Jens Stoltenberg
Jens Stoltenberg was prime minister of Norway in 2000-01 and from 2005 to 2013, and secretary-general of NATO from 2014 to 2024, the Labour economist who was the son of a foreign minister and the brother-in-law of the ambassador in Washington. He is remembered in Norway for 22 July 2011, when a right-wing extremist bombed the government quarter in Oslo, killing eight, and then shot sixty-nine people, most of them teenagers, at the Labour youth camp on the island of Utøya where Stoltenberg himself had spent his summers. The prime minister answered on television with more democracy, more openness, more humanity, but never naivety, and the country followed him. The eight years of the red-green coalition were also the oil fund passing five hundred billion dollars and its ethics council, the pension reform of 2011 that tied the retirement age to life expectancy, the financial crisis of 2008 absorbed with a stimulus and no bank failed. There was the Arctic delimitation treaty with Russia in 2010 that ended a forty-year dispute, the F-35 purchase, and the election of 2013 that Solberg won. He was born in Oslo in 1959, grew up partly in Belgrade where his father was posted, and studied economics at Oslo, was the Labour youth's leader and, at thirty-one, a junior minister, then minister of trade and energy and of finance under Jagland in the 1990s. He took the party in 2002 after the defeat of 2001 in which his first government, of eighteen months, had privatised part of Statoil and Telenor and lost the party its worst result since 1924. He was chosen for NATO in 2014 as the man Merkel and Obama could both accept. He ran the alliance through Crimea, Trump's first term, in which he was the ally who could talk to him, the Afghan withdrawal, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the accession of Finland and Sweden, staying two years past his term because nobody could agree on a successor until Rutte. He came home in 2024. He was Norway's finance minister again from February 2025 under Støre, which no former NATO chief had done. He became chairman of the Munich Security Conference in 2026.
- Lived: 1959 CE – ?
- Nationality: Norwegian
- Roles: prime minister, economist, politician
