Latest news with #MarkRutte
Daily Mail
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
ANDREW NEIL: Labour's hollow drivel can't conceal that the defence of the realm is not safe in their hands
Daddy did it! Donald Trump, designated 'Daddy' by Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte for knocking and Iranian heads together when they were behaving like 'two kids in a schoolyard', pulled off his second triumph of the week when Nato countries committed themselves to massive increases in defence spending. 'You are now flying to another great success in The Hague,' Rutte told Trump, ramping up the sycophancy while the US President was en route to the Nato summit, hard on the heels of the Israeli-Iranian ceasefire he'd engineered.
South China Morning Post
7 hours ago
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Nato chief calls Trump ‘daddy' as he makes Beijing the bogeyman
Mark Rutte has some daddy issues. The Trump-endearment of the Nato secretary general has reached unprecedented cringe levels, even by the usually unseemly standards of the shameless sycophants of the American imperium in Brussels. He has repeatedly called US President Donald Trump 'daddy', both during and after the latest Nato summit in The Hague. Indeed, his subsequent clarification to the press was worse, thereby making Trump the official Daddy of Nato. It all started after Trump showed frustration and used an expletive, calling out Israel and Iran for threatening the ceasefire he has imposed on them. 'We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f*** they're doing,' he told reporters. When the two men sat down, Rutte interjected, 'Daddy has to use tough language.' Afterwards, reporters asked him to clarify. Reaching new, bizarre heights, he doubled down on his kowtowing by comparing Trump and Europe to the relationship between a daddy and his child.
CNA
8 hours ago
- Politics
- CNA
Commentary: Why bending over backwards to agree with Donald Trump is a perilous strategy
LEIDEN, Netherlands: Donald Trump is a difficult figure to deal with, both for foreign leaders and figures closer to home who find themselves in his crosshairs. The United States president is unpredictable, sensitive and willing to break the rules to get his way. But in Trump's second term, a variety of different leaders and institutions seem to have settled on a way to handle him. The key, they seem to think, is flattery. The most obvious example came at the recently concluded NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, where world leaders got together to discuss the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Previous summits with Trump have descended into recrimination and backbiting. The organisers were determined to avoid a repeat – and decided the best way to do it was to make Trump feel really, really good about himself. Even before the summit began, NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte had texted Trump to thank him for his 'decisive action' in bombing Iran. This, he said, was something 'no one else dared to do'. Then, when discussing Trump's role in ending the war between Israel and Iran, Rutte referred to Trump as 'daddy' – a name the White House has already transformed into a meme. 🎶 Daddy's home… Hey, hey, hey, Daddy. President Donald J. Trump attended the NATO Summit in The Hague, Netherlands. Posted by The White House on Wednesday, June 25, 2025 MAKING TRUMP FEEL GOOD The summit itself was light on the sort of contentious and detailed policy discussions that have historically bored and angered Trump. Instead, it was reduced to a series of photo opportunities and speeches in which other leaders lavished praise on Trump. Lithuania's President Gitanas Nauseda even suggested the alliance ought to copy Trump's political movement by adopting the phrase 'make NATO great again'. NATO leaders aren't the only ones trying this trick. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has had a go at it too. Starmer has made sure that Trump will be the first US president to make a second state visit to the United Kingdom. He described the honour in Trump-like terms: 'This has never happened before. It's so incredible. It will be historic.' After Trump announced global trade tariffs earlier in the year, Starmer was the first leader to give Trump a much-needed victory by reaching a framework trade agreement. But it worked both ways, with Starmer able to land a political victory too. In his first term, flattery was also seen as a tool to be used to get Trump onside. Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried it in phone conversations with the US president, calling him a 'great teacher' from whom he learned 'skills and knowledge'. Flattery and compliance clearly have their uses. Trump is extremely sensitive to criticism and susceptible to praise, however hyperbolic and transparent it might be. Buttering him up may be an effective way to get him to back off. But it doesn't achieve much else. At the NATO summit, an opportunity was missed to make progress on issues of real importance, such as how to better support Ukraine in its war against Russia or to better coordinate European defence spending. A summit dedicated to the sole aim of making Trump feel good is one with very limited aims indeed. All it does is push the difficult decisions forward for another day. A MISSED OPPORTUNITY Individual decisions to bow down to Trump also mean missing the opportunity to mount collective resistance. One country might not be able to stand up to the president, but the odds of doing so would be greatly improved if leaders banded together. For example, Trump's trade tariffs will damage the US economy as well as those of its trading partners. That is especially the case if those partners impose tariffs of their own on US goods. If each country instead follows Britain's lead in the hope of getting the best deal for itself, they will have missed the opportunity to force the president to feel some discomfort of his own – and possibly change course. But perhaps the greatest danger of flattering Trump is that it teaches him that he can get away with doing pretty much whatever he likes. For a president who has threatened to annex the territory of NATO allies Denmark and Canada to nevertheless be feted at a NATO summit sends a message of impunity. That's a dangerous lesson for Trump to learn. He has spent much of his second term undermining democratic and liberal norms at home and key tenets of US foreign policy abroad, such as hostility to Russia. He is attempting to undermine all traditional sources of authority and expertise and instead make the world dance to his own tune. Given the expansive scope of his aims, which many experts already think is leading to a constitutional crisis that threatens democracy, the willingness to suck up to Trump normalises him in a menacing way. When his targets roll over, it sends a message to others that Trump is unstoppable and resistance is futile. It encourages not just the next presidential abuse of power, but also the next surrender from those he chooses to attack. Perhaps the best that can be said for this strategy is that maybe it will appease Trump enough to prevent him from doing too much actual harm. But when dealing with such an unpredictable and vindictive president, that is a thin reed of hope. It is much more likely to encourage him to press on – until the harm becomes too severe to ignore.
The Guardian
10 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Orchestrated grovel': critics react to Europe's attempts to tame Donald Trump
History may record this week as the one in which Donald Trump came to Europe to discuss defence spending. Diplomats may remember it as the week in which the art of obsequiousness reached new highs and the sycophants plunged new lows. All in the name of taming the president. It seems to have worked. After Trump landed to Washington from this week's Nato summit in The Hague, the White House posted a video that made clear how his team felt the trip had gone. The summit had concluded on Wednesday with a joint press conference in which Nato's secretary general, Mark Rutte, after showering the US president with compliments over his actions on Iran, bizarrely referred to him as 'daddy'. Rutte was now being widely derided for the summit's 'orchestrated grovel' and attempting to row back on his choice of language. In Washington, however, Team Trump were enjoying themselves. 'Daddy's home!' trilled the video, which mixed clips of Trump's handshakes with world leaders with footage of crowds awaiting his motorcade, soundtracked by a 2010 song by Usher: 'And I know you've been waiting for this loving all day …' The tone of Rutte's public bootlicking had been muted compared with the text messages he had sent to 'dear Donald' before the summit – 'Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, it was truly extraordinary … you will achieve something NO president in decades could get done' – and which the president had immediately leaked. 'I think he likes me,' smirked Trump later, while his cabinet giggled behind him. Ass-kissing, arse-licking, brown-nosing, sucking up – there is a reason metaphors for obsequiousness so often involve body fluids and the backside, because the act of sycophancy demeans both the arselicker and the arselickee. What is more cringeworthy, after all – the clips of Trump's cabinet members taking turns to parrot praise of his leadership and vision, or the fact that his fragile ego demands lavish compliments before he can get down to work? No doubt all the president's yes-men believe that lavishing him with praise can lead to lavish rewards. Take the former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who in 2020 presented him with a 'bookshelf-sized' bronze model of Mount Rushmore, portraying Trump's face next to those of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. Noem is now the secretary of homeland security. Stephen Miller, who called Trump 'the most stylish president in our lifetime', is the White House deputy chief of staff for policy. To some observers, this is just how Trump works, at home and abroad, and world leaders like Rutte who engage in flattery and 'strategic self-emasculation' are just being smart. 