“There was a joke I heard the other day,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told the audience of the Politico Defense Summit in November 2023, as the mandate of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenburg entered its final 12 months. “The next Secretary General should be from a new member state…should definitely be from a country that has spent at least 2% of their GDP on defense, and it would be nice if it would be a woman.” “So it’s logical it should be Mark Rutte,” she joked, hinting that she, not the Dutch prime minister, would fulfill all three criteria. Despite Kallas’ arguments, by March,…