The British Foreign Secretary had first asked Jeannine de Hoop Scheffer: “What do you think Jaap would think about becoming Secretary-General of NATO?” It was September 2003, De Hoop Scheffer had only just become Minister of Foreign Affairs in the second Balkenende cabinet, he was having dinner with his EU colleagues at Lake Garda. Three months later he moved to Brussels with his wife.
In a cafe in The Hague, Tuesday morning, I ask De Hoop Scheffer whether it is true that they sometimes ask him if Mark Rutte would like to become a NATO sg. He nods. For years, right? “For some time.” He says that that night in Italy, after dinner, he was stunned when his wife said: “Listen to what I experienced.”
Ruth is single. When De Hoop Scheffer receives such a call, he says that Rutte would be “very suitable” for a top job in Brussels. “But above all, ask him yourself.”
NATO has been looking for a successor to former Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, who has been sg since 2014, for some time now. He has another job, but is now staying longer in Brussels. Because of the war in Ukraine, but the NATO member states still don’t have anyone else who everyone thinks is good enough. “Rutte”, says De Hoop Scheffer, “knows that there is interest in him.”
Rutte also knows that the end of his premiership is coming, he increasingly says that he wants to become a teacher. In small circles he sometimes shows that he finds the presidency of the European Commission interesting, and not that of the European Council of Heads of Government at all – he thinks you are only busy two days a week with that. Former VVD leader Hans Wiegel revealed last weekend in The Telegraph that Rutte says about the king’s commissioners that “those people have nothing to do”. Nothing for him either.
Last week Rutte was in Poland, Lithuania and Turkey to talk about the war in Ukraine. He held a debate in The Hague and then was in Brussels for a NATO and an EU summit. He thinks that works.
Are you busy as secretary general? “24/7”, says De Hoop Scheffer. According to him, what you should be able to do above all: “Keep things together and maintain good personal relationships, with everyone.” According to people around him, it is what Rutte does all day long. In a live session on Instagram, Monday, you could always hear him say that in a crisis like this one you have to “keep things together”. There are diplomats who already think that he has also come to find NATO interesting, why else would he travel through Europe now? This Wednesday he was in Madrid.
You are silent about such ambitions. De Hoop Scheffer also says so. “A bird that whistles too early is a cat.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of March 31, 2022