OPINION: How a ‘rightfully traumatized’ NATO can survive Donald Trump

NATO’s brand-new secretary general, Mark Rutte, stands 6-foot-4, so he can look Donald Trump straight in the eye. He’s a deft dealmaker who managed four different coalition governments over 14 years as prime minister of the Netherlands - during which he got on well with Trump, whose contempt for the U.S.-led alliance made it a stage set for chaos in his first term.

Rutte’s friendly vibe with the president-elect might be his key job qualification, given Trump’s explicit threats to gut the NATO collective defense guarantee that ensures Europe’s security or abandon the alliance altogether. What Rutte needs now, beyond his proven political agility, is a survival guide for NATO, where the officials I interviewed last week were resigned but clearly anxious.

“They’re rightfully traumatized, but they won’t admit it” publicly, Muriel Domenach, who served five years as France’s ambassador to the alliance before leaving in July, told me. “They talk about ‘Trump-proofing,’ but the reality is a sense of panic.”

Rutte, 57, who met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago Friday, has his work cut out. But the components of NATO’s survival in the Trump years are clear enough, even if some would be politically excruciating.

The critical parts are concrete demonstrations that Europe will pull more weight and conveying that commitment in Trump’s own language. That starts with …

-Cash. Most of NATO’s 30 European states shrank their armed forces and military industrial capacity for years. Spending climbed sharply after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine; by the end of this decade, Washington’s European allies are expected to have 600 advanced U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets in their arsenals. But the alliance’s 2014 guideline that member states spend at least 2 percent of total economic output on defense is badly outdated and inadequate to execute existing battle plans.

Rutte should use next summer’s NATO summit in The Hague to set a higher minimum defense spending target for the alliance - 2.5 percent of gross domestic product immediately, rising to 3 percent by 2030. (The U.S. outlay is about 3.4 percent of GDP.) Translation: Tens of billions of dollars in additional annual outlays by NATO’s European members and Canada.

That would mean a massive (and massively unpopular) funds transfer from social programs, infrastructure projects and schools, a shift some leaders would regard as political suicide. At the least, it would require political courage rarely seen outside the vulnerable states on NATO’s eastern flank: Poland and the three Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Rutte’s focus should be on the alliance’s European Big Four: Germany, Britain, France and Italy, which together accounted for almost two-thirds of NATO’s non-U.S. defense spending last year. Each faces severe budget or fiscal restraints and would struggle to meet the goal - especially Italy, whose meager defense spending should be a national embarrassment.

Yet even 3 percent of GDP is less than some major European nations spent on defense during the Cold War. And it is just half the 6 percent of national income that Russia will spend next year.

-Debt. Rutte will also need to press for Euro defense bonds, a form of joint borrowing that could raise hundreds of billions of dollars to expand defense industries and modernize militaries.

The key will be convincing Germany, which has blocked the idea until now. But Rutte might have an opening as Germans prepare for federal elections in February, as well as a solid argument: The European Union jointly borrowed some $850 billion to jump-start pandemic-wracked economies and could do it again to buttress its own security.

-Asset seizure. Washington and its European partners haggled for months over using $50 billion in future profits from frozen Russian state assets, mostly located in Europe, to support and rebuild Ukraine. That’s too little. As lawyers bicker about seizing the underlying cash, roughly $300 billion, Rutte can make the case that doing so is a political decision, not a legal one - and this is the moment for Europe to show resolve.

-Ukraine. A central question in any peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine will be security guarantees for Kyiv - ensuring its sovereignty and the territory under its control. That will require ongoing financial and military support, paid for partly by the measures above, and probably a European-led peacekeeping force after a credible cease-fire is agreed.

The peacekeepers might not wear NATO shoulder patches. But Rutte can still play a role in convincing European leaders. The sooner that signal is sent to the incoming U.S. administration, the better.

-Strategy. Trump might like to hasten Washington’s shifting focus toward China and away from Europe. Rutte will need to make the case that the two are intertwined. That’s not only because China has become the Kremlin’s essential ally, energy export market and supplier of critical defense components such as chips - and therefore a threat to Western security. It’s also because the war in Ukraine’s endgame will provide a signal to China of Washington’s resolve or lack of it.

At NATO, there is optimism that Rutte is the right man to keep Washington in NATO’s tent. Let’s hope that’s not just wishful thinking.

Lee Hockstader has been the Washington Post’s European Affairs columnist, based in Paris, since 2023. Previously he was a member of the Post editorial board; a national correspondent, a foreign correspondent, and a local reporter. He was awarded The Post’s Eugene Meyer Award for lifetime achievement in 2014.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.