Managers and Clowns
Europe, the US and NATO: a status report
Welcome to Common Sense and Whiskey. Today we consider the less than ideal state of the North Atlantic Alliance, as viewed from both sides of the ocean. Please let me know what you think in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com.
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Here we go.
Today’s modest topic is the future of the West. Will it end in a bang, whimper or maybe just sort of muddle through in some zombie stagger? Whatever happens, a quarter of the way through the American Century, the standard of liberal democracy we hoisted as global inevitability twenty years ago hangs by the scruff of the neck and its enemies are eager to boot it straight into irrelevance.
Let’s consider each side of the transatlantic alliance. The NATO summit, the yearly expression of North Atlantic muscle held last week in the Hague, illuminates the Europeans.
And to set the table, when you have five minutes, listen to John Cage’s 4’33”. Not many musical compositions can capture the spirit of an allied summit, but this one does.
THE EUROPEANS: Shortly before ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning in June, Mark Rutte entered the World Forum Convention Centre auditorium in The Hague to open the NATO summit. He might have chewed his nails in the limo; he surely dreaded this meeting of the most powerful leaders on his continent, with the North American they depend on.
The Americans created the alliance he leads. The Secretary General’s mission was to keep the founders of NATO from taking their troops, weapons and military capabilities and going home.
Rutte labored since he took the job to make this meeting a success. In June alone he visited Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden and attended the G7 in Canada, trying to pull together and hold tight to NATO cohesion. Now, on a mild summer day with a gentle wind off de Nordsee, the longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history welcomed the allies to his hometown.
Rutte has lived in the Hague all his life, earning a master’s degree up the road in Leiden, then finding work at Unilever. Originally the product of a merger between a British soap-maker and a Dutch margarine producer, Unilever today is such a huge, faceless, generic corporation that it’s hard to characterize. It’s just a conglomerate.
Unilever and Rutte were made for each other. Rutte spent nearly a decade wearing out the corporate white boards, mastering two briefs at the beating heart of managerialism: human resources and brand management.
He carried out all the big managerial tasks: streamlining operations, training staff, reorganizing departments, aligning goals and maximizing institutional dynamics for the home office. Rutte then went on to run the Netherlands for almost fourteen years.
Rutte exemplifies the twenty-first century technocratic manager-as-leader. His perfect CVs and polished, affable, consensus-driven style made him the consensus choice among NATO’s big four—France, Germany, the UK, and US.
In the Netherlands, he’d honed his instincts in a parliament with fifteen parties—the most in Europe—where pragmatism, crisis avoidance and coalition-building are the only way to survive. European media called him “Teflon Mark.”
When he was picked to lead NATO a year ago, some voices from the east objected. Many were close to the front lines in Ukraine. Some had living memory of Russian rule. All wanted more urgency, less process and decisive leadership.
Their candidate was former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, judged liable to move fast and break things—traits that didn’t suit the more risk-averse countries farther back from the front lines.
Managing 32 fractious sovereign governments to consensus is a laudable talent. But there is a view in the east that a volatile geopolitical moment demands more than managerialism. It demands real leadership.
NATO’s most immediate mission is to keep Russia’s assault on Ukraine outside NATO countries’ borders. Its unspoken and much more frantic mission is to keep Donald Trump from blowing up the alliance.
The Europeans’ chosen method this year has been to arm-twist (hog-tie if necessary) the allies into a pledge to raise defense spending to five percent of GDP—Trump’s demand. Three point five percent would go to hard defense and another one point five percent to loosely defined defense-adjacent spending like repairing bridges, or dodgier proposals like funding state broadcasters.
A reality check: nine of the 32 countries don’t meet the current two percent target. Still, through Rutte’s Euro-winks and Euro-nods, loose definitions and vague deadlines, the allies claimed agreement and presented their five percent fudge to Donald Trump as a triumph, in hopes the Americans would not pull out of NATO, or Europe, or stop sending aid to Ukraine. And Trump was pleased.
Hoping to placate the Americans, with the biggest European land war in progress since NATO’s creation, the alliance shortened its summit and relegated Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the leader of a democratic country on the alliance’s border that is under attack, to a social dinner with spouses—along with other guests from Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.
This way the American president could fly in for dinner with a king and a three hour meeting and fly away. Yes, these are all adults. And yes, this is sad.
It was a tiny summit. A foothill. Oana Lungescu, a former NATO spokesperson, told the FT’s Gideon Rachman she expected this year’s summit to issue no more than a five paragraph joint communiqué. Last year’s communiqué, in comparison, was 40 paragraphs.
Such documents are aspirational, meant to be mostly worked out in advance to avoid unseemly wrangling among such an august assemblage. But that podcast was recorded nearly a month ago, and Lungescu turned out to be exactly right. The communiqué was five paragraphs.
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Summer 2025 would be a very good time for Europeans to stand for principles, to counterbalance the Americans, who are wavering. Everyone hopes this is just a wayward American moment, but Mark Rutte is the leader of a coalition of democracies that could be a powerful defender of democracy.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in March, “The paradox is that 500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians.” Maybe Rutte’s managerial instincts kick in when a board meeting is imminent, who knows, but why not agree with his Polish colleague, on the theory that it takes longer to get anywhere on tiptoe?
