019. The opposition, led by Angelo Bonelli of the Green and Left Alliance, instead used Rutte\u2019s words as proof of wider Italian involvement than the government had admitted, calling it a \u2018serious contradiction\u2019 of the official line from Palazzo Chigi. Rutte backtracked a few days later, in an interview with L\u2019Espresso in which he praised Meloni\u2019s \u2018decisive leadership\u2019 and Italy\u2019s \u2018essential contribution\u2019 to Ukraine, clarifying that his earlier remarks referred only to existing bilateral agreements on bases and airspace. It is an episode that sums up the Secretary General\u2019s fragile position rather well<\/strong>. In trying to please Washington by claiming credit for Europe\u2019s contribution<\/strong>, he keeps exposing allied governments on their home front<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Setting the June slip up aside, both sides still describe the Rutte Meloni relationship as \u2018strategic cooperation\u2019. The prime minister chose to play down the incident and, even after Trump\u2019s direct criticism in Ankara over Italy\u2019s supposedly weak support, repeated that her line is \u2018the unity of the West\u2019 rather than a personal relationship with this or that leader. \u2018Relations with Trump are cordial,\u2019 she said, \u2018but I do not change my approach depending on how personal relationships happen to be going.\u2019 It was an indirect way of putting some distance between herself and Rutte\u2019s own style too. The past six months also showed that Rutte\u2019s management is not always fully coordinated with the European chancelleries<\/strong>. At the E5 summit in Berlin on 24 June, which brought together Macron, Merz, Meloni, Tusk and Starmer to prepare a common position ahead of Ankara, the Secretary General took part only by video link from Washington, a detail read as a sign that the real decision making axis is shifting further towards the European capitals and the White House, leaving Rutte a reactive mediator rather than a director. Cracks between the European powers remain open too, from the collapse of the Franco German programme for the FCAS fighter jet to the diverging strategies of Paris and Berlin over how much autonomy to seek from Washington, terrain on which Rutte can mediate but can hardly arbitrate in his own right.<\/p>\n

A year into his term, the portrait emerging from Brussels is of a mediator as tireless as he is exposed<\/strong>: able to hold an Alliance under pressure together through flattery towards Trump<\/strong>, yet increasingly called upon<\/strong>, in Ankara as much as in Rome, to answer the Danish journalist\u2019s question<\/strong>: where does diplomacy end and where does servility begin<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

As for me, as I already made clear a few years back, in the house where I was born and grew up, in the Dutch colony of the Spice Islands, people spoke Italian, Piedmontese, Indonesian and, of course, Dutch. The Governor\u2019s residence stood only a short, very direct walk away. Everyone passed in front of it with respect, even long after the Dutch had been sent packing. And when the Governor speaks, I know how to listen. And I understand what he is saying. This Governor, not yet sixty, is sharp and ambitious. I rather think he regards the vast building on Avenue L\u00e9opold III in Brussels as a prestigious training ground from which to prepare a political future just a few kilometres further on, at the heart of Brussels\u2019 European Quarter.<\/p>\n

After all, setting aside Frans Timmermans\u2019s time as vice president, the last Dutch president of the European Commission held office for a mere nine months: Sicco Mansholt, from 22 March 1972 to 5 January 1973. \u2018There would certainly be room for reflection along those lines,\u2019 as one senior Mediterranean diplomat puts it, \u2018for a candidate with a distinguished multilateral career, representing one of the Union\u2019s founding members.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A year into his term, the portrait emerging from Brussels is of a mediator as tireless as he is exposed: able to hold an Alliance under pressure together through flattery towards Trump, yet increasingly called upon to answer the Danish journalist\u2019s question: where does diplomacy end and where does servility begin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7904,"featured_media":449535,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_category":"1","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_prev_next_post":"1","show_popup_post":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_author_box":"0","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"0"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[25711,30809],"tags":[27047,27569,27722,26002,31521,26527,29524,33669,29164,26104],"class_list":["post-459695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions","category-defence-security","tag-eu-en","tag-iran-in-2","tag-italy-en-2","tag-meloni-and","tag-nato-en-10","tag-paesi-bassi-en","tag-recovery-en","tag-rutte","tag-trump-en","tag-usa-en-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7904"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459695"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":459707,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459695\/revisions\/459707"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}