Daddy's club

To NATO's top civilian, the alliance makes no sense without Trump. Plus: a letter from the new Clerk (not to me)

Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general

1. Soli Trump Gloria

I haven’t seen much commentary about Mark Rutte’s weekend interview with the New York Times. It’s quite an interview. If the NATO secretary general is faking his enthusiasm for Donald Trump, he’s really committing to the bit.

I’m going to quote Rutte’s remarks in greater detail than you sometimes get, because what really stands out over the 36-minute podcast that resulted from the Times interview is Rutte’s doggedness. He doesn’t simply treat the US president as a containable problem, as European security experts sometimes do, but as nothing less than a full NATO partner and, indeed, as the hero of the alliance’s revitalization.

“President Trump deserves all the praise,” he tells interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a longtime NPR foreign correspondent before she joined the Times, “because without his leadership, without him being re-elected president of the United States, the 2% this year and the 5% in 2035 — we would never, ever, ever have been able to achieve agreement on this.”

Does he regret that Trump posted what the AP and a lot of others called a “fawning” text message in which Rutte wrote to Trump, “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win”? “Not at all, because what was in the text message is exactly as I see it.”

Is the integrity of NATO’s defense perimeter solid? “But it’s not that the Estonians are left to themselves. It would be the full force of NATO, including the full backup of the United States, which will come to the rescue. Putin knows this.”

Garcia-Navarro keeps pushing. Full backup of the United States, she says? You bet, Rutte says. In “everything I’ve discussed over the last six months with the new U.S. administration” there is “absolutely no shiver of a doubt that the U.S. is completely committed to NATO, is completely committed to Article 5,” the Alliance’s collective-defence principle.

Isn’t there a “fundamental disconnect” between the way Trump views the world and the commitments needed to make NATO work? Rutte answers: Nope! “President Trump put in place an excellent foreign-policy team, including Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth,” he offers.

But “what we are seeing,” Garcia-Navarro insists, perhaps in reference to this or this, “is the United States pulling back from Europe.”

“I really have to correct you,” Rutte insists in turn. “The United States is not pulling away from Europe.”

Where does Rutte stand on the credibility and prospects of Russia-Ukraine peace talks? “With the risk that I’m again praising President Trump: He is the one who broke the deadlock with Putin. When he became president in January, he started these discussions with Putin, and he was the only one who was able to do this. This had to happen.”

There’s more. I could find only the barest hints that his depiction of reality might be tactical, a preference to see some aspects of recent events rather than others because seeing things that way serves a larger objective. “I was prime minister of the Netherlands for 14 years, so I know about criticism, but I don’t care,” he says, when asked about the uproar his text to Trump caused. “In the end, I need to do my job. I have to keep the whole of NATO together. And the biggest ally is the United States.”

Later, when Garcia-Navarro pushes Rutte on other NATO allies’ shaky adherence to democratic principles, including Hungary’s and Turkey’s, he allows this much: “Sometimes internally, without the press there — and that is not very democratic, but that’s the only way to do it — in a discreet way, you have your discussions and your debates, but never out in the open. That’s impossible.” So Rutte does admit some distinction between what he says in public and what he thinks and says in private.

But he swiftly closes even that sliver of an open window on the possibility that he’s saying less than everything he thinks about the Trump administration. “And by the way, what you said about the U.S. and backsliding, I would not agree with this. I think the U.S. is still one of the strongest democracies on Earth.”

Rutte says other remarkable things in this interview, which I suspect students of NATO history will still be reading in 30 years. He’s pretty confident that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would begin with a gigantic distracting manoeuvre, a Russian attack on NATO territory at Beijing’s request. But let’s stick with Rutte’s concept of America, Trump’s America, as “daddy.”

This is a challenge to Canada, and to its prime minister, who I suspect will spend the rest of his political career trying to calibrate the proper height and angle of the national elbow.

Mark Carney is now on the record with a commitment to more than triple Canada’s defence spending as a share of GDP by 2035. (The newish government — Newoid? Faux-new? — is making great claims about hitting 2% this year, but I’m going to stick with the latest five-year average, which is well below 2%. And there’s fabulous vagueness about what will count toward 5%, but my hunch is that dental care won’t count, so there’ll have to be a tremendous amount of spending on something that doesn’t come naturally.)

But besides any uncertainty about accounting, there’s also considerable uncertainty about the rationale. Massively increase military and military-related spending… to what end? The only really satisfying answer is tautological: We have to hit 5% because we promised to hit 5%. Any more elaborate answer runs quickly into trouble. Hit 5% to… assert Canadian independence? To matter more in Europe? Hit 5% because, as Carney said in the first week of the recent election, “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on… tight security and military cooperation is over”?

Good luck with any of that. Mark Rutte’s here from Europe to say we all need to pitch in to reinforce American independence, in an alliance whose main vocation is liberate the Americans to go big in the South China Sea, and that “all the praise” goes to the guy we’re all congratulating ourselves about turning the page from. There’s a Twilight Zone episode in which a woman driving cross-country keeps seeing the same hitchhiker in front of her. In my remake, the driver is Carney and the hitchhiker is wearing this shirt, or this face:

I can already imagine the comment-board rationalizations about how I am being a Gloomy Gus, and there is no contradiction at all between the new era of Canadian independence and the new era of paying a skull-numbing alliance tab, and how we need to get closer to NATO to get further from Trump, it’s like, you know, whaddya call it, a slingshot effect, blah blah blah. In fact I can make myself believe a lot of that too. NATO has been wargaming Russian invasion scenarios on the ground across the Baltics continuously since 2017, and all of that makes more sense with American soldiers on the ground than without them. Flattering Daddy would, in theory, be a small price to pay for holding that line.

