NATO: next meeting in Washington, for its 75th year
Foreign Policy
The best of times and the worst of times: In many ways, NATO is going through both right now. The trans-Atlantic defense alliance, which is preparing to celebrate its 75th anniversary at a summit in Washington next month, has strengthened its collective will following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It has welcomed new members Sweden and Finland. And a record number of member states, more than 20 in all, will this year meet the alliance’s 2 percent defense spending goal—up from just three countries a decade ago, when the targets were first put in place.
Yet NATO also faces challenges, some existential in nature. For a long time the alliance has struggled with not enough troops, and as FP’s Jack Detsch reported, the problem is only getting worse. “NATO basically forgot about its military,” one senior NATO diplomat told Detsch, who also talked to the chair of NATO’s Military Committee about urgent plans to ramp up capacity. (Russia, Detsch noted, is having no such troubles in its ongoing war in Ukraine.)
Meanwhile, leadership of the alliance is about to change. In October of this year, current Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will be succeeded by outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. FP doesn’t often take on personalities in our analysis of geopolitics, but afascinating profile of Rutte by FP columnist Caroline de Gruyter exemplifies how the personal can reveal the political. In surveying many of those who know Rutte best, de Gruyter paints a portrait of the next “sec-gen”: the kind of guy who has been staying in the same no-frills Chinatown hotel on New York trips for the last 30 years, and who on every visit dines with legendary journalist Robert Caro at the same restaurant, will likely run a tight, disciplined ship at NATO. “Probably the most important thing to know about Rutte,” de Gruyter writes, “is that he is a very controlled person.”
