The Dutch media have been full of comments on the way in which NATO-chief Rutte (previous long-time Prime Minister of the Netherlands) handled his communication with American President Trump for the big NATO summit in the Hague. Rutte sent Trump a message before the meeting in which he praised the American leader in ways that are too hyperbolic for words. The Guardian explicitly qualified Rutte’s allusion as ‘sycophantic praise.’

During the NATO meeting itself, Rutte yesterday was smiling sympathetically at Trump’s way of speaking metaphorically about Israel and Iran as fighting ‘like two kids in a school yard, you know, they fight like hell, you can’t stop them, let them fight for like two three minutes, then it’s easier to stop them.’ Rutte immediately continues the metaphor, laughing: ‘Then daddy sometimes has to use strong language’, adding a gesture with a clenched fist coming down. According to that same Guardian, Trump responded to later questions about this by saying: ‘He did it very affectionately. “Daddy, you’re my daddy.”’ The Guardian then labelled Rutte’s behavior as ‘buttering up the president before the meeting.’

In the Dutch media, several comments were made. In talk show Goedenavond Nederland (Good evening Netherlands) of yesterday evening, three distinct views were voiced. Pundit Rick Nieman thought Rutte’s sycophantic behavior (geslijm) here was a blemish on the gravitas of the day. Ukranian presenter Victoria Koblenko was offended by the schoolyard metaphor, as she had been offended before by the identical metaphor used by Trump about Russia and Ukraine: she countered that, if anything, the latter was a case of schoolyard bullying, and additionally felt that the whole metaphor was ‘a little demeaning’. Demissionary Dutch Minister of Defence Ruben Brekelmans finally thought that ‘we should not read too much into these words’: it was Rutte’s fourth or fifth hour with the press, and then words can escape you. He does acknowledge, though, that Rutte was joining Trump in adopting a joking style, but he doubted that Rutte had been busy thinking that he was now going to call Trump ‘daddy’.

In an interview at roughly the same time, Dutch demissionary Pime Minister Schoof was saying precisely the opposite. ‘Details matter’, he said, as he was explaining how the change of one word in the final official treaty coming out of the summit had enabled Spain to go along. Instead of ‘we commit’ the text now reads ‘allies commit’ to the raise of their NATO contribution to 5% of their budgets. Schoof calls this a ‘vaguer term that allows for interpretation’. What he implies is that the text has been signed, but the intentions behind the wording deliberately allow for diverging follow-up, even lack of complete follow-up; and that is what was needed to keep everyone on board.

This morning I found a message in my LinkedIn feed from well-known Dutch social psychologist Roos Vonk, who explains how Rutte’s flattery might have been more professional than it seemed. She argued that Rutte’s words agreed with proven ways of persuasion and that they should be read as such by the public. She thinks this may be how we can keep the US on board of NATO to guarantee their continued generous contribution.

All of this goes to metaphor and sincerity. Details matter. Words matter, whether they are metaphorical or not. This sounds good, but in politics can be extremely ironic, as in the case of Spain and NATO. The final words in the text then sound sincere, but the goal is to conceal that there is a sincere difference of opinion which has been sincerely placed outside the agenda.

We are supposed to believe what politicians say. However, we also need to accept that they not only play with words in the way that PM Schoof suggests, but that they also do this deliberately to achieve greater goals, as professor Vonk suggests. Demissionary Minister of Defence Brekelmans is either naïve or tries to debunk what he knows cannot be true, certainly not with a top professional politician like Rutte (whose nick-name is ‘Teflon-Mark’, because nothing sticks); I do not know which is worse. In both cases, sincerity is undermined, and we cannot trust that what we hear is what we get.

All of this distracts from the real issues of life and death (pundit Nieman), where aggressors need to be contained (Ukrainian presenter Koblenko). As President Zelensky said in his encounter with President Trump in the White House, ‘I am not playing cards. I am a president at war.’ We need less offensive and more apt metaphors (if we need them at all) than Daddy using strong language to the fighting kids in the school yard.

When generous support to NATO can lead to this kind of metaphorical motivation of illegal actions (in the case of Iran) or lack of legal support (in the case of Ukraine), we need to think twice about the ways in which we can keep accepting this generous support. Perhaps Rutte is sincerely doing this, thinking twice; but perhaps he cannot become sincerely explicit about it. How do we know? By asking the question sincerely?