Interesting: Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s second-longest-serving secretary-general, chanted slogans against NATO when it was headed by its longest-serving president, “our” Joseph Luns. He also sang to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization when he was 16: ‘Norway, Norway from NATO’. Stoltenberg can still hum the melody. Young and left-wing people in 1975 saw NATO as a reactionary stronghold, led by a deeply conservative swordsman.
It can go wrong. Today, NATO is criticized in ultra-conservative and hard-right circles. Adepts come from circles where “Nato” used to be a dirty word. Take the German Grünen, take GroenLinks. No party that merged with GroenLinks campaigned for ‘defense cooperation with our NATO partners’. Two social-democratic female prime ministers from Scandinavia applied for NATO membership this month. The Nato figurehead is a social-democratic ex-Prime Minister of Norway.
Without Russian revanchism Jens Stoltenberg would not have been in this column, as the first Norwegian and second Scandinavian, after Greta Thunberg. In Luns’ time, a NATO chairman was well-known, after the end of the Cold War this position became more anonymous. If the secretary-general of NATO suddenly appears on international news channels, it is no more a favorable sign than if the prime minister of Norway makes it to CNN.
This spring, Stoltenberg must have thought back to the summer of 2011, when far-right terrorist Anders Breivik planted a bomb in front of his office (killing eight) and then shot dead 69 participants in a social-democratic summer camp on the island of Utøya. Stoltenberg was working on the speech he would give at that summer camp.
Norwegian Tony Blair
In the wake of the greatest tragedy in modern Norwegian history, he remained calm and calm, ‘businesslike’, some called it. Stoltenberg was dubbed ‘the Norwegian Tony Blair’ when he took office, but he was never caught for coquetry, twists and turns. Typical of his public statements is that he often summarizes what no one doubts. “We were surprised at the speed at which it went,” he said of the Taliban taking power after NATO’s withdrawal. About the death of his youngest sister Nini, for years Norway’s most famous heroin addict: ‘Her life had moments of light and darkness.’
He was the middle of three children from a prominent Social Democratic family. Father Thorvald Stoltenberg was Minister of Defense and Foreign Affairs, mother Karin Heiberg professor of genetics and feminist. Biographers of Stoltenberg senior wrote about the free, anti-authoritarian climate in this family. Yet as a child you can experience pressure to perform from such an environment. Jens Stoltenberg and his eldest sister Camilla rivaled their parents in their careers. One reached the top in politics, the other in health care. For Nini Stoltenberg, heroin became a means of escaping the pressure. There were years when her brother and father went looking for her in the streets after their foreign travels.
At her funeral, Jens Stoltenberg remained in the fold, as well as at Utøya commemorations and press conferences about the war in Europe. “Ukraine can win the war,” is the most extreme thing he has said. Russian state television denounces NATO as it did in Soviet times, but as often as viewers saw Luns then, so little do they now see Stoltenberg. Evidently, this Secretary General is unsuitable as a fearsome character. Russian viewers might come to think that NATO is not a rogue organization at all.