Foreign Affairs
If Rutte did such a sound job as leader of the Netherlands, why did his countrymen make such a clean break with his tenure?
The Netherlands. What is there to say? For most observers: not much. It was the Dutch Golden Age, Rembrandt, then tulip mania, vice on tap, and irrelevance all the way down.
The French get all the guff, but eighty-four springs ago Hitler bombed Rotterdam and the Dutch folded their nation in one day. It was not the roughest of transitions. After all, the previous German head of state, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was already in residence.
Wilhelm had absconded to the Utrecht hamlet Doorn after blowing the First World War, a tenure commemorated in the tedious 2016 film The Exception, starring the late, great Christopher Plummer and Lily James. Besides inspiring questionable flicks, Wilhelm’s Dutch decades produced a noteworthy missive or two.
On the German Führer, the defrocked monarch said from Holland: “There is a man alone, without family, without children, without God. He builds legions, but he doesn’t build a nation. … An all-swallowing State … sets itself up in place of everything else, and the man, who alone incorporates in himself this whole State, has neither a God to honor, nor a dynasty to conserve.”
In the present day, the Netherlands has a new administration, one widely advertised in the prestige press as “the most right-wing government” in ages (the symbiotic relationship between the fourth estate and the clonazepam industry continues apace). Dick Schoof, sometimes called “Tricky Dick” in the Dutch press—is everything American?—is slated to become prime minister after stints as a spook, immigration chief, and justice minister.
Schoof is considered by some to be the technocratic mask in front of a silent coup d’état orchestrated by Geert Wilders, whom critics decry as an ash-blonde, anti-Islam psychopath. Whatever the truth, after three decades of hurling stones at the castle walls, Wilders at last achieved power after a shock surge at the polls in late 2023.
Why did Wilders’ time in the wilderness end? After all, the man the new team succeeds, Mark Rutte, is perhaps the most revered mainstream conservative politician in Europe. But this time (the Wilders-Schoof experiment) came from that time (bespectacled putative statesmanship). Why this disconnect?
Answering that would be a trivial pursuit, were it not for Rutte’s likely next gig: secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an alliance the president of the United States strikingly calls a “sacred commitment.”
Rutte came to power in 2010. He had worked, for years, for his predecessor Jan Peter Balkenende, another center-right politician who can only be described as “Mark Rutte 1.0.” He survived thirteen years atop the system and was long hailed as “Teflon Mark,” another copycat designation from America.
The 2010s and early 2020s saw the collapse,