After ten years in office, Jens Stoltenberg is stepping down as NATO Secretary General. He looks back on a turbulent time – not only because of the war in Ukraine, but also because of internal disputes.
A call from Angela Merkel got the ball rolling. A good ten years ago she called Jens Stoltenberg in his office and asked whether he might be interested in an international job, for example with NATO. “I told her that the offer came too early and didn’t make any commitment at first,” recalls Stoltenberg in an interview with Norwegian radio.
He was also unsure whether a Norwegian could really succeed a Dane, i.e. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, at NATO. “But, well, then it just happened and I said yes.”
Stoltenberg initially didn't have the job at the top of NATO on the list. As a Norwegian JuSo, he demonstrated loudly against the Vietnam War, including against NATO. But that was a long time ago. In the meantime, he had been Prime Minister of Norway twice and had impressed many on the international stage with his friendly, unpretentious and always willing to talk political style – not just Merkel, but also the then US President Barack Obama. On October 1, 2014, Stoltenberg moved into his office at the Defense Alliance's Brussels headquarters.
“Shocked but not surprised”
Stoltenberg was recently asked what his worst experience has been in the ten years since. He doesn't hesitate and mentions the morning of February 24, 2022, when it was clear that Russian troops had invaded Ukraine that night. “We were shocked, but not surprised,” says Stoltenberg. “We already had very precise information about the invasion.”
Putin had gathered around 90,000 soldiers on the border with Ukraine – Stoltenberg had been warning about this in press conferences for months that this would mean war. “We predicted this precisely and in the fall of 2021 we even did something we don't normally do: we made our intelligence information public.”
Stoltenberg's term saw historic shifts in Europe's security architecture, NATO's largest military buildup on the continent. In response to Russia's war of aggression, the member states are moving combat units with several thousand soldiers to the eastern border, from Lithuania, where the Bundeswehr is in charge, to Romania in the southeast. Almost half a million soldiers are placed on high operational readiness, compared to just a few thousand before the Ukraine war.
Putin's invasion also caused a turnaround in arms spending. According to NATO figures, only three member countries previously achieved the two percent target; today, 23 countries spend at least two percent of their economic power, the annual gross domestic product, on defense. Including Germany.
Pointing the finger towards Berlin
Looking back, Stoltenberg regrets that the turnaround only came after Russia's attack and not before. His conclusion is that the Allies should have strengthened Ukraine militarily sooner. The Norwegian is far too much of a diplomat to openly blame individual countries for their failures.
This makes it all the more unusual for Stoltenberg to point the finger in the direction of Berlin shortly before the end of his term of office at a farewell event organized by the German Marshall Fund Foundation in Brussels. “Freedom is more important than free trade,” explained the Norwegian and then explained what he specifically meant by that: “It wasn't long ago that some allies thought that gas from Russia was an economic issue.” That was wrong.
Criticism of Germany's dependence on Russian gas supplies has become increasingly louder since 2017 at the latest, and the EU also warned. The federal government under Angela Merkel brushed off all concerns and presented Nord Stream not only as the core of a reliable and cost-effective energy supply, but also as a contribution to securing peace through good trade relations.
As recently as January 2022, Christine Lambrecht, currently in office as Defense Minister for the new traffic light coalition, described the pipeline as a purely “private-sector project with no political implications. That was five weeks before the start of the war. The tectonic changes also include the fact that Germany is in the third year of the war is one of the countries that Stoltenberg expressly praises for their military aid to Ukraine.
Skillful diplomacy
Keeping the store together is the motto under which the Norwegian has led the alliance for ten years. Against the threat from Moscow, but not only. The historical challenges posed by the Ukraine war have obscured the fact that there are also opponents within the alliance. The military calls it “friendly fire.” In July 2018, Donald Trump traveled to the NATO summit in Brussels, where he toyed with the idea of leaving the alliance because the Europeans were spending too little on defense.
Stoltenberg used clever diplomacy behind the scenes to prevent a scandal. His summit management ensured that the Europeans committed themselves to doing more on their own, and Trump left satisfied. At least for now. Trump's domestic political calculations later led to dramatic concessions to the Afghan Taliban, without any consultation with the allied partners.
But attacks against the alliance don't just come from Washington. NATO is brain dead, declared French President Emmanuel Macron in a 2019 interview with the Economist. Stoltenberg accepts the accusations with stoic composure. Instead of confrontation, he initiates a reform process; forums are created in the alliance for more political discussions.
“NATO is a big family”
However, the Norwegian has been able to do little against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's unilateral actions during his ten years in office. Years of attacks by Turkey on the north of Syria that violate international law, saber-rattling in the Eastern Mediterranean to the point of threatening war, the purchase of Russian S-400 air defense systems and other favors for Putin – Stoltenberg allows Erdogan's provocations to pass without comment.
Turkey is strategically indispensable on the southeastern flank of the alliance, that is one reason. Another is more banal: It is ultimately the very limited power of a NATO Secretary General. They say in Brussels that he is more of a secretary than a general, and Stoltenberg's predecessors also felt this.
The biggest challenge for the future will be to keep the 32 member states together, as Stoltenberg told his successor Mark Rutte. “NATO is a big family,” says the outgoing Secretary General. “But sometimes it's a real challenge to keep everyone in the family happy.”
A new job is already on the horizon for the 65-year-old Norwegian: He is to become head of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) and replace the previous MSC boss Christoph Heusgen. However, Stoltenberg has not yet wanted to confirm this officially. He confided to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that he was actually “no longer aiming for a big position.”
On the other hand, Stoltenberg also said that there was always an interesting surprise in his political career that he hadn't even considered. Like ten years ago when Angela Merkel called.
