Russia’s War in Ukraine
Sitting in a small lounge at a Romanian airport last month, I asked NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg about the prospect of another Donald Trump presidency. The former U.S. leader and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee had recently made headlines for saying that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to alliance members that don’t spend enough on defense. What would Trump 2.0 mean for NATO at the time of a major land war in Europe?
Luckily for Stoltenberg, we were interrupted: His plane had been refueled, and we were ready to take off again.
I hit pause on my recorder, we downed the rest of our coffees, and we went out to the tarmac under an overcast sky to board the plane and continue the interview. Stoltenberg was in dark jeans and a sweater, a more casual contrast to the smartly besuited phalanx of aides and serious-faced security detail that trailed us.
For three dizzying days in mid-March, Stoltenberg toured the South Caucasus—Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—a geopolitically important slice of land between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea that has become even more important and contested since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Foreign Policy joined Stoltenberg on his trip (which included brief refueling stops in Romania)—alongside a small coterie of his top advisors, several photographers, and a crew of burly security men—to watch the NATO chief at work and get his candid insights about the state of the alliance today and where he thinks it’s headed.
“My main responsibility is to ensure that NATO allies, also the United States, are committed to our collective defense,” Stoltenberg said, once we got back on board his charter plane and settled into the front row as the plane’s engines whirred to life to take off again. “The best way of doing that is not to speculate and not to be a kind of pundit. But it’s about ensuring that I do what I can to keep this family together.”
When I pressed him further on Trump, he offered up a defense of the alliance as a solid U.S. investment and a strategic bulwark against China—an argument tailor-made for the MAGA world.
“The United States is concerned about the economic and military strength of China. Remember that the United States represents 25 percent of the world’s GDP, but together with NATO allies, we represent 50 percent of the world’s GDP and 50 percent of the world’s military might,” he said. “This makes a difference. NATO is good for Europe, but it’s also good for the United States.”
Comments like these are part of why Stoltenberg has been in the job of leading the world’s most powerful military alliance for so long—even if for the last several years it’s been somewhat against his will. He’s a savvy diplomat who has proved remarkably capable of keeping the NATO family together against difficult odds, and he’s as solid a salesman as NATO can have for pitching its continued relevance to the Trumpist wing of America at a time when the alliance faces unprecedented challenges from outside and deepening skepticism from some within.
The next U.S. president is, at least in theory, not Stoltenberg’s problem. He’s set to retire from his post on Oct. 1, a month before the U.S. elections. But he’s tried to retire before, and NATO keeps clawing him back. Alliance leaders extended his term four separate times. He and his advisors insist there won’t be a fifth.
Jens Stoltenberg, then Norway’s prime minister, fixes his tie on board a private jet in Oslo on April 1, 2009. Daniel Sannum Lauten/AFP via Getty Images
During Stoltenberg’s 10-year tenure, he’s won praise from across an alliance that isn’t always the most unified, particularly in the Trump era.
When Stoltenberg first joined NATO back in 2014, he did so at a time of crisis, when NATO was still being shaken awake from its post-Cold War daze. Russia had just launched its first invasion of Ukraine, illegally annexing Crimea and backing separatists taking control of regions of eastern Ukraine. NATO’s “strategic concept”—the document guiding the alliance’s strategic priorities—from several years prior, 2010, was woefully out of date, listing Russia as a partner and making no mention of China.
Alliance defense spending was laggard across the board; only three of the alliance’s 28 members at the time—the United States, United Kingdom, and Greece—met the NATO benchmark of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense.
Stoltenberg’s appointment was initially met with some skepticism. He was a Social Democrat from Norway, an economics wonk without a defense background who worked to forge closer ties with Russia during his second tenure as prime minister from 2005 to 2013. In his youth, before steadily climbing the ranks of Norwegian politics, he protested against Norway’s NATO membership, with a song booklet that had former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin on its front page. “We sang the chorus, ‘Singing Norway, Norway out of NATO.’ It was a hit,” he later reminisced.
But he was no stranger to crisis. He was prime minister in 2011 when a right-wing terrorist detonated a bomb outside his office and then massacred a youth summer camp—one he used to attend—killing in total 77 and injuring more than 200. “It was the darkest day in Norway since the Second World War. It was the darkest day of my life,” he later told U.S. lawmakers during a special joint address to Congress.
In the last decade, NATO allies have totally revamped defense spending, spurred mostly by alarm over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prodded along by Trump, and quietly facilitated by Stoltenberg. This year, 18 of NATO’s 32 allies are slated to meet the 2 percent defense spending benchmark—significant progress but a far cry from what defense experts say the alliance needs to face off against Russia in the long run.
