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NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte might have been the only European in the room who enjoyed President Donald Trump’s lengthy, meandering speech last month at the World Economic Forum at Davos. He was lavishly praised not once but twice by the president, who called him an “excellent Secretary General” and, later, “a very smart man.” In subsequent bilateral talks, Rutte appeared to have used his chemistry with Trump to help reach a framework deal on the future of Greenland, which at least for the time being has eased tensions between the U.S. administration and Europeans. This episode was only the latest sign of Rutte’s ostensibly outsized role in managing the president.

Indeed, Rutte and his predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, have perhaps been the two premier non-American Trump-whisperers. Both built close accords with Trump based on public flattery and behind-the-scenes diplomacy. And both are credited with effectively using their influence to pull Trump back from the brink of destroying the alliance. However, there are important differences between their approaches and in the historical context, too. Rutte has not only gone much further in flattering Trump, crossing the border into undignified obsequiousness — for example, by referring to Trump as “daddy.” But at a time when grand strategic shifts in the United States and continued Russian aggression require a fundamental readjustment of the alliance, his strategy of subordinating everything to placating the U.S. president has also come at the expense of driving NATO’s urgently needed “Europeanization.” While perhaps momentarily successful, Rutte’s Trump-whispering thus ultimately risks weakening, not strengthening, the alliance.

Stoltenberg’s Playbook for Managing Trump I

NATO secretary generals have long been treated as peripheral figures — more secretaries than generals. European politicians usually close to their retirement have traditionally served in this post that comes with few formal powers. NATO, unlike the European Union for example, remains a heavily intergovernmental organization in which member states formally call the shots. However, this view of NATO officials as mere passive servants of the allies is outdated, if it ever was accurate. An emerging research agenda has highlighted the increasingly important role secretary generals play, particularly in crisis situations, across major international organizations, including NATO.

In 2021, I published a research paper in the journal International Affairs on how then-Secretary General Stoltenberg had a “striking degree of agency in helping NATO survive” Trump’s first term. The U.S. president had been extremely critical of the alliance and repeatedly threatened to withdraw. Drawing on more than 20 interviews with NATO and national officials, I detected three tactics used by Stoltenberg to avert this. First, he publicly flattered Trump. Playing to his narcissism, Stoltenberg continuously praised Trump for his “leadership on defense spending” and credited him for an “extra $100 billion allies would have added to their defense spending” by the end of Trump’s first term. And Trump proved receptive to Stoltenberg’s adulations, exclaiming that “the media never gives me credit but he gave me credit, now we’re up to way over $100 billion.”

Second, Stoltenberg used the procedural powers as chair of the North Atlantic Council to avert disaster at the most perilous moment for NATO during Trump’s first presidency: the NATO Brussels summit in July 2018. Following a highly contentious meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the first day of the summit, tensions escalated the next day when Trump threatened fellow allied leaders that the United States would “go its own way” should his burden-sharing demands not be met. Sensing the impending danger, Stoltenberg called for an impromptu crisis meeting on burden-sharing — an unusual move given the ritualistic nature of NATO summits. This allowed Trump to vent his frustration and put pressure on Europeans to make concessions before taking credit for almost all NATO reforms undertaken since 2014 in the subsequent press conference, letting him walk away with a sense of victory.

Third, Stoltenberg effectively built coalitions with supportive actors in the U.S. foreign policy establishment to coordinate policy and shield NATO’s Russia policy from the attention of Trump. Defense Secretary James Mattis became Stoltenberg’s main point of contact. This enabled NATO to reinforce its defense and deterrence posture through the “readiness action plan” and the establishment of enhanced forward presence, despite Trump’s calls to the contrary. In sum, I argued that Stoltenberg’s “astute leadership” was critical in helping the alliance survive.

Rutte’s Playbook for Managing Trump II

Rutte has taken a page out of Stoltenberg’s playbook. Selected for the role of NATO secretary general because he had already forged close relations with Trump when he was still the Dutch prime minister, Rutte adopted Stoltenberg’s tactics of public flattery. At the NATO summit in the Hague in 2025, he infamously described Trump as the “daddy” (even if this was uttered in the context of tensions between Iran and Israel). Prior to the summit, he had sent Trump a text, which the latter posted online, which effusively congratulated the president: “You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done … Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.” As Trump’s Davos speech illustrates, in so doing Rutte has managed to win favor with the president.