'A useful way to think about President Trump and his team is not in terms of a conventional American administration, but rather as a court,' says Sam Edwards, a reader in modern political history at Loughborough University. Understood in those terms, he argues, performative upsucking is all. Sign up to Headlines Europe A digest of the morning's main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week day after newsletter promotion He points to Keir Starmer's first visit to Trump's Oval Office, when the UK prime minister theatrically brandished a letter from King Charles inviting Trump to a second state visit, saying, 'This is really special, this is unprecedented.' In this sense, Edwards argues, Rutte's conduct 'looks like debasement, like he's conducted himself with weakness,' says Edwards. 'But in the longer term, he gets the Nato partners to sign up to 5% expenditure on defence, which is something he wants as much as Trump wants. I guess that's the strategic calculation that Rutte has made. I might come in for criticism, but further down the line, do I get what I want? Yes.' That view is not universal, however. 'Mr Rutte, he's trying to embarrass you, sir,' Trump's former director of communications Anthony Scaramucci said earlier this week. 'He's literally sitting on Air Force One laughing at you.' David H Dunn, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham, agrees that licking Trump's boots doesn't earn his favour but his disdain. His flattering cabinet were selected not because the president admires them, says Dunn, but because their obsequiousness shows their weakness. He thinks Rutte, too, has miscalculated. 'There is a lot of evidence from the first term that Trump doesn't necessarily respond to flattery,' Dunn says. 'It sends a signal that this is not an alliance of equals. This is not the America of old, whereby there was a coming together of countries of shared values and shared interests. What it looks like is fealty to the king.'
Telegraph
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Despite Trump cajoling Europe to pay up, Putin is the victor from this week's Nato summit
Nato leaders departed their summit in The Hague on Wednesday with relief. All, except for Spain, promised to spend what much more money on defence (though the concept of 'defence' is now being elasticated to includes things like another runway at Heathrow). Thirty-one of those leaders felt they had succeeded in placating the 32nd, or rather, the number one, Donald Trump. The Nato secretary-general, Mark Rutte, had written him a pre-summit letter about his great achievements in the baby language considered suitable. He also referred to him as 'Daddy '. I would call this fawning, or, in preferred Trump style, 'FAWNING!!!'. Nevertheless, Daddy seemed content. As he left, he announced that Nato 'is not a rip-off'; so that was good. But if you read the declaration which the Nato leaders published, you can see how markedly it differs from past ones. Three omissions stand out. The first concerns Ukraine. In the Nato declaration in 2022, the year of Putin's full-scale invasion, the leaders warned that 'War has returned to the European Continent.' They condemned Russia's 'war of aggression' and 'blatant violation of international law'. Their text spoke, in strikingly undiplomatic terms, of Russia's 'lies', 'cruelty' and the 'humanitarian catastrophe' caused. It offered 'full solidarity' with 'our close partner' Ukraine and vindicated its 'territorial integrity'. The 2022 declaration judged Russia to be 'the most significant and direct threat to peace in the Euro-Atlantic area.' Three years on, that war still rages. Yet this week's declaration says only this about Ukraine: 'Allies reaffirm their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine, whose security contributes to ours, and, to this end, will include direct contributions towards Ukraine's defence and its defence industry when calculating Allies' defence spending.' That word 'sovereign' was included to placate pro-Russian Nato members (e.g. Hungary) who would not want Vladmir Putin to think they are helping Ukraine. The stuff about paying to Ukraine's defence industry is part of the fudge over extra spending. The collective endorsement of Ukraine is now distinctly un-ringing. Gone is the talk of European war being caused by Russia. All the declaration says is that Nato spending is going up because of 'the long-term threat posed by Russia to Euro-Atlantic security and the persistent threat of terrorism'. 