Stoltenberg, senior U.S. and other NATO member officials said, also played a pivotal role in the tortuous negotiations to admit Finland and Sweden to NATO. Both countries threw off their long-standing nonalignment policies to join the alliance after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but Turkey and Hungary, the latter led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, threw up massive political roadblocks to membership. (For a new member to join, all current members have to give assent.) Finland joined in April 2023, and Sweden joined last month.
Stoltenberg is welcomed by Azerbaijan’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, Elnur Mammadov, upon his arrival in Baku on March 17 this year.AFP via Getty Images
Throughout his visit to the South Caucasus, I saw Stoltenberg the workaholic in action. Every meal was a working meal—be it dinners with presidents or breakfasts with his policy advisors.
In his visits to the Caucasus, he delivered messages carefully calibrated to each country. In Armenia and Azerbaijan, he pushed for normalization talks and lasting peace between the two countries after their devastating 2020 war, in which Azerbaijan emerged victorious. He was careful in Armenia to stress that each country can pick how to approach their own ties with NATO—a nod to the geopolitical tightrope Armenia has to walk as a treaty ally of Russia that is still looking to expand its ties with the West in the face of its 2020 defeat and alarm over the war in Ukraine.
In Azerbaijan, ruled by President Ilham Aliyev for over two decades, he spoke mostly of energy security and made no mention of shared democratic values or human rights. Azerbaijan is a major gas exporter to Europe, an important energy alternative to Russia, though it is not an aspiring NATO member.
In Georgia, he pushed the importance of democratic reforms (in the face of worrying democratic backsliding he didn’t explicitly call out publicly) and reiterated NATO’s pledge to have the country one day join the alliance—a pledge that seems more far-fetched than ever before given its nearly two decades of waiting.
In every speech and every interaction, Stoltenberg was quintessentially Scandinavian, concise, and very practical.
“Jens has been the master of steady as she goes,” said Rose Gottemoeller, a retired senior U.S. diplomat who served as deputy NATO secretary-general under Stoltenberg from 2016 to 2019. “He never wavers from his talking points, but it’s always a very firm, clear message. He’s not a flashy kind of guy,” she added. “He’s Norwegian, for god’s sake.”
Stoltenberg stands next to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and alongside other world leaders during a NATO family photo ahead of the opening ceremony of the NATO summit in Brussels on July 11, 2018. Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Stoltenberg greets Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at NATO headquarters in Brussels, on June 14, 2021. Francois Mori/AFP via Getty Images
There’s a lot of heartburn and unease about what comes next for NATO after the “steady as she goes” Stoltenberg era.
He is, as one senior Eastern European official put it to me, “the only guy who could get along with both Trump and Erdogan.” Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the president of NATO ally Turkey and a thorn in the side of NATO unity. Yet Stoltenberg managed to maintain good ties with Erdogan, helping broker talks between the Turkish leader and Swedish government to overcome Turkey’s objections to admitting Sweden into NATO.
Trump liked Stoltenberg, too—thanks to some deft maneuvers by Stoltenberg early on to ensure Trump saw him as an ally in the fight against, rather than the flag-bearer of, Europe’s moribund defense spending. “I think he’s doing a fantastic job,” Trump said of Stoltenberg in 2019. “I am a big fan.”
Finding someone else who fits that bill is very hard to do.
The job of a NATO secretary-general is a weird amalgamation of other high-profile global posts—he (there hasn’t been a she yet) needs the consensus-based support of a U.N. secretary-general, the diplomatic panache of a foreign secretary, the military prowess of a chief of defense, and the managerial skills to oversee a massive Brussels-based bureaucracy—all without any of the formal powers that a head of state or nation’s top general has.
This is to say nothing of the type of crisis leadership required to deal with a major land war in Europe and foreboding revanchism from a nuclear-armed Russia.
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Then there are all the unspoken criteria. Stoltenberg’s replacement needs the blessing—or, at the very least, the absence of outright objection—of all 32 alliance members. They will probably need to come from a country that meets or is close to NATO’s 2 percent of GDP defense spending benchmark, be hawkish enough on Russia to satisfy the alliance’s eastern members but not too hawkish as to rattle more cautious Western members, be a former head of state or government who hasn’t weathered too many political scandals to sink them, and gain the backing of the “Big Four”—the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany—so that other members get in line.
With all these criteria to meet, the list of plausible candidates winnows quickly down to, well, extending Stoltenberg again. But he’s adamant that, this time, he’s really leaving.
The top contender to replace Stoltenberg, outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, faces an early hurdle: He has already been branded as a no-go by close Trump allies (though whether their protests will have any effect remains to be seen). Romania has also put forward its president, Klaus Iohannis, as a candidate, though it’s unclear if he has the support that Rutte has. (Romania meets the magic 2 percent benchmark; the Netherlands does not.)
