NATO Rutte’s Berlin Speech: Not About Russia, But About the End of Rational Politics

And how it made me think of Hitler

Inside NATO’s cathedral of fear, weapons become sacraments and projection becomes liturgy. From the stained-glass altar, thunderous light strikes Russia and China — not as analysis, but as ritual. This is not about Putin. It is about the West’s collapse into psycho-political theatre.

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Jan Oberg

Mark Rutte’s Berlin speech in December 2025 has been hailed as a wake‑up call for NATO. But the deeper truth is this: Rutte’s speech is not about Russia and China at all. It is about NATO itself, and about the fundamental transformation of politics into psycho‑political theatre where rational policy has become impossible. The “red threat” he invoked is less an empirical reality than a stage device in a liturgical performance.

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From Policy to Performance

Compared with a good month ago, Rutte’s purpose is alarm/urgency instead of agreement/consensus. His tone is existential/dramatic instead of pragmatic/institutional. His focus was on the survival of Europe instead of the credibility of NATO, and hinting that more than 5% of GNP may be needed. His threat perception is now that “Russia is already at our doorstep,” and that China is behind it, where it was a more general enemy image and Ukraine focus in November 2025. Significantly and amateurishly, he condescendingly calls Putin “this guy.” These are very significant escalatory changes.

Watch the full speech here, delivered about 13 minutes after that of the German foreign minister, Wadephul, which is an intellectual bottom feeder in poor English. And here is NATO’s transcript of Rutte’s speech, should you prefer to study it more closely.

Politics once meant rational calculation: weighing interests, negotiating compromises, balancing costs and probabilities. That paradigm has collapsed. In its place stands a new order: politics as performance. Leaders no longer persuade with evidence; they dramatise with sermons. Rutte’s Berlin speech exemplifies this shift. His words were not analytical but eschatological: “Russia is already at our door. NATO and Europe could be Putin’s next target.” This is not policy analysis; it is liturgy. (See postscript below, too).

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NATO as Church

The speech revealed NATO’s metamorphosis into a church‑like institution.

• Doctrine: NATO embodies goodness; Russia embodies evil.

• Congregation: The Military‑Industrial‑Media‑Academic Complex, MIMAC, creates and repeats the creed.

• Rituals: Summits, communiqués, budget votes, press conferences, and speeches function as sacred ceremonies.

• Eschatology: The apocalypse — Russia’s attack — is always imminent, never arriving, sustaining endless vigilance and ever-increasing military expenditures, never peace. It is not the purpose.

In this church, Rutte plays the priest. His sermon is not about Russia’s actual capabilities or intentions; it is about reaffirming NATO’s faith in its own innocence and moral superiority. The congregation responds with offerings: pledges of 5% GDP for defence, tithes to the military‑industrial altar. More about NATO as church in my 2022 abolish NATO analysis.

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Psycho‑Pathological Rhetoric

Rutte’s rhetoric falls squarely into a tradition that includes Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, and Adolf Hitler. Each claimed to be surrounded by enemies, each insisted on the necessity of defence, and each justified aggression by projecting evil onto the other side. The formula is always the same: we are threatened all the way around, and we must defend ourselves — no matter the reality.

Hitler invoked Versailles and “Jewish Bolshevism” to justify expansion. Saddam invoked imperialism and Zionism to justify repression and war. Bush invoked weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion. Rutte invokes Putin to justify NATO’s expansion and militarisation. The psycho‑pathological script is identical: paranoia, projection, eschatology, and self‑sanctification.

And here lies the danger: there is an increasing risk that the Rutte‑type of performance, whether intended or not, will have the same consequence for Europe as Hitler’s did. Once politics becomes theatre of paranoia, escalation is not a possibility but a destiny.

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The Absurd Stage

The absurdity of this transformation is striking. It resembles Ionesco’s The Chairs, where the stage fills with empty chairs until there is no room left for the characters themselves. In NATO’s theatre, the “chairs” are weapons, budgets, and warnings — multiplying endlessly until politics itself disappears. The room is filled with arsenals, slogans, and rituals, leaving no space for rational analysis or genuine diplomacy.

Groupthink thrives in this closed theatre. Leaders, media, and academics repeat the same refrains, trapped inside the box of paranoia. The more they echo each other, the less reality intrudes. The absurdity is not comic but tragic: a self‑reinforcing ritual that consumes substance and replaces it with performance.

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The Red Threat as Stage Device

The “red threat” is not a description of Russia’s actual power. NATO remains technologically superior, vastly richer, and more expansive than Russia. Yet Rutte insists NATO is fragile, vulnerable, at risk of annihilation. This inversion of reality is the hallmark of absurd theatre: the stronger actor plays the victim, the weaker is cast as omnipotent aggressor. The red threat is a stage device, a prop that sustains the liturgy of fear.

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Why Politics Has Changed

Readers will ask: Why has politics changed so dramatically? The answer lies in the decline of the West itself. The United States, NATO, and the European Union are facing the long arc of imperial exhaustion. Economic stagnation, social fragmentation, and geopolitical overreach have eroded confidence. As substance weakens, performance intensifies. The sermon replaces the policy because the empire no longer has coherent strategies to offer.

Rutte’s speech is therefore not only a symptom of NATO’s paranoia but of the West’s decline. The liturgical theatre of threat and innocence is the last refuge of a system that senses its own fragility. The louder the sermons, the weaker the empire beneath them.

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The Existential Change

The tragic fact is that Rutte’s speech demonstrates the end of rational politics. There is no longer space for cohesive, analytical policy. What remains is performance: sermons of paranoia, rituals of spending, choruses of media repetition. Politics has mutated into psycho‑religious theatre, where leaders preach, congregations respond, and the apocalypse is always imminent.

Thus, the speech is not about Russia and China at all. It is about NATO’s transformation into a church of paranoia and projection in which the sermon itself is the policy. The red threat is not a geopolitical reality but a liturgical necessity. And in this theatre — absurd, pathological, and imperial in decline — substance has vanished; only performance remains.

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Post‑script

The tragic transformation of politics described above makes it rather meaningless for an organisation like TFF to continue publishing rational analyses, as if today’s world were still guided by reason, concepts from peace research, international relations, or political science. With few exceptions, the omnipresent geo‑politico‑military day-to-day commentators do not seem to have noticed this change and speak now into a vacuum — into something that once existed but no longer does.

As TFF turns 40 on January 1, 2026, we therefore move in new directions – or do the same with new means and perspectives: toward idea‑producing visions and conceptual innovations that humanity will need in the multi‑nodal, networking world that will emerge after the fall of the US/Western empire and its institutions.

Our basic mission remains the same: Promoting the UN norm of making peace by peaceful means. But either you adapt the methods and perspectives to the ways of the world or you perish – or stop. TFF does not stop. We believe in the fundamental – superior – values of nonviolence, educated conflict-management and peacemaking over primitive and kakistocratic urges of militarism and pathological war-mongering in the name of fake peace.

Addendum
See Thomas Karat’s excellent analysis of this speech as warmongering scare tactics here that was published on December 16, 2025.

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