Image by Marjan Blan.

Mark Rutte became secretary general of NATO despite having no military experience. He is however a combatant in the holy war against social welfare in Europe. One glance at Rutte’s actual record reveals the warfare that NATO currently engages in as being economic rather than defensive. Putin is nothing more than a scarecrow in Rutte’s perception-management op to convince Europeans of the need for never-ending austerity.

As the Netherlands’ longest-serving prime minister, Rutte enacted reforms which crippled social democracy, education, healthcare and welfare in his own small and affluent country. It was during Rutte’s tenure that Dutch street beggars, homelessness and poverty reappeared as commonplace sights in the rich little delta on the North Sea. But he also imposed these policies onto the European Union.

During COVID, for example, Rutte strongarmed the EU into drastically reducing aid to the most devastated European countries like Portugal, Italy, and Spain. He even lobbied to condition and withhold aid until these countries signed onto more draconian neoliberal reforms. Perhaps it was this performance, more than any other, which initiated Rutte to become chief austerity-monger at the dashboard of NATO. President Donald Trump and Rutte recently pressured member-states into pledging 5% of their GPDs to NATO–requiring massive privatization and cruel cuts to Europe’s already-ailing public sectors. That is not a side-effect, it is, rather, the program’s core objective.

NATO has ushered in a new face of warfare for the neoliberal era. NATO secretary-generals bear no resemblance to traditional generals: rather than appear in typical regalia, they don the suits and ties appropriate for any senior corporate role.

French philosopher Pierre Legendre, who died in 2023, often pointed out how neoliberal ideology involves a quasi-Calvinistic yet fanatically progressive tendency to strip away all ceremony and value-systems of the past. The problem is that things like rules of war are often among the quaint “antiquated” notions eliminated by managerialism’s “creative destruction”. In documentaries such as “Dominium Mundi: The Empire of Management” Pierre Legendre warned that when the managers take over political process and diplomacy, they exalt the shredding of international law as a form of “thinking outside the box” inspired by the ideas of the 1960s. Rutte embodies the essence described by Legendre.

Advocates of austerity tend to trumpet martial metaphors from war propaganda—calling Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain “PIGS”; Musk’s chainsaw; Milei’s chainsaw, are cases in point. There are also Macron’s many elocutions in which he seeks to associate himself with the image of general DeGaulle–despite DeGaulle’s policy of boldly withdrawing France from NATO. Rutte’s cabinet-member Halbe Zijlstra–who Rutte defended after Zijlstra admitted to having lied about a past encounter with Putin--was said to have invoked an axe representing austerity measures. For these human resources clerks who lack any military background to speak of, austerity is the only worthwhile fight in politics. And yet, these symbols prove sterile without American muscle and ammo reinforcing them. Politicians like Rutte are so adept at using war terminology to describe neoliberal reform, that they can be selected to run actual armies. This is particularly dangerous, because civilians tend to have more war-lust. Veterans and survivors of the frontlines are less likely to pine for rushing into battle before all other means are exhausted. The truly experienced are less prone to leap into the fray with the giddiness displayed by Doctor Strangelove or Kaja Kallas, the Estonian now in charge of the EU’s diplomacy who recently invoked Rutte’s claim that, unless all countries ramp up support for Zelensky, we will soon all be speaking Russian. Rutte cheers for war like a civilian or a sports forecaster, as he did when celebrating Trump’s attack on Iranian nuclear sites, risking irreversible harm to the once-successful Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Without providing any arguments, Rutte denied these strikes broke international law. This ominous enthusiasm for global conflict was on display as early as 2022, when, as prime minister he pledged heavier weaponry and roughly 10 billion euros in aid to Ukraine.

Perhaps it was back then, at the cusp of Europe’s response to the Russia-Ukraine war, that Rutte eyed his opportunity to jockey for the appointment to NATO. A change of career had appeal for the scandal-plagued Dutch politico, who had just disgraced himself as interim prime minister after much of his government resigned in the wake of what became known as “the childcare benefits affair”. An investigation by opposition politicians (socialist Renske Leite and the new-right Peter Omtzigt, both of whom uncovered backroom plots by Rutte to ostracise them) revealed how the state under Rutte falsely accused thousands families from ethnic minorities of misusing childcare benefits. Racially profiled for foreign-sounding surnames, these families accused of being scammers were expelled from the system and obliged to pay back hundreds of thousands of euros. The media attention and public outrage pressured members of Rutte’s third cabinet into resignation, while Rutte went on television talk-shows to air his apologies. Here we see the pattern of failing upwards in Rutte’s long rule: first, the lid gets popped off unlawful acts coordinated at the top. In turn, Rutte conflates State interests with his own, insisting that his machinations had to be kept tightly under wraps for “national security”. Denial is followed by confession; a swansong of emotive public apologies ensue. When the smoke clears, many of those around him have been eliminated from politics, but Rutte the unbeatable austerity-man is still there, flying higher, unscathed by the mushroom cloud. There is no reason to doubt that Rutte will recycle his routine in his new function as head of the world’s largest military bureaucracy.

