Utøya is shrouded in fog as Jens Stoltenberg and I board the ferry from the mainland.
The small forested island just outside of Oslo is a deeply personal place for Stoltenberg, who spent his teenage summers here. Later, as Norway’s prime minister, he led the country in mourning a far-right terrorist attack on Utøya that shocked the world.
We’re lunching because this week, the 65-year-old ended a decade as the sober, metronomic leader of the world’s most powerful military alliance. US-led Nato — 32 nations accounting for 55 per cent of global military spending — has underpinned European security for 75 years.
Since February 2022, he had three simultaneous tasks: supporting Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s invasion, warning western publics of the threat posed by President Vladimir Putin, and avoiding the nuclear Armageddon of conflict with Moscow.
Prioritising de-escalation cuts both ways. As Ukraine has pleaded for a no-fly zone and for Nato’s cutting-edge defences to shoot down Russian missiles, Stoltenberg has also been the voice of Kyiv’s disappointment.
“If there’s anything I in a way regret and see much more clearly now is that we should have provided Ukraine with much more military support much earlier,” he says, speaking slowly and carefully. “I think we all have to admit, we should have given them more weapons pre-invasion. And we should have given them more advanced weapons, faster, after the invasion. I take my part of the responsibility.”
Stoltenberg, dressed casually in trainers and polo shirt, takes big strides along the rough paths from the island’s pebbled beach. “Sending lethal weapons was a big discussion. Most allies were against that, pre-invasion . . . they were very afraid of the consequences,” he adds. “I’m proud of what we have done, but it would have been a great advantage if it started earlier. It maybe could even have prevented the invasion, or at least made it much harder for [Russia] to do what they’ve done.”
We’re eating in a small private dining room above Utøya’s cafeteria, a wooden building perched in the centre of the island used to feeding hundreds of children who still visit each year for summer camps and educational seminars on fighting extremism.
Stoltenberg was born firmly into Norway’s political elite. His father, Thorvald, was a pillar of the dominant Labour party, and was defence minister when Stoltenberg did his mandatory military service. He grew up around politics and power: Nelson Mandela once came to his house for breakfast.
An energetic leftwing activist as a teenager, his anti-Americanism had moderated by the time he was elected leader of the Labour-affiliated Workers’ Youth League (AUF) at 26. Eight years later, in 1993, he was a minister, winning the premiership in 2000. His first administration, marked by liberal reforms such as the privatisation of major state-run enterprises, lasted just 19 months.
“If you judge it by the typical political standards, it was a total disaster,” he recollects. “But in terms of what we got done, it was a big success.”
Our food has been pre-selected: a platter overflowing with smoked salmon, ham, cured truffle sausage, potato salad and cheeses. I begin by asking about the terror attack that his closest friends say defined his political career.
Stoltenberg knows every inch of this island, which is owned by the youth party he used to lead. He returned in the most tragic of circumstances in 2011, during his second term as prime minister. On July 22, after killing eight people with a car bomb targeting Stoltenberg’s office in Oslo, the far-right terrorist Anders Breivik came here disguised as a policeman and murdered 69 people, most of them teenagers.
“From 14 to 30 here is where I spent my free time,” he says. “This was the paradise of my youth, which turned into a hell.”
He links Breivik’s terror to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine — and the wider threat that Moscow poses to Europe. “We see a wide range of hostile actions,” he says between forkfuls. “It’s an unpredictable, dangerous environment.”
Putin has ramped up warnings that Nato’s support to Ukraine makes it a direct party to the conflict and that it could be attacked, potentially using nuclear weapons.
“There were days and weeks, especially in the beginning of the full-scale war, where we had to discuss and address the issue of these Russian red lines,” Stoltenberg says. “Of course you have to stop and think, well, maybe, this is just too dangerous. But then the alternative, to stop supporting Ukraine because of some rhetoric, isn’t really an option.
“If anything, I pushed for crossing all those so-called red lines that Putin has put up. And we have crossed many of them, and he hasn’t done anything. The reality is that if President Putin wants to escalate with the use of weapons of mass destruction, he can create all the excuses he needs,” Stoltenberg adds. “So far, we have called his bluff.”
Stoltenberg wasn’t always busy fighting back against Russia. I ask how he spent a decade as a KGB contact. He pauses to chew some salmon through a smile.
“That was very strange,” he begins. “[My father] told me that the only guys you have to talk to in the Russian embassy are the KGB guys, because they are the only guys that had some influence.”
The meetings took place in the 1980s, while Stoltenberg was leading the Workers’ Youth League. “I have never done anything I am ashamed of. But the whole idea was that they invite me for lunch. And I had these big shrimp sandwiches, at the same table at the same restaurant in Oslo, like, once a month, with a guy called Kirillov,” he continues as my eyes widen. “And he was a KGB. No doubt.”
Stoltenberg’s father, who had known Viktor Grushko, a KGB agent under diplomatic cover in Norway, advised him to approve each meeting with domestic spooks.
