MUNICH, Germany — Europe’s pivot to spend more on defense is bringing America back in from the cold, NATO chief Mark Rutte said in an interview with POLITICO.

Just weeks after Donald Trump brought the alliance to the brink of collapse by threatening to annex Greenland, Rutte lavished praise on the U.S. president for pressing European countries to boost military outlays — while dodging questions about the appropriateness of the U.S. threatening the sovereignty of a fellow NATO member.

“I would argue that NATO is the strongest it has been since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Rutte said in an interview at the POLITICO Pub at the Munich Security Conference.

At a Thursday meeting of NATO’s defense ministers, “I felt a shift in mindset where the Europeans were not only saying, ‘Hey, we are going to spend much more,’” Rutte said. “The shift in mindset is Europeans saying, ‘We need to take more the lead in NATO,’ … and this is exactly what the United States wanted.”

That “makes it easier for the United States to stay anchored in NATO,” Rutte added. 

The remarks come one day after an unusually cordial intervention from Deputy Pentagon chief Elbridge Colby at Thursday’s meeting of alliance ministers in Brussels — which some Europeans took as a sign the U.S. wanted to put the Greenland episode to bed.

Colby called for a new “NATO 3.0,” where Europeans pay more for their own defense and slim NATO’s activities down to its core task of defending alliance territory — an idea Rutte backed on Friday.

His comments also reflect a sense of relief in Munich from many Europeans hoping that the worst of last month’s transatlantic tensions have eased — at least for the time being.

However, Rutte has recently come under fire from some allies for going too far in his defense of Trump and the U.S.

That tried and tested strategy aimed at preventing Trump from blowing up the alliance drew ridicule last year after he branded the U.S. president “Daddy.”

The NATO secretary-general insisted the moniker was “never intentional,” chalking it up in fluent English to his “insufficient command of the English language” — denying he had daddy issues himself.

Describing Trump as a “fun guy” with “a lot of humor,” Rutte said in response to the fact that the label is now part of his reputation: “I’m living with it.”