Crowds of protesters jeered at NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, after the US-led military bloc was awarded the Westphalian Peace Prize on Thursday. 

The prize, awarded by the Economic Society for Westphalia and Lippe, commemorates the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War and legally enshrined the modern concept of the nation state. 

Rutte, known among protestors as the “Lying Dutchman,” collected the award in the German city of Munster on Thursday on behalf of the interventionist US-led military bloc. 

Speaking at the ceremony, North Rhine-Westphalia Minister-President Hendrik Wust declared that “military strength can prevent war and preserve peace,” and that “NATO has demonstrated for more than 75 years that strength secures peace.”

Protesters gathered outside Munster Town Hall disagreed. When the Dutchman, the German, and other dignitaries stepped onto the balcony, below which a blue-blazered band played, they were met with chants of “murderers” and “blood on your hands” from the square below (perhaps the greatest show of anger in the town since the anabaptists in 1534).

The NATO chief and the German chancellor gritted their teeth and smiled and waved through the boos and whistles.

Wust’s speech did not mention NATO’s bombing campaigns against Serbia in 1995 and 1999, or its bombing and subsequent breaking up of Libya in 2011. More recently, NATO exercises on Russia’s Kaliningrad border have been interpreted as reckless provocations by the Kremlin, with the Russian Foreign Ministry reminding NATO leadership this week that Kaliningrad is integral Russian territory, which Moscow is prepared to defend with “all its arsenal, including nuclear weapons.”

Less than 24 hours earlier, Rutte declared that NATO’s European members should have attacked Iran on behalf of the US and Israel. “Europe was not able to take out the nuclear capability of Iran. We couldn’t. We didn’t have the capabilities. In ten years, we can and we should…it should be us doing this, not the Americans,” he said at a Euronews summit in Brussels.

Merz took the opportunity to swipe at his political rivals too, falsely claiming the AfD – currently Germany’s most popular political party – is “Russian-backed.”  

“A peace prize for a military alliance – at first glance, that seems contradictory, but in fact it is entirely logical,” he reasoned. “It protects our freedom, it protects our security, it protects our prosperity, and it serves the cause of peace in Europe.”

The organizers of the Westphalian Peace Prize did not always share NATO’s confrontational stance toward Russia. Two years ago, the prize was awarded to French President Emmanuel Macron for “his diplomatic skill in maintaining dialogue with the Russian leadership despite serious upheavals.”