NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is, as we noted here, a fan of President Trump. He agrees with Trump that the Europeans have not pulled their weight in NATO, and need to get serious, quickly, to counter the growing threat from Russia. That made Rutte a natural subject of the New York Times’ podcast, The Interview. A transcript of the interview, which was conducted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, appears in the Times.
Navarro doesn’t know what to make of a European who actually approves of Trump. She tries to talk Rutte out of his views, unsuccessfully:
I’m assuming that’s how you sold it to President Trump, who has not been a big fan of NATO and essentially views Europe, as he has mentioned in the past, as a bunch of freeloaders. He sees it as European nations basically funding their welfare states at the expense of American defense. Do you think that view is fair?
The second half of the view is fair, but the first half I would not buy into, because I’m confident of the fact that Trump very much realizes that for the U.S. to stay strong and safe, there is this embeddedness with European security and working together to keep the Indo-Pacific safe. But I do agree with the second half, because there are these enormous irritants since Eisenhower with American presidents, and I think they’re completely right that the Europeans were not paying enough. So he has a big point, and luckily, last week in The Hague, we solved it.
Navarro isn’t interested in geopolitical threats and national security. She wants to get back to Trump:
Before we get into that substance, I’d like to talk a little bit about style, because your interactions with President Trump in the aftermath of that meeting have been called, and I’m quoting here, “fawning” and “an orchestrated grovel.” I saw someone refer to NATO now as the North Atlantic Trump Organization. How do you see it?
I think when somebody deserves praise, that praise should be given. And President Trump deserves all the praise, because without his leadership, without him being re-elected president of the United States, the 2 percent this year and the 5 percent in 2035 — we would never, ever, ever have been able to achieve agreement on this.
Someone who is not a slave to a dogmatic ideology might at least be willing to consider the possibility that Rutte could be right. But not Navarro:
I want to get to what exactly these numbers are and what they mean, but there are these two camps after the summit. One said that you did what you did to pacify President Trump’s ego and have a successful summit, which you did. And the other said that while our president likes flattery, he ultimately sees it as weakness, and it only appeases him for so long. I’m sure you’ve seen all this commentary.
So Rutte could only have been sucking up to Trump, rather than saying what he actually believes. And the idea that “all this commentary”–appearing in useless outlets like the New York Times–should be of concern to the Secretary General of NATO is presumptuous at best.
I was prime minister of the Netherlands for 14 years, so I know about criticism, but I don’t care. In the end, I need to do my job. I have to keep the whole of NATO together. And the biggest ally is the United States. That biggest ally has paid, since Eisenhower, more than the Europeans. And now, for the first time in 65 years, we will equalize between what the U.S. is paying and what the Europeans are paying. And without Trump, that would not have happened.
Rutte seems to believe that if he keeps repeating the truth, it eventually will get through to Navarro. It didn’t.
There was this big New Yorker article that came out recently, and it described a training exercise in Estonia, which is a member state, to test its readiness for a possible Russian invasion. The piece noted that Estonia has no air force, has no navy. And in the exercise, the team playing the invading army had a “capabilities overmatch” — more heavy armor, more long-range fire. Basically, it did not go well for Estonia. Was that exercise a wake-up call for you?
No. What The New Yorker described there is right, but it’s not a wake-up call, because we have all the plans in place that if Estonia will be attacked — and the Russians know this — our reaction will be devastating. I cannot go into all the details, because Vladimir Putin, I know, is watching these programs. But we have to make sure that we not only have those plans but we also have the people and the military gear to back it up. And this is exactly why we need to spend more. But it’s not that the Estonians are left to themselves. It would be the full force of NATO, including the full backup of the United States, which will come to the rescue. Putin knows this. This is why he will not attack Estonia today. But he might in five or seven years if we would not make all these extra investments.
There’s a key sentence in what you just said, which is “with the full backup of the United States.” This is clearly what so much of the concern and discussion has been about, because President Trump has never fully committed to coming to Europe’s defense if indeed something like that should happen. Are you confident at this moment that if Estonia were invaded, the United States would come to its aid?
One hundred percent. I have no doubt at all, and it was very clear in the closing press conference in The Hague. But also everything I’ve discussed over the last six months with the new U.S. administration — absolutely no shiver of a doubt that the U.S. is completely committed to NATO, is completely committed to Article 5. There is one big irritant, and that is the fact that the Europeans have not paid their fair share.
Navarro still doesn’t want to hear it:
That is the irritant that President Trump talks about publicly, but there is an underlying issue as well, which is that President Trump does not like to get into foreign entanglements. He has a very transactional view of the world: If it’s good for him or good for America, then he will do it. So are you certain that the only irritant was that the Europeans weren’t paying enough, or is there a fundamental disconnect between the way that the American president views the world and commitments to these international organizations?
I don’t believe so. President Trump put in place an excellent foreign-policy team, including Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth and Matt Whitaker, the ambassador here at NATO.
You can imagine how much it pained Navarro (and will pain readers of the Times) to hear that.
And there is broad agreement that when it comes to the defense of NATO territory, the U.S. is part and parcel. That means that it’s not only about defending Europe; it’s about the United States, for the reasons I mentioned earlier: that the U.S. is not secure if the Atlantic, Europe and the Arctic are not secured.
There’s a second reason that has to do with the Indo-Pacific. There’s an increasing realization, and let’s not be naïve about this: If Xi Jinping would attack Taiwan, he would first make sure that he makes a call to his very junior partner in all of this, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, residing in Moscow, and telling him, “Hey, I’m going to do this, and I need you to to keep them busy in Europe by attacking NATO territory.” That is most likely the way this will progress. And to deter them, we need to do two things. One is that NATO, collectively, being so strong that the Russians will never do this. And second, working together with the Indo-Pacific — something President Trump is very much promoting. Because we have this close interconnectedness, working together on defense industry, innovation between NATO and the Indo-Pacific.
Rutte is making an important point about the relationship between Russia and China, and between European and Pacific defense. But it goes over Navarro’s head because it doesn’t tie in with her preoccupation with Trump.
It’s interesting that you talk about Trump’s foreign-policy team and their understanding and commitment to NATO’s security. The U.S. has had up to 100,000 troops stationed across Europe as part of its NATO commitments, including about 20,000 that President Biden deployed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the Trump administration is now saying that it is going to redeploy some of those to other parts of the world. Have you been told what that drawdown will look like?
There is no talk at this moment of a drawdown. …
Navarro continues her obsessive pursuit of the white whale:
Secretary General, what I’m asking here is: You say that the commitment is ironclad, and yet what we are seeing, while a war is raging with a resurgent Russia on Europe’s doorstep, is the United States pulling back from Europe.
I really have to correct you. The United States is not pulling away from Europe. …
OK, one more. The Times reporter suggests that the United States may not be democratic enough to belong to NATO:
But part of the idea of NATO is about allies who share a commitment to democratic values. It was created for that. And now you have as part of this alliance what some would call a democratically backsliding United States. You have Hungary, which calls itself an illiberal democracy. And you have Turkey under President Erdogan, which has been called an electoral autocracy. Can this alliance hold when the very values at its heart are no longer commonly held in the way that perhaps they once had been?
By this time Rutte must be tired of it all, but he responds diplomatically:
I’m not sure I would completely subscribe to all the assumptions in your question, but that is a debate, as democracies, that we can have, and that is why we are indeed an alliance of democracies. …
This is what passes for journalism on the Left. If Navarro were intelligent and were willing to listen to Rutte with an open mind, and actually hear what he is saying, she might have learned something. Her readers might have learned something, too. But at the Times, ignorance is invincible.
