Mark Rutte’s March to War
In his maiden speech as NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte ominously warned that peacetime is over as he delivered a cocktail of half-truths to demand ever-increased military spending.
NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte holds the closing press conference at NATO headquarters on the second day of the NATO Foreign Affairs Ministers' meeting on December 4, 2024, in Brussels, Belgium. (Omar Havana / Getty Images)
The first speech by NATO’s new secretary-general, Mark Rutte, on December 12 was ominous for more than one reason.
The obvious one was what Rutte explicitly wanted to tell us. He said we are “not yet at war but definitely no longer at peace.” He saw threats to our cherished global order everywhere: in Russia, in China, in North Korea, and in Iran. These threats were not abstract and far away but concrete and nearby: “They bring the front line to our front doors — even into our homes,” Rutte said. He was adamant that the geopolitical security threat was now greater than it had ever been. That was why he called upon us, citizens of the free West, to press our politicians to increase defense spending, even if that meant less health care and pensions.
What’s at stake, said Rutte, is nothing less than our freedom, our security, our way of life: “Without strong defense, there is no lasting security. And without security, there is no freedom for our children and grandchildren. No schools, no hospitals, no businesses. There is nothing,” he commented.
But the speech was also ominous for a quite different reason: the fact that it projected the same cocktail of half-truths and fallacies with which the security establishment has for almost three years now tried to discipline voters into accepting the unavoidability of a higher defense bill in order to contain “our” adversaries. These same claims have, by and large, been willingly repeated by a legacy press that seems to have lost its professional ethos of neutrality and objectivity.
There is a history to every conflict. So it is with the war in Ukraine, as is clearly spelled out in Mary Elise Sarotte’s meticulously researched 2021 book Not One Inch. In that story, NATO appears not as a passive victim of Russian aggression but as an active participant pursuing its own, often Washington-directed geopolitical agenda. Not so in Rutte’s version of events. According to the secretary-general, NATO is merely the peaceful, innocent, unsuspecting object of Russian and — soon on the horizon — Chinese aggression: “Our adversaries think they are tough and we are soft. They invade other countries, while we uphold international rules. They oppress their people, while we cherish freedom.”
Even more bewildering was Rutte’s use of defense spending figures. “Our” spending had to be urgently ramped up to at least 3 percent of GDP because Russian spending had already reached the level of 8 percent of GDP, while some of “us” (EU and NATO states) are still below 2 percent. At first sight, that does look like a huge gap, until you realize that real figures are what matter, not relative ones. Given that Russian GDP in real terms is no bigger than the likes of Spain or Italy, it is obvious that the EU member states already massively outspend Russian on weaponry — to a factor of four. The United States alone accounts for over 40 percent of global defense spending and buys more weaponry annually than the next ten countries (Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Japan, and so on) combined. The arsenals are already overflowing.
This data is all kept track of by Cold War–era outfit SIPRI (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) and is freely available to a global public. Nevertheless, journalists from legacy media keep letting the security establishment get away with massively overstating Russia’s spending figures and massively understating how much “our” side commits to weapons. The effect: to let them spread a message of looming disaster unchallenged.
Global Order?
Just as suspect was Rutte’s rendering of the global order. “Russia, China, but also North Korea and Iran, are hard at work to try to weaken North America and Europe — to chip away at our freedom. They want to reshape the global order, not to create a fairer one but to secure their own spheres of influence. They are testing us, and the rest of the world is watching,” he said in the speech.
This is one-sided at best and malicious at worst. If there is one superpower that has endangered the global order, it is the United States, as Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson forcefully argued in their 2024 book The Myth of American Idealism. It has done so not only by waging illegal wars (and walking away when things go wrong) and setting up CIA “black sites” to illegally torture prisoners of the “war on terror” but also by unilaterally withdrawing from nuclear arms-reduction agreements with Russia, by refusing to acknowledge the legal power of the International Court of Justice, and, under Donald Trump, by unilaterally pulling out of the Paris Agreement of 2015.
The BRICS countries’ complaints about the West’s moral high ground over the global legal order are based in the reality of Western hypocrisy. To conclude from those complaints, as Rutte does, that “Putin is trying to fundamentally change the security architecture that has kept Europe safe for decades,” that “he is trying to crush our freedom and way of life,” and “that Russia is preparing for long-term confrontation,” borders on the paranoid.
