“Five thousand aircraft took off from European bases based on bilateral basing agreements in the first, in the six weeks between late February and mid-April, until a ceasefire came into force.”

With NATO’s Nordic countries uncomfortably close to the huge cluster of Russian nuclear-armed submarine bases on the Kola Peninsula on Russia’s Arctic coast, Rutte notes that this acts as a kind of early warning system for Washington.

“You don’t want Russian nuclear submarines to end up on the coasts of the United States,” he says. “We prevented it collectively as NATO. So, for all these reasons, we are in this together, 32 countries and nations, because we need each other.”

This NATO summit, despite occasional distractions, focused largely on turning European governments’ promises of more defense money into concrete action.

The goal is to galvanize the continent’s industrial capacity to the point where it can match the threat posed by Russia’s vast arsenal of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles.

While some countries, such as Britain, have failed to set a path to spending 3% of GDP on defense by 2030, Rutte is clearly pleased with the increases achieved since the last summit held in his hometown of The Hague in 2025.

“Today we took stock,” he tells me, “and a quarter of a billion [dollars] extra spending by Canadians and Europeans in two years. It’s amazing. “So we are delivering and now we have to further increase defense industrial production, making progress and maintaining support for Ukraine.”

So are you sure, I ask, that if Russia grabbed land somewhere, for example in Estonia, in 2030, as some predict, NATO would be ready?

Once again, his confidence is convincing. It’s a question you’ve probably been asked many times.

“Of course we’ll be ready,” he replies. “Now we are ready, in 2030 we will be ready, at any time. We are on the defensive. We will never attack another country, but every adversary knows that if they try to attack us, we are ready. We will defend ourselves.”