NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s time of service is over next week, on Tuesday 1 October 2024, after ten years at the helm. Many are glad, others not, and we know that the world’s largest military organization lives its own life irrespective of the name of the leader. The new chief is Mark Rutte (57) from the Netherlands, also he, like the Norwegian Stoltenberg (65), a former PM in coalition governments. The alliance now has 32 members in all, after Finland and Sweden joined last year and earlier this year. As always, the USA is the dominant member as for funding and policies. Yet, for the media and the general public, the NATO chief plays an important role, indeed so when there is a war on European soil, now with NATO on Ukraine’s side after Russia’s broader invasion on 24 February 2022. More controversially, NATO has several times taken part in operations outside its own territory, such as in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, and it has partner countries in Asia and elsewhere although it is intended to be a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in 1949 following the end of WWII.

During Stoltenberg’s time, NATO remained close to the USA, also when Donald Trump was American President. Of course, you may say, because that is how it is with the world’s major superpower, responsible for the majority of the NATO members’ military budgets; the USA has much over a hundred military bases in over eighty countries around the world, and some six hundred on own territory. Agreeing to Trump’s requirements, Stoltenberg managed to get the European NATO members to increase their military budgets, and two per cent of each country’s GDP became the general norm, not the maximum but the minimum. Now, the NATO members and we all live in a time of rearmament and militarization, with less focus on reduction of nuclear arsenals, and no focus on reduction of conventional military capacity and active peace creation; the latter........

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