LATIKA M BOURKE: NATO chief Mark Rutte’s fawning Trump texts could hold a lesson for Albanese

Anthony Albanese bizarrely claimed during the election campaign that US President Donald Trump didn’t have a phone.

The baffling reply was given when 7’s political editor Mark Riley asked the Prime Minister if he had Trump’s digits.

“I’m not sure he has a mobile phone ... Or Joe Biden, it is not the way it works with any global leader,” Mr Albanese said at the time.

It was a telling remark that, with hindsight, explains a lot about Mr Albanese’s inability to obtain a face-to-face meeting with the leader of Australia’s closest ally.

It was, of course, untrue, as Mr Albanese was forced to admit the next day.

“I don’t have Donald Trump’s number,” he admitted.

“I didn’t have Joe Biden’s number. It’s not the way it works between the Australian prime minister and the US president.”

But yet for many leaders, it is very much the way it works, as brutally demonstrated on Tuesday, when NATO boss Mark Rutte texted the President as he was making his way to the Netherlands.

The former Dutch prime minister is hosting his first NATO summit as Secretary General in his bougie home city of The Hague, the Netherlands political capital and home to multiple UN bodies.

The stakes are high. Donald Trump has effectively held Canada and European leaders to ransom during his Presidential campaign and his second term in the White House, demanding the bloc pay their way, or else the US could withdraw from the alliance.

As is often the case with the self-described “stable genius”, he has a point, even if he uses brutal, often destructive but also effective methods to make them.

The Hague summit is a case in point. Leaders are likely to commit to raise their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP. That’s more than double the two per cent baseline promised in 2014 at Wales.

But there is resistance. Spain’s socialist leader Pedro Sanchez has claimed to have reached a deal for an exemption from the target meaning he can keep his defence spending levels at 2 per cent.

In truth the 5 per cent, if you peer behind the curtains, is a somewhat of a fudge anyway.

Of the 5 per cent, 3.5 per cent is to be spent on core defence like weapons and paying armies. The remaining 1.5 per cent can be put towards defence related spending, which can mean anything from disaster resilience programs to upgrading bridges so they can support the weight and size of battle tanks.

And then there is the new language of “capability targets”.

The capabilities NATO needs to acquire to defend itself are classified, but one example is increasing NATO’s air defences five-fold.

It is these capability targets that NATO will assess in 2029 to see if countries are on track to meet their 5 per cent obligations.

But NATO’s boss Mark Rutte, famed for being a Trump whisperer, is judging and hoping all this creative accounting and nuance will be lost on the President.

In a highly embarrassing disclosure, Trump posted on Truth Social, Rutte’s personal text messages.

They reveal not so much a Trump-whisperer at work, but a plain old-fashioned brown-noser adopting Trump-syntax, complete with randomly capitalised words, to speak Trumpian to Trump.

“Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world,” Rutte wrote as Trump prepared to fly to Europe.

“You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done.

“It was not easy but we’ve got them all signed onto 5 per cent!

“Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.”

The messages in no way portray Rutte, who tells European audiences that it was Vladimir Putin that inspired the continent’s belated rearmament, and not Trump, well.

And they will only add to European suspicions that Rutte is too close to the President and fawning. Earlier this year, during an Oval Office press conference, Rutte laughed nervously when Trump threatened to annex Greenland, which is governed by NATO and EU member Denmark.

While he did not endorse Trump’s threat, he did not repudiate it either.

But Rutte’s methods however humiliating to see in public, show a politician willing to abase himself to keep a fracturing alliance from rupturing.

Rutte was Dutch Prime Prime Minister when MH17, which left from Amsterdam’s Schipol airport, was blown out of the sky over eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Russia has never been held accountable and Putin got away with annexing Crimea that same year before launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

If sucking up to Trump, and being humiliated by having that unenviable task exposed in the process, is necessary to keep NATO together, so be it.

And the stakes are truly that high. On Wednesday, NATO has crunched the annual leaders’ summit into the shortest session possible to accommodate Trump.

The focus will be defence spending. But there are two main things to watch for, as they will tell whether the Alliance still stands, and if not, whether the conflict in Europe, might spread.

The first is whether Mr Trump says he stands by Article 5. This is the collective defence clause that states an attack on one country shall be considered an attack on all.

The President did not commit to it on board Air Force on his way over to Europe.

“It depends on your definition, there’s numerous definitions of Article 5,” he said.

“I’m committed to being their friends … and I’m committed helping them.

“And I’m going to give you an exact definition when I get there. I just don’t want to do it on the back of an airplane.”

If the US were to retreat from upholding Article 5, this would be a green light to Vladimir Putin to broaden his attack from Ukraine to a small Baltic country like Lithuania, Estonia or Latvia to see what happens.

“I believe that Vladimir Putin takes Article 5 very, very seriously,” a NATO official briefed reporters on Tuesday.

“And I believe that so long as he sees that allies are remarkably committed to each other and Article 5, that allies are taking extraordinary steps now, increasing defence spending in an historic way, I believe that all of those things show that we as an alliance are committed to Article 5.

“As long as that is something Vladimir Putin believes then I believe the actions are keeping the Baltic states safe.”

But if Putin were to assess that Trump’s America was not willing to defend Europe and that Europe was not ready to fight back, a test of the alliance could leave it in tatters. The Russian President would need to weigh up the strain that his full-scale war with Ukraine is having on his economy.

But NATO officials believe the Kremlin can finance its war effort until at least 2027.

This is why the second and related need that NATO has from Trump this summit, is for him to declare that Russia poses a threat to Trans-Atlantic and not just European security.

For Europe, the spectacle of Rutte sucking up to Trump (and yes, worse language is being used to describe the display) may be one they wince at seeing publicised in broad daylight.

But it will be deemed a necessary endeavour if Trump sticks by his European friends on Wednesday.

For Anthony Albanese, he may be grateful that he can’t score the President’s mobile phone number, for the Rutte incident shows every world leader, that anything they text to Trump, could also be exposed to world consumption.