(SeaPRwire) – By: Gavin Thorne
The July 2026 Ankara NATO summit was not a display of transatlantic solidarity. It was a tightly scripted diplomatic stunt to win over Donald Trump. The president arrived ready to tear the alliance apart, railing against what he called one-sided US financial support for the bloc. He singled out France, Germany, Italy, and the UK for failing to back US actions on Iran. He also reprised his demand for control of Greenland and bashed allies for low defense spending. By the time he departed, he was gushing about the “love” among member nations. The mastermind behind this turnaround is Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general.
Before Rutte took office as NATO secretary general in October 2024, he was not the obvious pick for the role. The Netherlands had a poor defense spending record under his 14-year tenure as Dutch prime minister. Many allies pushed for the bloc’s first female secretary general, or one from an Eastern European member state. But his skill at building coalition consensus earned him the nickname “Teflon Mark.” Donald Trump won re-election just three months after Rutte started at NATO, putting the new secretary general’s flattery skills to an immediate test.
Rutte has leaned into unreserved flattery at every opportunity. He dubbed recent European and Canadian defense spending increases the “Trump trillion.” When a Danish journalist criticized him in Ankara for failing to push back on Trump’s Greenland claims, he compared the president’s impact on NATO to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s. Trump rewarded this by calling Rutte an “extraordinary person” and a “smart leader.” The cost of this strategy has been high. Rutte called Trump “Daddy” at the 2025 Hague summit, a move that embarrassed many NATO diplomats. He also faced a public rebuke from Italy’s defense ministry for overstating its role in US operations against Iran.
Rutte is far from the first NATO secretary general to use flattery to keep Trump on side. His predecessor Jens Stoltenberg used the same playbook during Trump’s first term. The two even brokered a deal at the 2018 summit to keep Trump from pulling out of the alliance. All three of the most recent NATO chiefs—Rutte, Stoltenberg, and Danish former PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen—were sitting prime ministers when appointed. This gives them the clout to stand up to member state leaders, a luxury previous secretaries general did not always have.
Even with that institutional clout, NATO’s secretary general has limited real power. The United States holds the ultimate leverage over the alliance. Stoltenberg could not stop the US from ending its NATO mission in Afghanistan in 2021. Today, Rutte’s only job is to spin US troop drawdowns in Europe as a positive shift for the bloc. Away from the public eye, the alliance is quietly shifting to a new model dubbed NATO 3.0. This framework, designed by US Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, asks European allies to take primary responsibility for their own conventional defense.
Unless European allies stop treating diplomatic sycophancy as a replacement for meeting their defense spending targets, NATO will remain a political tool tailored to US electoral cycles rather than a lasting collective security alliance.
Author bio: Gavin Thorne, an investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C., who tracks special interest influence on national security and diplomatic policy.