Jens Stoltenberg

Jens Stoltenberg (born March 16, 1959, Oslo, Norway) is a Norwegian Labour Party politician who served as prime minister of Norway (2000–01, 2005–13) and secretary-general (2014–24) of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Stoltenberg, the son of politician and one-time foreign minister (1987–89) Thorvald Stoltenberg, attended the University of Oslo, earning an advanced degree in economics. From 1979 to 1981 he wrote for the daily newspaper Arbeiderbladet. He then gave up journalism to devote himself to politics, serving as the information secretary of the Norwegian Labour Party (Det norske Arbeiderparti; DNA) in 1981 and chairing the Labour Youth League from 1985 to 1989. In 1989 he briefly returned to the University of Oslo as a lecturer in economics.

The following year Stoltenberg was appointed leader of the Oslo branch of the DNA (1990–92). He became a member of the Storting, Norway’s parliament, in 1993, serving as minister of trade and energy (1993–96) and minister of finance (1996–97) under Prime Ministers Gro Harlem Brundtland and Thorbjørn Jagland. In 1997 the Labour Party lost power, and Kjell Magne Bondevik, heading a coalition of the Christian Democrat, Centre, and Liberal parties, became prime minister. Stoltenberg served as leader of the committee on oil and energy (1997–2000) during Bondevik’s tenure.

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In 2000 Bondevik stepped down from the premiership after failing to win support in his campaign against the building of Norwegian power plants, the plans for which, Bondevik felt, offered insufficient protection against carbon dioxide emissions. As a leader of the main opposition party, Stoltenberg was asked by King Harald V to create a new government. He took office as prime minister on March 17, 2000, but his minority government struggled to maintain public support while implementing reforms such as the privatization of several industries. In the 2001 elections the DNA received only one-fourth of the vote, its worst results since the first quarter of the 20th century. As a result, Bondevik replaced Stoltenberg in office.

Stoltenberg then found himself battling for party leadership with fellow former prime minister Jagland; Stoltenberg won the battle in 2002. In 2005 he led a Red-Green coalition comprising the Labour Party, Socialist Left Party, and Centre Party. This center-left alliance achieved a narrow victory but majority rule. Under Stoltenberg, Norway maintained low rates of unemployment and expanded social services. Opponents of his government called attention to its support for high taxes and criticized its liberal immigration policies. In 2009, in another tight race, the Stoltenberg-led coalition retained power, and Stoltenberg became the first Norwegian prime minister to achieve reelection since 1993. His calm, measured response to a pair of terror attacks in 2011 that killed more than 70 people—the deadliest incident in Norway’s post-World War II history—united Norwegians and reaffirmed the country’s values.

Even as much of the rest of the world struggled in the wake of the international financial crisis that had begun in 2008, Norway continued to prosper, and by 2013 the Government Pension Fund had swelled to some $750 billion. Nevertheless, despite the country’s continued economic prosperity, a restive Norwegian electorate rejected Stoltenberg’s government in parliamentary elections in September 2013. Labour still captured the largest number of seats for any single party (55), but the center-right bloc led by the Conservative Party took 96 seats, and in October 2013 Conservative leader Erna Solberg became the first prime minister from her party since 1990.

Stoltenberg remained head of the Labour Party, and in March 2014 he was selected to succeed Anders Fogh Rasmussen as secretary-general of NATO. In anticipation of his new duties, Stoltenberg announced his resignation as Labour leader, and that June the party convened to choose his longtime ally Jonas Gahr Støre to replace him. Stoltenberg took the helm at NATO in October 2014, at a time when the alliance faced some of its greatest challenges since the end of the Cold War. Russia’s forcible annexation of the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea, its stoking of a pro-Russian insurgency in southeastern Ukraine, and its increasingly assertive military posture in the Baltic region returned NATO’s focus to eastern Europe and renewed members’ interest in collective defense.

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Stoltenberg would be the second-longest serving secretary-general in NATO history, and his 10-year term heralded a reinvigoration of the alliance. He oversaw the accession of new members Montenegro (2017) and North Macedonia (2020), and worked to enhance the readiness of NATO forces. Although U.S. Pres. Donald Trump had questioned the relevance of NATO and even discussed withdrawing the United States from the alliance, by the end of Trump’s term in 2021, the U.S. troop presence in Europe was almost entirely unchanged. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2024, Stoltenberg remarked that NATO was undergoing “the biggest overhaul of our collective deterrence and defense since the Cold War.” In addition to increasing the size of NATO’s rapid reaction force, he presided over the accession of Finland (2023) and Sweden (2024), two countries with a long history of neutrality. On October 1, 2024, he was succeeded by former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.