None of this is to accuse Rutte of never having been personally impacted by war. To the contrary. His parents formed part of the Dutch colonial enterprise in Indonesia until they were taken captive by the Japanese during WWII. After Sukarno’s Indonesian nationalist revolution the family moved back to the motherland, where they joined what is tellingly the Netherlands’ oldest political party: the Anti-Revolutionary Party, rooted in a Calvinist church that preaches frugality and austerity.

Calvinists believe that when bad things happen to you, it’s because you had it coming, since you were probably indolent, indulgent, or otherwise sinful. In accordance with that worldview, some ex-colonists reasoned that it had been their exuberance, decadence and having been too showy with the wealth and glamor of colonial life that had brought about the loss of the East Indies, like a Biblical punishment visited upon the Dutch by Yahweh. The conclusion that follows is that “austerity” is the formula which European nations could apply to restore their imperial heyday and to win back their lost seats at the table of Great Power games.

That is one lesson in a Spartan approach to life that has obsessed Rutte, and it worked out for him. His lifestyle is notably austere for a pro-business politician: riding his bicycle to parliament from a loft in the Hague where he lived alone in rumored celibacy, and giving speeches without any rhetorical flourish let alone ideological (or other) content. Such plainness won the sympathies of a simplicity-loving Dutch public. Which is why supporters found it hard to process how the Lutheran aesthetic of the PM did not translate into earnestness as scandals cropped up, tarnishing his cabinets.

That brings us to the second time Mark Rutte was truly affected by war.

In 2015, a Dutch Royal Airforce F16 bombed a neighborhood in Hawija, Iraq as part of coalition efforts by the Netherlands to “aid” the US in the Middle East in “Operation Inherent Resolve”. At least 70 civilians died in an area heavily populated by internal refugees who had fled ISIS. (Ironically, not a few Daesh volunteers happened to be Dutch jihadists). The Netherlands blamed having been fed faulty intel by the Americans (“Daddy” in Rutte’s latest parlance). The consequences of the Iraq fiasco were kept secret from Dutch parliament’s scrutiny. The story only broke in 2019, revealing the conservative estimate of 70 deaths. Rutte was accused of having worked to conceal Dutch responsibility, but denied he was ever handed the info by his then-defense-minister Jeanine Hennis—who quickly contradicted the PM, saying that she had in all likelihood reported the civilian deaths to her superior. This stoked fears in the Netherlands about a second Srebrenica tragedy harming the country’s international reputation. Many in the Netherlands experienced Srebrenica as a national humiliation after Dutch peacekeepers failed to intervene in Milosevic’s massacre.

Today, while considering the death toll in Gaza, the Hawijah events might have faded in hindsight. But one must not forget The Netherlands’ vulnerable status as home to the International Court of Justice among other international humanitarian bodies whose credibility is damaged by the Hague’s foreign policy errors.

Now, a decade after the bombings, video footage from Hawija has finally surfaced, after being found “accidentally” on a computer in a military base in the Southern Netherlands, reopening the investigation. But it is late in the game: Rutte has already failed upwards again, this time into the cockpit of the world’s largest military alliance. Current Dutch Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans called it “extremely undesirable that these images were only tracked down ten years after the fact, and after the investigation by the Sorgdrager Commission, despite previous efforts to retrieve these images.”  Rutte’s Minister of Defense had not kept images of the attacks, and said frames had been “overwritten” a claim which was quickly proven false.[[1]](https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/2/messages/AK_CLUqOqC5m1u8LQTeIMW1rjds" \l "_ftn1) The Sorgdrager Commission, led by retired Dutch politician Winnifred Sorgdrager, was founded to represent the victims of the Hawija disaster.

