Dutch Uncle

There is an American idiom “talk like a Dutch uncle” meaning “give a severe reproof”. For decades, American presidents have done the opposite with Europe: flattering, subsidizing, and indulging strategic dependency. This week NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, formerly the prime minister of the Netherlands, talked like a Dutch uncle to the European parliament foreign affairs and security committees:

On my relationship with the President, hey, listen, if somebody is doing good stuff, and President Trump is doing a lot of good stuff, I believe. I know I’m irritating a lot of you again, but I think so, because as I said, also in Davos, the 2% reached by all NATO countries now at the end of 2025 would never, ever, ever have happened without Trump. Do you really think that Spain and Italy and Belgium and Canada would have decided to move from 1.5 to 2%? Italy spending 10 billion more now on defence at the beginning of the year without President Trump? No way. It would not have happened. And do you really think that in The Hague we would have come to the 5% commitment without President Trump? No way. So, I think he is very important to NATO.

[…]

And if anyone thinks here, again, that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming. You can’t. We can’t. We need each other. And why do we need each other? I tell you, first of all, because also the US needs NATO. And the US is not only in NATO to prevent a mistake after the First World War, not to re-engage with Europe, and then again, the long arm of history reaching out to the US again in the Second World War — as Churchill famously said in his speech in 1941 in the US Congress. They are also in NATO because for the US to stay safe, and by the way, Arctic region is evidence here, they need a secure Arctic. They need a secure Euro-Atlantic, and they also need a secure Europe. So, the US has every interest in NATO, as much as Canada and the European NATO Allies. But for Europe, if you really want to go it alone, and those who you are pleading for that, forget that you can never get there with 5%. It will be 10%. You have to build up your own nuclear capability. That costs billions and billions of euros. You will lose then in that scenario, you would lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the US nuclear umbrella. So hey, good luck.

Rutte’s remarks about Trump are mostly a distraction. The real issue is not which American president deserves credit for browbeating Europe, but whether Europe is structurally capable of defending itself at all. As I have said before the question is not whether the U. S. needs Europe. The question is how much does the United States need a Europe that is disinterested in defending itself? There is a deeper problem I won’t rehearse here: for at least fifty years, U.S. policy has implicitly preferred weak allies. That is a policy I strongly disagree with, but it explains much of what we are now seeing.

Multiple U. S. war game exercises have shown that our allies need to be able to sustain themselves for at least a week without U. S. assistance. Are they actually capable of doing that now? That question cannot be answered based on what percents of their GDPs they spend on defense but only on a dispassionate analysis of their defense capabilities.

Sec. Gen. Rutte has given them the address they need. The open question is whether Europe still has the political culture required to hear it.