Jens Stoltenberg at the last NATO meeting as Secretary General

Jens Stoltenberg will bid farewell to the NATO leaders after presiding over the last NATO Summit and will mark the end of a decade of presidency in one of the most tumultuous periods in NATO’s history.

According to “PBS”, Stoltenberg will step down as the 13th Secretary General of NATO in the fall and will be replaced by Mark Rutte, the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, on October 1st.

Only Joseph Lunes, who held the post for 12 years, has had a longer tenure as head of the world’s largest security agency than Stoltenberg.

Stoltenberg came to power in 2014, the year Crimea was annexed to Russia; Therefore, the increase in NATO’s military spending accelerated during the Stoltenberg period.

Over the past decade, Stoltenberg, the 65-year-old former prime minister of Norway, has gained a reputation for his diplomatic acumen, leading NATO from its headquarters in Brussels.

When President Joe Biden presented Stoltenberg with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday, he described him as “a man of integrity and hard work, calm in times of crisis and a consummate diplomat who works with all political leaders. He praised.”

Biden said that Stoltenberg has led NATO “in one of the most important periods in its history”.

The decade of Stoltenberg’s presidency was marked by a failed military coup in Turkey, a NATO ally, in early 2016. He quickly supported Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and in this way attracted Erdoğan’s attention.

In the same year, when he was preparing the complex transition of NATO to a new headquarters, Donald Trump was elected as the president of the most powerful member of the NATO alliance.

Trump’s words about the need to pay the debt of NATO allies to the US undermined the trust between the members. NATO’s directive to spend 2% of GDP on defense was only related to member countries’ national budgets, not a common budget that required a country to pay dues.

This situation became an existential challenge for NATO. Smaller NATO members feared that the US, under Trump, would withdraw from NATO’s security commitment that all come to the aid of a member in a crisis. This is a fundamental principle in NATO.

Foreign Policy magazine named Stoltenberg its 2019 diplomat of the year “for his exceptional leadership at a time of uncertainty about NATO’s future.” Many NATO diplomats praised his political intelligence.

But Stoltenberg could not have much influence in 2021, when Biden followed through on Trump’s promise to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan. At this time, NATO faced its biggest and most challenging security operation in almost two decades. Taliban regained power in Afghanistan and humiliated NATO allies.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 put NATO at the peak of crisis. This alliance was formed 75 years ago under the pretext of confronting the Soviet Union and faced such conditions again. Stoltenberg led NATO’s joint response to the war, forcing the alliance to repeat its 2008 promise that Ukraine should one day join.

When Finland and Sweden decided to join NATO, he was one of the main supporters of these two countries.

But Ukraine’s membership in NATO is still a distant prospect. The war between Russia and Ukraine is in its third year, and the fierce fighting between the two sides and the daily bombings make peace more distant.

Source: IRNA