In recent years, we’ve got used to talking about NATO as if it were a tired, almost automatic body. A structure that exists because it has to, but that always reacts late, without real vision. A bit like EU itself, actually. And yet, looking at what happened around the Greenland issue, one starts to think that maybe the problem isn’t the alliance as such, but how and when it is used.

What Mark Rutte did was not spectacular, nor bombastic. There were no grand speeches, no epic declarations abouta ‘united West’. And perhaps that is precisely why it worked. Rutte did something simple, but rare: he did politics, in the most concrete sense of the word.

Greenland has not suddenly become important today

It has been important for years, ever since the Arctic became a real strategic space again, not just a textbook map. Routes, bases, deterrence, competition between great powers. And when the United States started to think more and more directly, almost brutally, about that area, the risk was obvious: a new transatlantic rift, unnecessary and harmful.

Here, in my opinion, Rutte has understood something that we in Europe often pretend not to see: American interests are not fought with morals, but managed with strategy. And above all, they are not isolated. They are channelled.

Talking to Trump without being professional moralists

The central issue has been the relationship with Donald Trump. Many in Europe continue to treat him as an uncomfortable parenthesis, something to be endured or demonised. But in international politics this attitude does not go far. Trump is there, he weighs, and he represents a large part of America. Ignoring or provoking him does not make Europe stronger, it only makes it more irrelevant.

Rutte did not make this mistake. He did not try to ‘educate’ Trump, nor to oppose him head-on. He did something much smarter: he showed him that his interest coincided with that of the alliance. That Greenland was not to become a bilateral battleground, but a piece of a shared strategy in the North Atlantic.

This, together with the ‘cold’ reaction of the markets, prevented escalation, trade tensions, and inflammatory statements. Not because anyone ‘caved in’, but because the issue was brought back to the right place: NATO.

NATO is not dead. We are the ones who often use it badly

This affair, in my opinion, dismantles a lazy narrative: that of a NATO incapable of action. NATO works when there is a leadership that sees it as a political instrument, not just a military one. Rutte has shown that the alliance can still be a table where different interests are held together, without hypocrisy but also without unnecessary ruptures.

And that is where Europe comes in. Because we cannot keep calling for Atlantic unity and then always turn up with our hats in our hands. If we want to count, we have to be credible. And credibility, in geopolitics, also comes – above all – from defence spending.

Defence, spending, responsibility

I know it is an uncomfortable subject, especially for a generation that grew up with the idea that peace was a given. But it is not. It is no longer. Talking about increasing military spending does not mean being belligerent, it means being realistic. A more united NATO needs allies who invest, not just comment.

As a European and a liberal, I believe this is the real political point: Western unity is not a feeling, it is a choice. It costs money, it creates internal tensions, it requires leadership. But it is infinitely preferable to the alternative: a slow strategic marginalisation of Europe.

A lesson that goes beyond Greenland

Rutte’s ‘masterpiece’ is not to have solved everything, nor to have ushered in a new era. It is to have shown that, even in a fragmented world, international politics can still be governed. That the West is not condemned to divide by ideological reflex. That NATO can be more than an acronym if it stops being treated as an empty totem.

Maybe it’s not much. Maybe it’s just one episode. But in a time when geopolitics often seems dominated by improvisation and rhetoric, even this matters. And it matters a lot.

Read L’Europeista’s preview from Davos: Davos and Greenland, Cypriot solution emerges: US sovereignty only over military bases