In fact, any neutral observer would conclude from a comparison of Rutte’s speech and the one that Xi Jinping gave a few weeks before at the BRICS meeting in Kazan that it is NATO that rejects the “global order,” or at least one able to include the BRICS countries. Xi, unlike Rutte, spoke the language of bridging divides: “We are committed to justice, and we must all act as forerunners in reforming global governance. . . . We should champion true multilateralism and adhere to the vision of global governance characterized by extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits. We must ensure that global governance reform is guided by the principles of fairness, justice, openness, and inclusiveness.” The key giveaway here is the rider “true” before “multilateralism”: in the eyes of the BRICS, multilateralism has too often functioned as a mere smoke screen for furthering Western interests alone.
But the most important reason why Rutte’s speech was ominous is that it marks a next step on the ladder of escalation, which in preceding weeks had already reached new heights with the decision of Joe Biden’s administration to allow Ukrainian forces to use US missiles to hit targets on Russian territory. For Rutte’s speech was not directed at the security establishment congregated at the Concert Noble in Brussels but at “us,” or at least the citizens of the member states of NATO, and of the underspending European ones in particular. This is why he began his speech by commenting, “I’m very honored to start a crucial conversation with the citizens living in NATO countries, especially in Europe and Canada. It’s you I’m talking to. It’s your support I need. It’s your voices and actions that will determine our future security.” He performed the verbal equivalent of Britain’s famous Great War mobilization poster, showing a finger-pointing Lord Kitchener asking you to join the king’s army.
March of Folly
Dutch citizens know full well that Rutte is a master of the political ground game, having managed the fragmented and volatile Dutch political landscape for thirteen years. Yet he has proven quite averse to formulating political visions. In fact, he once quipped (quoting the German prime minister Helmut Schmidt) that you should consult an optometrist if you wanted vision. Strikingly, the speech he gave in Brussels was the exact opposite: it sketched a dramatic geopolitical vision of the future where the united democracies will fiercely reject any attack on their way of life. “We can do this. We have done it before. We can do it again,” the final sentences of the speech read.
To Dutch ears, this is a different Rutte. That can only mean one thing: what European citizens witnessed here was a presentation of the new, post-Biden consensus, delivered by a fresh, media-savvy secretary-general and blessed by the wider security establishment in the room.
This is when things get dangerous. As Barbara Tuchman described in her 1984 classic March of Folly, the path to war always passes through a phase when consensus is manufactured by canceling critics, by ridiculing alternative framings, by banning doubt and skepticism, and by creating misleading necessities through false historical analogies, like the ubiquitous reference to Munich 1938 that suggests only “taking a stand” will stop a ruthless dictator like Vladimir Putin.
The lesson that Tuchman draws from the American debacle in Vietnam, described in the last part of March of Folly, is quite a different one. For her, there is no more effective path to folly than to be certain about one’s case. For certainty always results in a politics of faits accomplis, which carry the seeds of escalation, according to the logic that there is no backing down now. In Tuchman’s words, “Once a policy has been adopted, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it.”
The US intervention in Vietnam began in 1960 with a mere nine hundred “technical assistance” operatives — and led to half a million US soldiers, boots on the ground, just eight years later, before the disastrous withdrawal from Saigon on April 30, 1975. Again today, Rutte’s historic speech on December 12 fitted into a process of step-by-step escalation that started with the promise of “not one inch” in 1990 and may potentially end with the stationing of forty thousand Polish and French troops in Ukraine, as those countries’ leaders, Donald Tusk and Emmanuel Macron, have announced. All this in the shadow of increasing nuclear threat from the Russian adversary.
The main lesson one should draw from history, we learn from Tuchman, is not that more defense spending is the only insurance for keeping adversaries at bay, as per the Latin saying Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”). Rather, it is that true security depends on patiently building and maintaining good, open relations with one’s neighbors — if only because it helps hone “strategic empathy” for the security concerns of others.
From Tuchman, we learn that a bit more cognitive pluralism may inoculate against folly. We could only wish that Rutte had a copy of the book for his nightstand.