(Read the report’s conclusionshere*)*The report refutes early attempts to blame inadequate American intel for the “mistargeting” of innocents: it reveals that the Netherlands ignored American advice to bring its own Dutch intelligence and legal teams to be stationed in the Persian Gulf. The Netherlands is not in the so-called Five Eyes community which enoys privileged access to American and British intel,[2] which is why the Dutch mission was supposed to bring its own arbiters to the Middle East to prevent violations of the rules of engagement. Rutte’s Defense Minister dragged her feet for a year before handing over its self-investigation to the public prosecutor.

A cursory look at Sorgdrager’s report should make anyone worry about Rutte captaining NATO, even or especially if you want NATO to be an effective force rather than a corrupt machine jammed with disinformation. The report concludes that

1. The government decided to join a war, but did not notify parliament in those terms.

2. The staffing of military personnel at CAOC headquarters in the targeting process was insufficient, as was their preparation.

3. The Netherlands entirely relied on US intelligence during the war in Iraq. The Netherlands failed to build up its own intelligence position and therefore was unable to sufficiently make its own assessments.

4. After the Hawija attack, the government did not sufficiently inform parliament of the fact that the attack had resulted in civilian casualties and, consequently, put off the responsibility of reporting civilian casualties for years. The government failed to report to parliament that civilians had been killed by the Dutch deployment

5. Before and after the Hawija attack, the government consistently provided incomplete and inaccurate information to the House of Representatives.

Then there is Rutte’s adventurism in Syria. In 2018, Dutch newspaper Trouwexposed Rutte’s having aided Jihadist organizations militating in North Syria, such as the Erdogan-backed Jabhat Al-Shamiya, some of whose operatives were arrested in Rotterdam. Rutte said it was strictly “Non-Lethal Assistance” or NLA—meaning jihadis were endowed not with Dutch weapons, but with other “non-lethal” logistical materials and technology required for combat, such as cars and trucks (in total 313 vehicles) funding, medicine, clothing and food.

Rutteopenly declared he wanted any investigations of Dutch multi-million-euro involvement in Syria to be dropped. After a dogged pressure campaign of nearly three years, a fact-finding commission demonstrated that Rutte had been cultivating jihadists in Syria under the pretext of eradicating ISIS, which itself had numerous volunteers from the Low Countries. Instead of bringing Dutch Daesh-members like Yago Riedijk (husband of Shamima Begum) to face justice at home, Rutte rescinded their citizenship, leaving them in the custody of Kurdish prison guards who must feed and support Dutch prisoners.

The late philosopher Zygmunt Bauman explained the reemergence of authoritarianism as resulting from how power (“the means for getting things done” in Bauman’s accessible language) and politics (“the ability to decide what needs to be done”) have severed from one another and drift ever further apart. Even as Europeans elect right-wing or left populists who campaign on economic social justice, from SYRIZA to Podemos, from Wilders to Salvini, it makes little difference whether citizens vote Fascist or Communist once a country signs onto the 5% target. No program of social spending is compatible with paying full tribute to NATO, aka “Daddy”. Here we see the true function of Rutte. In the light of this scheme, we must ask ourselves who poses the greater threat to democracy and the “Western way of life” which EU officials keep invoking–Rutte, or the usual scarecrows like Russia, Hamas and Iranian ayatollahs?

NOTES

[1] From p. 18 of the Summary of the Sorgdrager report: “Despite heavy suspicions of civilian casualties, the images of this Dutch Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) had not been kept by the Ministry of Defence. The Ministry of Defence stated that these had been ‘overwritten’ the next day. On 4 June 2015, however, the images were still available. This BDA shows more collateral damage than expected. The BDA drawn up by the Americans and the analysis with images from the video, also taken on the morning of 3 June, had, however, survived.”

[2] From p. 9 of the Summary of the Sorgdrager report: “The Americans did notify the Ministry of Defence of the relevance of bringing in their own experts and stationing them in Qatar where the Coalition Target Development Working Group was preparing for deployments of weapons. Specifically, the Americans mentioned bringing in the Netherlands’ own intelligence and posting Intel experts as well as experts who may or may not be able to pull a red card in a deployment of weapons in a timely manner. This requires an Intel expert, an RCH and a LEGAD. The Commission finds that the Netherlands did send an RCH to Qatar, however, neither an Intel expert from the MIVD nor a LEGAD. (…)There was no independent intelligence position”

The post NATO’s Dutch Dr Strangelove, Rutte Knows Nothing of War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed