NATO chief Mark Rutte is looking east and growing nervous. Tensions we’ve not seen since the Cold War, it seems, are beginning to rise again in Western Europe. But things today are very, very different than the bad old days, when there was the very real possibility of a few thousand Soviet tanks crashing through the Fulda Gap at any moment.
Is Mark Rutte right to be worried about Russia today?
Speaking at a security event in Berlin, the secretary general painted a stark picture of the continent’s future, saying Russia could be ready to use force against NATO “within five years” and urging Europeans to “shift to a wartime mindset.”
He said allies must prepare for conflict on the scale their “grandparents or great-grandparents endured,” including mass mobilization and widespread destruction.
Rutte argued that Moscow’s full-scale war on Ukraine, backed by Chinese technology and Iranian and North Korean arms, proves the Kremlin is rebuilding an “empire” and sees free European societies as a threat.
He’s not wrong about Vladimir Putin’s ambition; the old KGB apparatchik would love nothing more than to resurrect the Soviet Union, or maybe to create a new Russian Empire with him as Tsar Vladimir I. But the question is one of capabilities. Rutte is warning NATO to ramp up defensive capabilities.
Rutte hailed this year’s NATO summit in The Hague, where leaders agreed to drive total defense-related spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 — including 3.5% on core military outlays, far above the long-standing 2% benchmark.
Germany alone is planning to reach 3.5% by 2029, which Rutte called “staggering,” and he pressed other European governments to follow.
At the same time, NATO is launching new operations such as “Eastern Sentry” and “Baltic Sentry” to reinforce the alliance’s eastern flank and protect critical infrastructure after Russian drones violated Polish airspace and undersea cables were cut in the Baltic.
As far as Russia’s capability to take on NATO, well, even now, color me skeptical. Granted, there have been billions of dollars flooded into Ukraine to prop up the Ukrainian military to hold Putin’s Russia back, but while Russia has allies, too, they have still been unable to take Ukraine as a whole. A negotiated peace, sooner or later, will become mandatory; Putin can’t keep this up forever. It doesn’t seem likely that he could drive the Russian Army through to the English Channel, which was always the Soviet Union’s Cold War goal.
As far as the likelihood of any aggressor nation starting a new world war, it’s clearly China that is the greater threat. But a China-Russia alliance, that could be troubling. But that war, it would seem, would be fought mostly in the Pacific and in Asia.
NATO spending more on its own defense, of course, is a good thing regardless of any Russian threat, or the lack thereof. They have sheltered under the American military umbrella for long enough.
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The NATO chief also made some interesting remarks about President Trump:
In February, Rutte tried to reassure Washington that Europe is finally shouldering more of the burden and he gave credit to President Donald Trump.
The secretary-general noted it was the president, “when he was Trump 45 and now Trump 47,” who consistently demanded that European allies and Canada spend more on defense, and argued that the new 5% target is exactly what Trump has been asking for since his first term.
Rutte also conceded in other Berlin remarks that “President Trump wants to end the bloodshed now, and he’s the only one who can get Putin to the negotiating table,” effectively acknowledging that any serious peace push will have to run through Washington and Trump’s White House.
He’s not wrong about any of that.
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