'Long-term'? The day before the summit, 350 drones and 16 missiles attacked Ukraine and killed ten people in Kyiv. Such occurrences are almost daily. If I were Putin, I would feel well pleased by the muffling of Nato's rhetoric: another couple of years, he may think, and the words 'Russia' and 'Ukraine' can be excised from its communiques altogether. Another omission is the word 'nuclear'. In Cold War declarations, the range, level and balance of nuclear armaments between Nato and the Soviet Union were often discussed. Their importance was emphasised. In 1983, when the Soviet threat was high and Reagan and Thatcher were hitting back with cruise and Pershing deployment in Europe, the Nato declaration said, 'A sufficient level of both conventional and nuclear forces remains necessary for the credibility of deterrence.' With the word 'nuclear' now gone, what deters? The final three words absent from the latest declaration are 'The United States'. It is almost as if a major Vatican document did not mention His Holiness the Pope. There is a great big orange elephant in the room trumpeting uncontrollably but no one wants to talk about it. That is a dramatic change. This passage from the 1982 Nato declaration could stand for the alliance's whole doctrine and its key American dimension: 'The security and sovereignty of the European members of the Alliance remain guaranteed by their own defence, by the presence of North American forces on European territory and by the United States strategic nuclear commitment to Europe. The United States and Canada likewise depend for their own security upon the contribution of the European partners to the defence of the Alliance.' The reason the doctrine is not repeated today is, presumably, that it would not be believed. That 'credibility of deterrence' has weakened. Nato communiques often talk of member states' commitments being 'ironclad'. That adjective is repeated this year, but the iron looks rusty now. There is an additional reason: the current occupant of the White House may not believe it himself. Those anxious leaders in The Hague probably thought, 'Best not to ask'. So the question naturally follows, 'What is Nato for?' It must be for something, since 31 of its 32 nations are committing to spend much more money on it: but what? Who is the enemy? How great is the threat? What is the posture? There is now a radical disjunction between the imminence of the Russian threat perceived by roughly half of the Nato allies – including Baltics, Nordics, Poland and (rather more tentatively) Britain – and the sort of denial or reluctance visible in southern or Balkan countries and, above all, in elements of the American administration. In Britain, most of us have spent most of our lives believing or half-believing that we are under the American nuclear umbrella. I say 'half-believing' because we cannot be certain what would happen if Armageddon loomed, but we have at least believed that the size and seriousness of US nuclear capacity have deterred our common enemies from trying on anything too dangerous. I probably do still believe that. President Trump's bombing of Iran's nuclear sites – though in no sense a Nato action – shows he is on the side of the West against the maniacs. But it could be that 'Daddy' regards Israel as a sort of Prodigal Son whom he will indulge, while for Nato he is more like an absent father who resents having to see his kids. We confront the contradiction that the man who tells us to contribute much more money and acts as if he is the boss may be the one least likely to stick around. He is also the friendliest towards our greatest immediate foe. Mr Trump has been absolutely consistent in refusing the underlying Nato approach, which is that Putin is completely in the wrong because he is trying to change the borders of Europe by force. Trump will criticise Putin sometimes. Yes, he has gone too far ('What the hell happened to him?'), he will say. That he should not have attacked at all, he will never, ever say. So it becomes very hard to imagine circumstances in which Trump's finger would press the button to save Europe – or even Britain, for whom he has a soft spot – from Putin. Hence our inglorious but not completely foolish playing for time in The Hague. Perhaps Mr Trump will eventually see more sense, or just calm down – and anyway power will have drained away from him in not much more than three years' time, or even, perhaps, after the mid-terms next year. In these trying circumstances, we should feel sympathetic to Sir Keir Starmer's efforts to take the defence and security of Britain more seriously. So it was marginally good news this week that we shall buy 12 dual-capable F-35A bombers from the United States, thus improving our nuclear capacity. When you consider, however, that they will be American and under American custody and command, and that we are not buying more bombers than before, but simply different ones (switching from B models to A models), you – and Vladimir Putin - may be underwhelmed. On VE Day 1945, Churchill said, 'Our enemy lies prostrate before us.' Eighty years on, we risk it being the other way round.
