Daddy’s Home: Trump’s “Transactional” Foreign Policy Is Anything But Retreat
When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte joked at the 2025 summit that “Daddy” Trump sometimes had to use strong language to stop the children fighting, he was referring to Israel and Iran. But the setting made the larger point unavoidable: Europe knew exactly who had forced it to grow up.
What it wasn’t was the unending “America is withdrawing from the world” refrain of our neoconservative friends.
Rutte, a Dutch globalist to his bones, knew exactly who had dragged NATO out of decades of complacency, who had forced Europe to stop coasting on American protection and start taking its own defense seriously.