Beyond the Trump factor, one major question for NATO and Stoltenberg’s successor is what comes next in the Ukraine war. Western support for Kyiv seems to be flagging in its third year of conflict—a massive new tranche of vital U.S. aid for Kyiv has been stuck in Congress for months—and Russia is moving its entire economy onto a wartime footing.
“It’s this spring and this summer that the war in Ukraine will be decided,” the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, told me during a visit to Washington before I met with Stoltenberg. “Many analysts expect a major Russian offensive this summer, and Ukraine cannot wait until the result of the next U.S. elections.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Stoltenberg speak to the media on the second day of the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 12, 2023. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
I asked Stoltenberg what he expects in the war’s coming months.
“I’m always very careful predicting, because wars are by nature unpredictable,” he said. “Ukraine has performed better than expectations, again and again. At the same time, what we saw last year was, of course, that the long-prepared [Ukrainian] offensive didn’t give the outcome we all hoped for.”
“The small gains the Russians have achieved, they have paid a very high price for, up to 900 casualties per day in the fight for Avdiivka,” he said, referring to a small town that Russia recaptured from Ukraine earlier this year. “We need to be prepared for a war of attrition.”
The next major question is on NATO expansion. Putin is fixated on NATO expansion as a strategic threat to Russia (never mind that Russia is driving its own nervous neighbors into NATO’s arms—and by their own demand and not NATO’s).
NATO is torn over Ukraine’s future membership. Some allies pushed for NATO to extend Ukraine a formal membership invitation at the upcoming NATO summit, scheduled to be in Washington this summer as the alliance rings in its 75th anniversary. The Biden administration and Germany quashed those plans.
Other allies quietly sided with Washington and Germany, fearing that admitting Ukraine too early and with some of its territory still occupied by Russia is a recipe for a spiraling NATO-Russia conflict that no one wants—and one that could well turn nuclear.
“Ukraine is closer to membership than ever before,” Stoltenberg said. “As soon as the political conditions are in place, we can make a decision and Ukraine can become a member very quickly after that.”
What those political conditions are, he didn’t specify.
One of Stoltenberg’s predecessors, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is pushing a unique proposal to get around the thorniest parts of this question. His proposal would allow Ukraine to join NATO and have NATO’s collective defense clause—the bedrock of the alliance’s deterrence muscles—only apply to the Ukrainian territory that Ukraine firmly controls. I asked Stoltenberg about this.
“I think it will not be helpful if I’ll speculate about just how we would issue that. Meaning that, of course, if I’m too specific about that now, I think it will make the internal process more difficult.”
After these caveats, though, he offered some historical precedents for this idea. “You have examples where security guarantees have been issued to parts of territories. The United States has security guarantees for Japan, excluding the Kurils, which is controlled by Russia,” he said, referring to a disputed group of islands that Russia has controlled since the end of World War II but Japan also lays territorial claim to. “West Germany became a member of NATO in the 1950s without East Germany, even though West Germany always aimed for a united Germany,” he added.
It’s not a matter Stoltenberg is likely to have to handle as he prepares to wind down from his job after the upcoming summit in Washington this summer, which will be his last as secretary-general. Yet the unanswered questions about Ukraine’s future in (or out) of NATO will likely define the legacy of Stoltenberg’s successor.
Stoltenberg and U.S. President Joe Biden leave after giving a statement on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Vilnius on July 11, 2023. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Back in 2022, Stoltenberg was slated to become the next head of Norway’s central bank after leaving NATO. On paper, it seemed like a step down from leading the world’s most powerful military alliance, but it’s a job he said he was “really looking forward to,” in a nod to his roots as an economics wonk. That plan got derailed when his term at NATO was extended yet again. “That did not happen,” he said. “I have given up on that.”
So what comes next? “My focus now is on doing my job as secretary-general until my tenure ends,” he said, in a classic diplomatic non-answer.
Most officials who work closely with him say he deserves a break. Whether he actually takes one is another matter entirely. “His job is exhausting, and he’s been doing it for a decade. He earned a quiet retirement,” said one senior official who works closely with him. “I give it about a week before he gets restless and wants to get back to work.”
As is typical of Stoltenberg, he never let his diplomatic guard down when speaking to me throughout the trip—a sign he hasn’t checked out of his job after a tumultuous 10 years in office.
At the end of the trip, I asked him what his favorite meal was. “The best thing I ate was the dinner we had—” but then he stopped, apparently mindful of the fierce national culinary rivalries in the region. “No, you know that’s very dangerous.” He paused and reset. “In the Caucasus, they have very delicious food.”