Mark Rutte may not be a household name in the Chicago area or the rest of America, but the man is perhaps the only thing standing in the way of a full-blown collision between President Donald Trump and the NATO alliance.
NATO’s secretary-general has emerged as Europe’s most capable Trump whisperer, someone who can fly to Washington at a moment’s notice to talk the mercurial president away from the ledge. Last July, Rutte made a trip to the White House to push for a NATO-financed scheme that would sustain weapons shipments to Kyiv for Ukraine’s war against Russia—following Trump’s infamous blowup with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Rutte pulled it off again in October, when it seemed like Trump would bypass Ukraine to negotiate an end to the war directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
What Rutte did back then appears relatively easy compared with the challenge he faces in Washington this week. The relationship between NATO and its most important member, the United States, is shaky. The nearly six-week-long war in Iran may be occurring thousands of miles away from NATO headquarters, but its impacts are reverberating throughout Europe in the form of ballooning fuel prices and the risk of energy shortages. Trump has been in an increasingly agitated state, lobbing barbs at the alliance for refusing to help clear the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf chokepoint where around 20% of the world’s oil flowed until Iran effectively shuttered it. It may be time, Trump recently said, to consider withdrawing from the organization.
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