“I like the Washington Treaty,” Jens Stoltenberg once said of NATO’s founding text, and then waited a beat. “Not least because it is very short.”
That dry humor was on display for the last time at the helm in Washington. On Thursday, July 11, 2024, Stoltenberg closed NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, the final one he chaired as secretary general. Thirty-two countries now make up the alliance, and the summit ran from July 9 to July 11.
What the leaders agreed
Ukraine dominated the agenda. Ahead of the gathering, a RAND Corporation researcher, Ann Marie Dailey, expected a new body to train Ukrainians, an announcement on air defense and a pledge on long-term aid. All three arrived. On July 10 the allies created a new command to coordinate military gear and instruction for Kyiv. They also pledged long-term security assistance with a floor of 40 billion euros, to be delivered within a year. Stoltenberg said the pledge would spread the burden of military support more evenly. By his count, 20 allies had now signed bilateral security agreements with Kyiv, and a NATO-Ukraine centre for analysis, training and education would be based in Poland.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy joined the leaders on the final afternoon for a NATO-Ukraine Council meeting at head-of-state level. Stoltenberg said the allies remained behind Ukraine’s “irreversible” path to membership.
The morning belonged to the Indo-Pacific. Leaders met counterparts from Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, plus the European Union. The summit declaration called the Moscow-Beijing partnership a “cause for profound concern,” and Stoltenberg said China was a decisive enabler of Moscow’s war. The next summit, he noted, would be held in The Hague in 2025.
A decade at the top
Stoltenberg is NATO’s 13th secretary general, and only Joseph Luns, with 12 years, served longer. He started in 2014, the year Russian forces without insignia appeared in Ukraine and Moscow annexed Crimea. A defense spending buildup began then and gathered pace under him. Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister, takes over from him on Oct. 1.
It was not a quiet decade. A failed coup in Turkey in 2016 had him quickly backing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After Donald Trump won the White House, Trump’s talk of allies owing America money shook trust, and smaller members feared Washington might walk away from its pledge to defend any ally in trouble. Foreign Policy magazine picked him as its 2019 diplomat of the year for guiding the alliance through that uncertainty, though some diplomats grumbled at how much he indulged Trump. In 2021 the Taliban retook Afghanistan after Biden followed through on pulling troops out, a humiliation for the allies. Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
On the Tuesday of summit week, President Joe Biden gave the 65-year-old Norwegian the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising “a man of integrity and intellectual rigor.” Biden added that Stoltenberg had steered NATO through a pivotal stretch of its history.
Before the meeting, Stoltenberg said NATO had never been a given. New governments, he argued, tend to see for themselves that a strong NATO serves their own interests.
Sources
- Jens Stoltenberg wraps up his final summit as NATO secretary-general
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Sources
- 2024 Washington NATO summit – Wikipedia
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