NATO's new chief, former Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, took over as NATO’s 14th Secretary General from Jens Stoltenberg at a ceremony in the Alliance’s Brussels headquarters on Tuesday, where they laid a wreath to fallen military personnel.
The two are old friends, first meeting as the leaders of Norway and the Netherlands almost 15 years ago. The respect between the two was evident from the way they greeted each other warmly outside the alliance's Brussels headquarters.
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Stoltenberg was stepping down after 10 years as Alliance chief, surpassed only by another “Netherlander” politician Joseph Luns, who spent 12 years in charge of NATO from 1971. His tenure, which began in 2014, has coincided with the foreign adventurism of Russian President Vladimir Putin that began with the illegal annexation of Crimea.
In handing over the mantle to Rutte, Stoltenberg said, “Mark has the perfect background to become a great secretary general,” before adding:
“He has served as prime minister for 14 years and led four different coalition governments, so therefore he knows how to make compromises, create consensus, and these are skills which are very much valued here at NATO.”
In his acceptance speech, Rutte pledged that under his watch, NATO would continue to back Ukraine, encourage members to increase defense spending and to strengthen partnerships with countries in Asia and the Middle East.
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He said that he was unconcerned about the outcome of the forthcoming US presidential election saying he knows both candidates well and could work with either as part of maintaining the trans-Atlantic relationship between the US, Canada and Europe.
Rutte takes over as NATO’s top official as day 1,000 of the war in Ukraine fast approaches. He became a strong advocate for Ukraine following the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by a Russian missile over the Donetsk region on July 17, 2014, and even more so after the start of the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion.
Since then, he has developed a close, genuinely warm, relationship with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, one of the reasons Rutte says made him so keen to take the post of NATO Secretary General.
Rutte said Putin was “cold-blooded, cruel, and ruthless,” at the UN in the summer of 2022., before adding: “He will not stop in Ukraine unless we stop him now. This war is not only about Ukraine. It is about upholding the international rule of law.”
The Netherlands under Rutte's leadership has become one of Kyiv’s most reliable partners. In particular he was one of the leading lights in the formation of NATO’s F-16 coalition as well as making his country the fifth-largest supplier of military aid to Ukraine.
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