Rutte also learned from Stoltenberg’s success as a meeting manager and designed the Hague summit with one goal in mind: preventing a public row. He shortened both the summit proceedings and the traditional declaration to cater to Trump’s attention span. The agenda was also laser-focused on the approval of a new defense spending pledge, according to which allies would commit to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense (3.5 percent on core defense and 1.5 percent to defense-related issues) by 2035. Ukraine received much less attention compared to the previous summit, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky relegated to the sidelines of the meeting. In the end, the summit achieved the important agreement to increase defense spending, which allowed Trump to hail it as his personal triumph.

Compared to many other international organizations, NATO has so far weathered the wrath of Trump. Rutte’s role in allaying the American president has undoubtedly been significant: In addition to helping convince the president to ease his threats against Greenland, his flattery has evidently struck a chord with Trump and appeared instrumental in ensuring a smooth NATO summit, which was by no means predetermined. In doing so, he has — theoretically — bought NATO time.

However, Rutte’s Trump-whispering approach is problematic and could ultimately prove counterproductive for two reasons. First, the success of Rutte’s approach may be overstated. One reading of the Greenland issue is that it was not so much Rutte’s personal diplomacy that led to Trump’s climbdown, but in fact Europe’s threats of retaliation. Given other examples of countries successfully pushing back rather than submitting to the president, a strategy of strength rather than sycophancy may work better against Trump. Indeed, research rooted in psychology suggests that submissiveness to the bully only invites more contempt.

Second, even if one accepts that Rutte has been successful in preventing the worst in the short term, his overriding prioritization of pleasing Trump comes at the cost of adapting NATO. Stoltenberg could still pursue a policy of mere survival because he could plausibly hope that Trump was only an aberration and rely on “adults in the room” to help manage him. But Rutte cannot. A fundamental U.S. strategic reorientation toward the western hemisphere and Indo-Pacific (though the administration’s China policy remains ambiguous) and away from Europe is underway. This is aggravated by the administration’s ideological antagonism toward Europe,  as evidenced by both the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. To survive, NATO Europe needs to prepare for a contingency in which the United States offers much less, if any, assistance to defending the continent.

But, for one, Rutte’s focus on Trump crowds out political capital for other initiatives. The Hague summit epitomized a new “era of low expectations.” NATO avoided potential disaster only by agreeing to much higher defense spending. But allies failed to make real progress on other substantive issues — including on forging a common position on support for Ukraine, a plan and timeline for shifting some of the burden of defending the continent to European allies, and strengthening the credibility of the non-U.S. nuclear deterrent anchored in NATO.

For another, Rutte actively prevents the adaptation of the alliance beyond just higher defense spending. Based on his reality-distorting view that there is “total commitment by the [United States] to NATO Article Five,” he has opposed, even ridiculed, European initiatives to proactively seize some of the burden of defending Europe. He clings onto the notion that greater European efforts would create a self-fulfilling prophecy of driving U.S. retrenchment, dismissively telling Europeans to “dream on” and wishing them “good luck” if they thought they could defend the continent without America. This belittling of allies is not only unbecoming of a secretary general, but also undermines the credibility of Europe’s deterrence posture.

Shout It: “Europeanize” NATO

The NATO secretary general should walk a fine line. He should of course continue to use his extraordinary influence with Trump to keep the United States engaged, but simultaneously and quietly prepare the alliance for much less, perhaps even no America in the future. That means driving, rather than blocking, the “Europeanization” of NATO by replacing those U.S. troops, assets, and command-and-control capabilities most urgently needed for Europeans to defend against Russia. This is undoubtedly a herculean task, as European capability gaps and dependency on the United States are real. But as the Trump administration (and in fact previous administrations, too) has amply demonstrated, maintaining the status quo is untenable. By denying the grand strategic shifts underway in the United States, Rutte’s approach risks leaving Europe unprepared for when U.S. retrenchment from the continent occurs and provides excuses for those Europeans inclined to avoid hard decisions. Rutte has helped Europeans buy time. He should now switch gears and push Europeans to use it.

Leonard A. Schütte, Ph.D., is an international security program fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School and a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He has published widely on European security, U.S. grand strategy, and German defense policy.

Image: The White House via Wikimedia Commons