Nato chief Mark Rutte has been forced to backtrack on an embarrassing remark - where he apparently called US president Donald Trump 'daddy.'
During a meeting of the defence bloc in the Hague yesterday, Rutte and Trump met following the US president's crass comment on the Iran-Israel war.
It was there that the US President he said: 'We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f*** they're doing.'
Rutte said on Wednesday that 'Daddy has to use strong language' to get Israel and Iran to sort things out, to which Trump agreed.
'You have to use strong language. Every once in a while you have to use a certain word,' the president said.
But the Nato chief's comments raised eyebrows across the world, and later in the day Rutte, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, was forced to backtrack.
He said: 'The daddy thing, I didn't call [Trump] daddy, what I said, is that sometimes... In Europe, I hear sometimes countries saying, "hey, Mark, will the US stay with us?"
'And I said, "that sounds a little bit like a small child asking his daddy, 'hey, are you still staying with the family'"? So in that sense, I use daddy, not that I was calling President Trump daddy.'
But Trump himself appeared to enjoy being called 'daddy' as he was referred to at Wednesday's Nato Summit in the Hague by Rutte, who has led the defence bloc since October 2024.
During Trump's whirlwind press conference that marked his final appearance at the summit, a reporter asked him how he felt when Rutte had referred to the American president as 'daddy' earlier in the day.
