The record shows a decade bracketed by two wars. Jens Stoltenberg handed over NATO’s secretary generalship to Mark Rutte on October 1, 2024, at a ceremony in Brussels, ten years after taking the post. He inherited an alliance recovering from a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021; he leaves it with war raging on its border and its Cold War purpose renewed. In a farewell essay he called the period “as the most transformational” the 32-member alliance had seen since the Cold War.
Officials confirmed the arithmetic behind that claim. In 2014, three allies met the 2% of GDP defence-spending floor; by 2024, 23 did. Troops returned to Eastern Europe in new deployments, defence industry production ramped up, and the alliance grew by four members, with Montenegro and North Macedonia followed by Finland and Sweden, both abandoning neutrality after Russia’s all-out invasion of February 2022.
The middle years were the test. Donald Trump, as president, railed against allies, Germany above all, over spending he deemed unacceptably low, and questioned the collective-defence principle itself; Emmanuel Macron at one point warned the alliance risked “brain death”. Stoltenberg was credited with moderating the spending quarrel, and with a quieter diplomatic victory: shepherd Finland and Sweden past Turkish resistance, with Ankara obtaining greater Swedish commitments against groups it labels “terrorists”, chiefly the banned PKK. His term was extended after the 2022 invasion, and again in 2023 when no successor could be agreed.
The succession went to a familiar figure. Rutte, who spent longer as Dutch prime minister than anyone before him, became frontrunner with early backing from Washington, Berlin and London, criticism of Dutch underspending notwithstanding; his first term runs four years, and his in-tray holds Ukraine, doubts cast by Trump on American defence commitments, and the rise of China’s military strength.
The outgoing chief, meanwhile, did not linger on the lecture circuit. By early 2025 he had returned to Norwegian politics as finance minister in the reshuffle that followed the two-party coalition’s collapse, and Labour now governs alone, a first in a quarter-century. Peter Egge Langsæther, who teaches politics at Oslo University, notes the Social Democrats “are now enjoying a massive and sudden boost in popularity,” a shift owed in no small part to the returning hero, once nicknamed the “Trump whisperer” for talking that president out of leaving the alliance. Twice prime minister from 2000 and again from 2005 to 2013, finance minister in the 1990s, he holds the same portfolio again at 65. According to the record, turbulence was the job description; the alliance outgrew it.
Sources
- Changing of the guard at NATO as Jens Stoltenberg steps down
- Norway: Former NATO Chief Makes Surprise Return To Politics | Global Finance Magazine
