Unable to find a replacement to everyone’s liking and at the height of the historical circumstances, NATO leaders will ratify on Tuesday at the Vilnius summit their decision to extend Jens Stoltenberg’s mandate for another year, until September 2024. After a re-election and a first extension on the occasion of the start of the war, Stoltenberg longed to return to his country, to Norway, but ignoring obligations does not go with his character.
Elected in 2014, Stoltenberg is on his way to being the longest-serving Secretary General in the modern history of the Atlantic Alliance. And although Angela Merkel and Barack Obama did not sign him to make changes, the former Norwegian prime minister will go down in history as the civilian architect of NATO’s most important transformation since the Cold War in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
His ability to forge compromises was useful to him in dealing with Donald Trump, who as president was tempted several times to withdraw the United States from the Alliance (“When I arrived, I was busy with the organization” but Stoltenberg ” he is doing a fantastic job”, he said in 2019, pleased by the increase in European defense spending). He has also managed to involve Emmanuel Macron in the future of an organization he had declared “brain dead”. And, finally, he has managed to keep the allies together in the face of the war in Ukraine. This legacy explains why allies – starting with Joe Biden – are reluctant to let him go. In the decision to extend his mandate, “he has weighed not only the war, but his impeccable career”, stressed allied sources.
Not many people remember it today, but in 2014 Stoltenberg’s leftist profile caused consternation in the most conservative circles in Washington. Not that they held a grudge against him for, as a young man, throwing stones at the US embassy in Oslo in protest of the Vietnam War. Nor because, as a Labor youth leader, he opposed Norway’s entry into NATO.
What worried the American hawks was not so much that he did not renounce these sins of youth, but his soft profile (after an ultra-right killed 77 people on the island of Utoya, he advocated for “more democracy, more openness and more humanity”) and his alignment with the doves, an unfounded fear given how much the Alliance has strengthened its deterrence and defense posture under his mandate.
Born in Oslo in 1959, Stoltenberg grew up in a wealthy and politically engaged family, hearing stories about past wars and contemporary struggles. Activists from all over the world passed by his house, Nelson Mandela among them. His father was a minister in several Labor governments, ambassador to the UN and high commissioner for refugees; his mother, a feminist who pushed for the first equality laws.
He had learning problems as a child (he didn’t read until he was 10, but when he did, he devoured a 600-page work on the siege of Leningrad, his sister Camilla explains), but Stoltenberg has a scientific mind. He graduated in Mathematics, did a Masters in Economics, started a PhD and decided not to go into politics. “It’s the only clear decision I’ve made about my career”, he said in a meeting with young people about his improbable journey.
Shortly after starting work at the national statistics office, he was asked to be Secretary of State for the Environment. “I told myself, and my wife [career diplomat], that it would only be one year.” It was 1990 and his political career had just begun. He was then Minister of Energy and Finance and, between 2000 and 2001, Prime Minister, a position he held again without interruption from 2002 to 2014, when NATO claimed him.
His negotiating experience with Putin, with whom he resolved an old border dispute as prime minister, was one of his assets in being elected secretary general. The invasion of Crimea, perpetrated shortly before in the face of Western indifference, changed the way he saw the Russian leader. The Eastern Allies seriously redoubled their investments in defense and, since 2022, they have all done so and by leaps and bounds. Since 2014, military spending has increased by 42%, which has made it possible to strengthen the defense of the eastern flank like never before, create a highly available force of 300,000 soldiers and help Kyiv defend itself against Russia. In theory, after the 75th anniversary summit, NATO will let him go.
