Latest news with #TheHague
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.
Daily Mail
9 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
White House's thinly-veiled threat to Albanese over defense spending
Australia should boost its defense spending in line with NATO partners, according to a new diktat from the White House which sets Anthony Albanese on a collision course with Donald Trump , who he is yet to meet. Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - which Australia is not a part of - agreed to lift their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP over 10 years during a summit in The Hague, the Netherlands, this week. The move was triggered by pressure from the US President who had has long called for European allies to boost their defense spending. It was a win for Trump who had his ego massaged at the meeting of world leaders when Nato Chief Mark Rutte referred to him as 'daddy'. But now the US Commander-in-Chief has indicated he expects his allies in the Asia-Pacific - including Australia - to also increase their defense funding. 'Yeah, look, if our allies in Europe and our NATO allies can do that, I think our allies and our friends in the Asia Pacific region can do it as well,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Friday. Ms Leavitt said she would leave the 'specific relations and discussions' for individual countries to Trump. This means that Albanese may be pressured to increase defense spending if he hopes to secure a carve-out from the punishing tariffs imposed by the US on imports, including a 50 percent levy on steel and aluminum. He will also be hoping to shore up the $368bn AUKUS submarine deal, which is currently under threat from a 30-day review by the Pentagon. But Albanese rebuffed the call to increase defense spending on Friday morning, insisting his government would not deviate from the levels they outlined in the March budget, which aims to reach 2.3 per cent over the next ten years. 'We continue to invest in whatever capabilities Australia needs – we'll continue to do that,' Albanese told reporters. 'My job is to look after Australia's national interest, which includes our defense and security interests, and that's precisely what we are doing.' Spain was the only NATO member not to agree to lift its defense spending above 2.1 percent of GDP, with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez arguing it was 'incompatible with our welfare state and our vision of the world'. This triggered Trump's ire, with the US President vowing to hit Spain with higher tariffs. 'They want a little bit of a free ride, but they'll have to pay it back to us on trade, because I'm not going to let that happen,' Trump said. Albanese's planned meeting with Trump at the G7 summit in Canada failed to eventuate when the US President had to dash back to Washington to deal with the Israel-Iran crisis. Many had expected him to go in Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles place to the NATO summit this week to secure a meeting but instead he stayed in Australian. Marles risked Trump's ire by insisting Australia would not follow NATO members by lifting its defense spending to five percent of GDP. 'Look, obviously, a very significant decision has been made here in relation to European defense spending, and that is fundamentally a matter for NATO,' Marles said. 'We've gone through our own process of assessing our strategic landscape, assessing the threats that exist there, and the kind of defense force we need to build in order to meet those threats, to meet the strategic moment, and then to resource that. Marles did not speak directly with Mr Trump, nor US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, despite intensive efforts by government officials to tee up a first face-to-face meeting of an Australian minister with the US President.
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.'
