At 9am (0700 GMT) on Tuesday, wreaths will be laid at the granite monument to the men and women who have died fighting under the banner of Nato during the last 75 years. It will be a brief moment of solemnity at the headquarters of the transatlantic alliance in Brussels. Then, after retreating into the cavernous, windowless North Atlantic Council room, Mark Rutte will officially take charge as Nato secretary general.
Rutte, the blunt-speaking liberal who led four Dutch coalition governments over 13 years, takes the reins at a perilous moment for Ukraine, a defining test for the transatlantic alliance. Nato allies recently pledged to bolster long-term support to Ukraine “so it can prevail in its fight for freedom”.
Far from prevailing, Ukraine is facing its third winter fighting Russia’s brutal invasion, while Vladimir Putin’s forces continue to advance in the east of the country.
Nato has changed considerably since Jens Stoltenberg, the outgoing and second-longest serving secretary general, took over a decade ago. When Stoltenberg arrived at Nato HQ, Russia had already annexed Crimea and, aided by local separatists, was seizing territory into eastern Ukraine. Yet in 2014 Nato allies were more focused on Afghanistan, and as Stoltenberg said earlier this month, support for Ukraine was “marginal”.
Now the alliance reports tens of thousands of combat-ready troops on Nato’s eastern flank, compared with zero a decade ago. And 23 of 32 Nato members meet the target to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence, compared with just three a decade ago.
Yet Nato, and western support more broadly, has been too little, too late to tip the scales in Ukraine’s favour. Western support is still “not enough, sadly”, said Tomáš Valášek, a former Nato ambassador for Slovakia, now a member of the Slovak parliament. “The reality is that two years on we have been too slow to crank up the industrial production. The Russian Federation, which is essentially an economy a fraction of the size of the combined US and European economies, has been able … to certainly give us a proper run for our money in defence production, which is a little ridiculous.”
Western nations, for example, waited a year to get moving on desperately needed ammunition. “Ukraine is completely unnecessarily being forced to cede ground in the east because of banal problems such as the lack of munitions, which should have been eminently within our means to supply Ukraine with.”
At the Washington summit last July, Nato leaders pledged €40bn (£33bn) “minimum funding” for Ukraine for the next year and an “irreversible path” to Nato membership. The new secretary general will have to manage both Ukraine’s membership hopes and money at the next summit in The Hague in June 2025.
Oana Lungescu, who was Nato’s chief spokesperson for 13 years, said money would be a major test for Rutte. “He will need to bolster his credentials as a strong advocate of increased defence spending across the alliance and that will help consolidate his credibility as the Nato secretary general, both with Washington, but also with the countries of central and eastern Europe, which perhaps were a bit lukewarm at the beginning when his name was put forward.”
The Netherlands, for many years a laggard in defence spending, was announced as meeting Nato’s 2% target just days before Rutte was appointed.
In a farewell speech this month Stoltenberg said it was obvious that Nato allies needed to spend “significantly more than 2%” if they were going to fulfil defence spending plans, but declined to offer a precise figure. Lungescu, now a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said there had already been talks in Nato for more than a year of “at least 3% or more”, pointing out the average defence spend in the cold war was about 4%.
Then there is the prospect of Donald Trump, who said earlier this year he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” when recounting an alleged encounter with a Nato leader of a country that had not met the 2% target.
Camille Grand, who served as assistant secretary general at Nato during the first Trump presidency, said he was in the pessimistic camp about a second Trump administration. Thinktanks close to Trump pitch “a dormant Nato” that stops all further expansion.
Grand, now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said he feared not so much a formal withdrawal under Trump “but statements or actions that would undermine the fundamental logic of the alliance, which is that of solidarity, the sort of musketeer-style ‘one for all and all for one’”.
While Nato insiders would be relieved by a victory for Kamala Harris, the pressure for Europe to contribute more to its own defence, as the US switches focus to the far east, would remain. (China was named as a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s aggression by Nato leaders in July, the strongest rebuke of Beijing, albeit without consequences.)
Talks about burden-sharing would continue under a Harris administration, Grand said. “No matter who is in the White House, [they will] be more focused on the Indo-Pacific, more focused on domestic issues, they have resource constraints and therefore it is impossible to assume that it’s going to be the old-fashioned Nato coming back.”
Lungescu thinks that whoever is elected US president in November, Nato will have to step up support for Ukraine, increase defence spending, but also look further afield to stay relevant for a US administration: “Nato will need to do more in order to counter China’s ambitious and influence including by making its partnerships with the democracies of the Indo-Pacific more substantive”.
Former Nato insiders see Rutte as well placed to navigate relations between Nato’s 32 members, including the US under a Trump administration. Nicknamed the Trump whisperer, Rutte is credited with averting a near-disaster at the 2018 Nato summit in Brussels, when he talked Trump round on defence spending. More recently, he has counselled allies to stop “whining and moaning about Trump”, because Europe has to work “with whoever is on the dance floor”.
A veteran of EU summitry, Rutte is also in a strong position to bridge any mismatch between the bloc’s growing defence ambitions and Nato. The EU will soon have its first commissioner for defence, the former Lithuanian prime minister Andrius Kubilius, who is tasked with leading work on “defence projects of common European interest”, such as a European air shield and cyber defences. Nato has traditionally been wary of EU defence ambitions, but Rutte, a fiscal conservative who is not romantic about the EU motto of “ever closer union”, could be the man to bridge any potential gap.
Years of coalition-building in the Netherlands should also stand him in good stead. “As a secretary general, you’re far more of a secretary than general,” Valášek said. “A lot of your job is simply brokering, convincing, occasionally pleading, listening.”
