When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warns, as he did last week, that the alliance must prepare “for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured,” he is not merely outlining a defense posture. He intends to commit more American blood and treasure, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. taxpayer, for an endless war in Europe against Russia.
But Rutte could, ultimately, help bring about the opposite: an American backlash to NATO that sees a reduction of U.S. commitment to the Western alliance.
This chorus of alarm led by Rutte has been amplified by Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who recently declared that Vladimir Putin “won’t stop” in Ukraine and directly compared the Russian president to Adolf Hitler. Such moral absolutism is not a strategy but a rhetorical accelerant, transforming a complex geopolitical conflict into a metaphysical crusade against evil and foreclosing any off-ramp but total victory or total defeat.
To be clear, dismissing these concerns does not require minimizing the Russian threat. Moscow’s actions in Ukraine are brutal and illegal. However, a sober assessment must separate capability from intention, and military reality from political hyperbole.
The blunt fact is that NATO’s conventional military capabilities are overwhelmingly superior to Russia’s across nearly every metric—from aggregate defense spending and technological sophistication to air power and naval reach. Russia’s war in Ukraine has revealed profound weaknesses in its armed forces. The only sphere of parity is the nuclear one, a domain where mutually assured destruction has guaranteed stability, however tense, for decades.
Furthermore, there exists no credible intelligence or evidence that Russia is preparing to attack the NATO alliance. Its ambitions, however dangerous, appear limited to Ukraine, not existential from a European point of view.
As Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven has argued, the idea of a “deliberate, premeditated Russian attack on Nato ‘within five years’ is simply nonsense.” From a rational-actor perspective, it defies Moscow’s stated interests and capabilities. “Why in the name of God would we ourselves attack NATO?” a Russian official emphasized to Lieven. “What could we hope to gain? That’s absurd!”
As Lieven notes, geostrategically, any such attack would shatter Russia’s political goal of dividing the West and would indeed wind up “reuniting the West in opposition.” Militarily, it would pit Russia against an alliance with a combined GDP more than 20 times larger, in an era when the defense holds a crushing advantage, as proven in Ukraine. Politically, Putin has hesitated to demand full societal sacrifice for a war in Ukraine that many Russians deem vital for their country’s security; launching a war of choice against NATO would be politically suicidal.
The calls by Rutte and Merz are therefore not a calibrated response to a clear and present military danger, but a preemptive mobilization against a phantom menace of total war—one that conveniently justifies a continuation and escalation of American support for Europe’s security. Viewed cynically, their rhetoric amounts to a crass political maneuver—a familiar ritual wherein Euro-Atlantic elites inflate threats to justify their own relevance, secure budgets, and cement a permanent state of war.
But repeating such incendiary nonsense is not cost-free: Bellicose rhetoric, if repeated often enough, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By constantly invoking the specters of Hitler and total war, these leaders risk constructing the very reality they claim only to be preparing for, locking the continent into a doom loop of escalation where diplomacy is deemed appeasement and compromise is treason.
From an American perspective, the tone-deafness is staggering. Having grown accustomed to a security relationship where American power underwrites their stability, European politicians like Rutte and Merz profoundly underestimate the negative reaction they trigger when they casually invoke the sacrifice of a next generation of Americans to stop the “new Hitler.” They speak of “our” preparedness and “our” values, but the unspoken subtext is always clear: The heaviest lifting, the gravest losses, will once again be America’s to bear.
This perceived entitlement logically fosters growing resentment in America. It has found concrete, principled expression in Representative Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) newly introduced bill to withdraw the United States from NATO. His proposal is a direct political and philosophical rebuttal to the rhetoric personified by Rutte, Merz, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, and other hawkish European politicians.
When European leaders casually telegraph a return to 20th-century-scale warfare and paint conflict in apocalyptic, non-negotiable terms, is it any wonder that a growing number of Americans, consulting both their national interest and the wisdom of the Founders, ask, “Why are we signing up for this?”
Massie’s bill is the evidence of that shifting mood. It is the logical endpoint of a foreign-policy restrainer’s reconsideration of the status quo. His argument is simple and echoes the wisdom of George Washington: “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” The legislation seeks to restrict U.S. funds for NATO’s budget, acknowledge that wealthy Europe can defend itself, and formally withdraw from an alliance whose purpose, Massie says, is no longer consistent with the national security interests of the United States.
The neoconservative and liberal-interventionist establishment will dismiss Massie as an outlier. They shouldn’t. He is a canary in the coal mine, signaling a buildup of pragmatic and principled dissent on foreign policy orthodoxy. His stance is a warning shot across the bow of a transatlantic project that has morphed from a defensive pact into an engine for expansion and conflict.
Now, every time a European leader like Merz plays the Hitler card to score domestic points or a functionary like Rutte prophesies apocalyptic war, they will inadvertently fuel the case for Massie’s bill. They make Washington’s 18th-century warnings seem not like historical artifacts, but like urgent, contemporary counsel.
The path forward is not to shout down Massie and other restrainers, but to understand the legitimate grievances they channel. A sustainable transatlantic relationship cannot be built on a foundation of another American generational sacrifice treated as an inexhaustible reservoir for European moral certitude. It requires European allies who take their own defense seriously—in deeds, not just euros—and a diplomatic corps that seeks deescalation and political solutions with the same vigor it presently deploys misleading historical analogies.
Rutte’s vision of refighting our grandparents’ war and Merz’s reduction of Putin to Hitler are failures of statecraft. Massie’s bill is the sobering rebuttal. Ahead lies the urgent task of forging a truly interest-based American strategy: one that engages with the world through strength and diplomacy, but refuses to be drafted into foreign nightmares by officials for whom “preparedness” is a career strategy, moral posturing a substitute for policy, and war an abstraction to be fought by others.
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