But it’s not entirely emotionally satisfying, is it. I heard from progressive friends who were great admirers of Carney right up until they heard the numbers out of the Hague NATO summit, and started to realize how many billions there are between here and 5%. Canadian foreign-policy politics is rarely salient in our broader politics, but when it is, it’s largely in the service of telling ourselves some kind of story of standing up to Uncle Sam. Chrétien kept us out of Iraq. Pierre Trudeau smirked at Nixon and Reagan. Paul Martin stayed out of missile defence. And on and on.

Every one of those stories was more complex than it’s remembered. Pierre Trudeau let Reagan test cruise missiles over the prairies, for instance. But all the political potency is on the side of those who can cast Canada’s foreign policy as a means of keeping the Americans at bay. Just ask Lloyd Axworthy, whom I include here not as some sort of comic figure, but as a representative of a nationalist and progressive sentiment that Liberals, of all people, ignore at their peril.

What’s to be done about all this? I don’t have a lot of certainty. You make the decisions you need to make, ideally with an eye to something more serious than branding. But it’s at least worth acknowledging that the massively higher price tag Carney has accepted for the next decade of his defence and foreign policy only buys Canada a ticket to bigger dilemmas with higher stakes.

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2. Hello city

Here’s an email public servants received on Monday from Michael Sabia, the new Clerk of the Privy Council. I’ve been publicly critical of Sabia’s results in previous positions, but I haven’t the faintest intention of prosecuting that viewpoint repeatedly in the months ahead. We shall see. In the meantime, he’s a significant new player in Ottawa, and his opening message to his colleagues is, or should be, news. Personally I’m encouraged by his language about “personal accountability.” It’s not that far from wishes I expressed here before the election. — pw

Dear Colleagues,

Today marks the third time in my career that I have joined the federal public service. The first was a long time ago when I was fresh out of school. More recently, I rejoined about five years ago as the Deputy Minister of Finance. And here I am today, in a new role.

So, you might well ask, why? Why am I here? Of course, the most direct answer is that the Prime Minister asked me to take this on. I am grateful to him for the opportunity to do this job at this point in Canada’s history.

Why does this period present such a compelling opportunity for all of us?

First, the federal public service is one of Canada’s great institutions. I have believed this for decades. It has a long-distinguished history of advising successive governments through challenging periods. And, over time, it has shown its ability to evolve and become more diverse to reflect the country itself. For all those reasons, the public service plays an integral part in our system of government – in our democracy. If we have learned anything from the turbulent world we live in, it should be to never take for granted our democratic system of government, and the institutions that support it and make it work.

Second, I believe that we are at a particular moment in our history. The world is changing fast. And in some fundamental ways. While the changes we are living aren’t easy, they give us, as a country, the opportunity right now to make decisions that will put Canada’s economy on a more resilient path; that will make us a more prosperous and fairer country; and that can strengthen our national unity in the face of an increasingly divided world. That is a tall order. It will only be accomplished with a lot of hard work inside government and across the country. It is an opportunity that we cannot miss.

Third, I am convinced that the public service has an indispensable role to play in ensuring we seize this opportunity. As public servants, if we are to deliver on that goal, we need to keep three words in mind.

· Focus: the Government’s priorities are very clear, as set out in the missions that the Prime Minister has launched. Our job is to be disciplined and concentrate on those. By staying tightly focused on priorities, we can help them become realities faster.

· Simplify: Our internal processes have become quite complicated. When that happens, there is always the risk that following the process is so time-consuming that everything slows down – at a time when we need to speed up because the world is moving as fast as it is. Windows of opportunity open and close. The world waits for no one. When processes get too onerous, they can also obscure what really matters most and why we are all here: to have an impact for the benefit of Canadians. Trying to simplify processes is going to be a priority. I know it is easier said than done. But it has to be addressed.

· Accountability: From the advice we give ministers to the decisions we take in running departments and programs to the services we provide to Canadians – from national defence to issuing a passport – we need to have a sense of personal accountability for what we do. Accountability is about commitment. It is about initiative – it is about taking that extra step that no one may have asked you to take, but that is often needed to make something a success. Successful organizations always have two characteristics. Formal accountabilities have to be clear – it’s the job of senior management to ensure that they are. And people need to feel and act in a personally accountable way. Helping to build those accountabilities and a culture of personal accountability will be key priorities for me.

In my experience, leadership is a lot about listening. Listening to the open and honest debates we need. In these uncertain times, when the standard operating procedures just don’t work anymore, rigorous debate is the best path to the best decisions. In this, our diversity is a continuing source of strength. With diversity comes the differing perspectives that make those debates even more worthwhile.

A final point: be proud. Proud of the work you do. Proud of serving Canada and Canadians.

I look forward to working with all of you.

Michael Sabia