It’s remarkable that after 76 years, NATO even remains standing, and relevant. The allies have demonstrated they can overcome division: in 1962 the Cuban missile crisis challenged NATO’s solidarity head on. Two of its members, Greece and Türkiye, just about fought a war over Cyprus in 1974.
While it didn’t disband, NATO let itself become more impressive on paper than on the ground, and there are precious few shortcuts on the way back. The end of the Cold War made NATO look dissolute, obsolete.
In the unipolar years, NATO ceded its relevance to just going through the motions, to running on managerialism. But wait. After all, the Americans elected Donald Trump. He may be Mark Rutte’s problem, but he’s not his fault. Right?
THE AMERICANS: As the US political system quit working, what filled the void? Managers papered over rising incoherence. The Academy proposed jargon to explain it all, offering dubious theories of ‘functional authoritarianism,’ ‘liberal autocracy,’ ‘participatory autarky’ and so on. But mostly, the void was seized by clowns and their courtiers.
The clown is the personification of institutional decay, a figure who doesn’t merely emerge from disfunction but thrives in it, weaponizing spectacle and performative rule-breaking. Clowns wear their buffoonery as proof that they are authentic, and superior to the institutions they discredit.
When the Congress, the courts and political parties become supporting actors in the larger performances of Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth and Tom Homan (“White House Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations”), it’s safe to say those institutions have ceded their function. They’ve given way to the clowns.
The few Republican politicians holding town hall meetings back in their districts this summer do so not to engage constituents, but in performative defiance of constituents who disagree with them. Participatory democracy in the summer of 2025 means watching the circus online, then offering summary judgement on X. America has entered the Age of the Clown.
The United States is not breaking new ground here. Just this century, consider Berlusconi. Bolsonaro. Bukele. Our American leader has known the role all his life. He mocks decorum, and thereby the system.
His supporters are animated by dissatisfaction and devoid of direction. He connects to them not despite his crudeness but in its furtherance. He scoffs at the future. He proposes to auction off the Post Office’s new electric vehicles.
Donald Trump’s special talent is being craven enough to openly indulge his venality at the first moment Americans would entertain such a thing. He is what our addled times have spit up. He is a culmination.
He is not making America anything again. He is—at best—an empty vessel used as a vehicle by ideologues. His very blueprint for governance came ghost written (like his books), along with an ‘insert leader’s name here’ plug-and-play implementation plan from the Heritage Foundation.
For a long time the United States held on to one huge advantage: since World War II it presented a template for how the world’s most successful prevailing models of both politics and economics could work in tandem. Now eighty years on, American Democracy just delivers volatility and gridlock, and American Capitalism has come to represent rent-seeking inequality.
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Institutions once held weight and countries addressed each other through them. Now no country has a particular reason to aspire to former goals like transparency; the US doesn’t itself. So countries follow their own self interest and the world fumbles about.
What is NATO but a series of nerve-wracking meetings managed to assuage the erratic Americans? What is the G7 but a string of photo-ops with resort backdrops? What is Davos but grating opulence?
Nobody has confidence in any of it.
As we live ever more immersed in media, so our leadership becomes more performative than productive. This is still taking some getting used to. In pursuit of the show, last week’s NATO summit prioritized rhetoric over results. But press releases can’t replace performance.
The Europeans came to the NATO dance with the Americans in the 1940s. Eighty years on, the Americans have gotten drunk on power—and Europe has to find its own way home.
The NATO alliance is in more trouble than European leaders are keen to acknowledge, so they don’t, publicly. Last week in the Hague their success was avoiding catastrophe—the American president didn’t blow up the alliance. In the process they demonstrated precious little confidence in the road ahead.
NATO chose Mark Rutte, a capable consensus builder, at a time when the fragility of the West isn’t down to a lack of bonhomie; it’s down to comprehensive institutional fatigue. The North Atlantic alliance doesn’t need to praise daddy (Susan Glasser called this ‘strategic self-abasement’); it needs to throw open the windows and administer a great big slosh of bleach. It needs wholesale reinvigoration.
Like a performance of John Cage’s 4’33”, Mark Rutte’s silent NATO symphony was well attended by A-list guests—and substantively empty. America answers with the chaos of clowns. Both sides of the transatlantic alliance have chosen their models; leadership is nowhere in sight.
Having let slip America’s insistence on rule of law, why should the United States be counted on for steadfast defense of the Western democracies? Meanwhile, can Europe take care of itself?
The Europeans will scramble to rearm. They will throw money and waste some. In America, Donald Trump will serve out his term, selling his branded sneakers, watches, guitars and Bibles while his children’s more egregious engorgement carries on just offstage. Will we make it through MAGA Two? Probably. But what kind of country will remain?
When you most want to throw up your hands, maybe there is this modest solace: Donald Trump isn’t clever enough to have crafted a new way of politics. He’s the culmination of fifty years of wealth over welfare, of Mount Pèlerin over the shining city on the hill.
The coin of Donald Trump’s realm is outrage, monetized by algorithm. It’s money over meaning, spectacle over substance and cynicism as governing strategy.
A time will surely come when the common good will again replace the greed and elitism and inequality of the last fifty years. Look hard enough and if you’re determined enough, you may find some early stirrings of it out there today. Squint hard.
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Cheers,
Bill
