Anders Fogh Rasmussen
Anders Fogh Rasmussen was prime minister of Denmark from 2001 to 2009, and secretary-general of NATO from 2009 to 2014, the Liberal who had written a book in 1993 called From Social State to Minimal State and governed for eight years as though he had not, with a tax freeze, a welfare state kept and the immigration tightened to the strictest in Western Europe by the twenty-four-year rule on spouses and the attachment requirement, on the votes of the Danish People's Party that supported his minority governments through three elections. The years were the Iraq war, which Denmark joined in March 2003 with a submarine and a corvette and then five hundred soldiers at Basra, on the argument that Saddam had weapons. There was the Afghan war in which forty-three Danes died in Helmand, and the municipal reform of 2007 that cut the country's two hundred and seventy-one municipalities to ninety-eight and its counties to five regions. There were the structural reforms of the welfare agreement of 2006 that raised the retirement age, and the cartoons, the twelve drawings of Muhammad that Jyllands-Posten published in September 2005 and that he refused to discuss with the ambassadors of eleven Muslim countries. After that the embassies in Damascus and Beirut were burned, the Danish goods were boycotted across the Middle East and a hundred and fifty people died in the riots. He called it the country's worst foreign policy crisis since 1945 and handled it by saying that a government could not apologise for a newspaper. He was born in Ginnerup in Jutland in 1953, a farmer's son, studied economics at Aarhus, entered parliament at twenty-five in 1978, was tax minister and economics minister under Schlüter. He resigned in 1992 over creative accounting in his ministry. He took the Liberal Party in 1998, moving it to the centre by burying the book. He left in April 2009 for NATO, whose secretary-general he was through the Libyan air campaign of 2011, the Afghan drawdown, the Chicago and Wales summits and the Russian seizure of Crimea, which brought the two-per-cent pledge that he wrote. The Turks had blocked him for the cartoons until Obama and Merkel talked them round. He runs a consultancy, Rasmussen Global, has advised Ukraine's president since 2016 and written the Kyiv security compact. He has said that Europe must be able to defend itself without the Americans, which was not his position when it counted.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Danish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