“In 1991, Norwegian counter-intelligence came to me and said, can you help us to get Kirillov to defect? I had known him 10 years, this guy. I had my last lunch with him, and I said: ‘I know you, you know me, if you want to jump, to turn: Norway’s a beautiful country. They’re going to take care of you.’”
Kirillov didn’t take the offer. Grushko’s son, Alexander, now Russia’s deputy foreign minister, was posted as ambassador to Nato in 2012 and revealed that they had played together in the Stoltenbergs’ summer house while their fathers drank vodka. When the KGB archives were opened, Stoltenberg learned his code name: Steklov.
A waitress comes in to clear the plates. Not yet — we’ve been talking too much. I decide to change pace: the calamitous Nato withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Prompted by a unilateral US decision, the scramble to evacuate thousands of troops as the Taliban took back control was encapsulated by footage of desperate civilians falling from a Nato plane as it took off from Kabul airport. It left an indelible stain on the alliance’s reputation.
“It’s personal because I met so many Afghani women, members of parliament, journalists, who begged us to stay.” Stoltenberg begins to stumble over his words. “I told them: ‘Our departure from Afghanistan is conditions-based. We will only leave when we are confident that the Afghans can protect their own country and ensure the Taliban doesn’t return’.”
You broke that promise, I say.
“Yes,” he admits with a grimace. “That’s the reality.”
Perhaps Stoltenberg’s most celebrated feat as secretary-general was managing the turbulence of Donald Trump’s presidency, for which he was dubbed the “Trump whisperer”.
“I don’t like the word ‘manage’,” he says. “The first thing I decided when my team had breakfast in my residence following the election outcome was that we should now not make jokes. We should treat the president of the United States with respect, regardless of how much we disagree with him,” he says.
Trump had vowed to pull the US out of Nato if European allies didn’t “pay more” for Washington’s protection. Even though Stoltenberg knew the protection racket argument was wrong, and dangerous, he accepted Trump’s fundamental complaint that Europe spent too little on its own defence.
“I remember some allies just thought that we should just give up and not engage and just try to hide for four years. Some even proposed that we not have Nato summits,” he says. “I decided to do the opposite: engage . . . whether it was a 10 per cent likelihood that Nato would collapse under Trump or 90 per cent, it didn’t change what we had to do.”
The Trump threat peaked at the alliance’s 2018 summit, where deft diplomacy avoided catastrophe with a pledge to ramp up spending. Then, four allies met the Nato guideline of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence. This year, 23 will. But there’s a catch.
“That’s the good news,” he says. “The bad news is that’s not enough.”
Stoltenberg, an economist and statistics nerd, knows the grim data by heart: Europe has too few weapons, capabilities and troops at high readiness.
“We know that we are behind [the Russians],” he says. “I can’t tell you exactly how much it will cost. But I can tell you with certainty that if allies are going to deliver on the capabilities they have promised . . . it will cost much more than 2 per cent, whether it’s 2.5 or 3.”
And does Russia know this?
“Yes,” he says, quietly. “They know.”
I ask when he became sure that Putin would launch the biggest war in Europe since 1945.
“Mid-autumn 2021,” he replies. That’s roughly a month before the US went public with intelligence reports of Russia’s huge military build-up. But some allies, such as French President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz, were unconvinced.
“Fundamentally the difference was not about the facts, the intelligence. It was about intention,” he says. “And I told them: it doesn’t really matter whether you think the likelihood is 90 per cent or 10 per cent . . . we need to prepare for it to happen.”
When the invasion came, Nato warned Kyiv would fall in a few days. But Ukraine’s capital held. “It was a toss of the coin,” says Stoltenberg. “If Kyiv had fallen and they had taken [President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, which they were very close to doing, then the whole war would have been very different.”
Stoltenberg first met Zelenskyy, a former comedian, in June 2019. “I liked him, but I didn’t imagine him becoming a war leader,” he recalls between sips of blackcurrant juice. “He was inexperienced. He was asking the most basic questions . . . I underestimated him, totally.”
As Zelenskyy sheltered from Russia’s invasion in bunkers and evaded Russian assassins, Stoltenberg wasn’t able to speak to him for two days. When they finally talked, “that phone call was quite difficult”.
Part of it, Stoltenberg recalls, was the fear Zelenskyy would soon be “caught or killed”. “But more than that, a large part of the conversation was about a no-fly zone. He wanted a no-fly zone. And I wasn’t able to give him a no-fly zone.”
Does he regret that?
“No,” he replies, without hesitation. “The reality is that since the beginning I have formulated the Nato approach: support Ukraine, but not be part of the conflict.”
That dichotomy has dogged Nato and Stoltenberg ever since. It’s a mantra that’s increasingly hard to defend as Ukrainians die in their thousands and the world’s most powerful military alliance waits outside, training soldiers but not sending their own, shipping weapons but restricting their use.
As our empty plates are taken away I ask: how will this all end?
“After the [US] election there will be a kind of new momentum, a new initiative to try to get some movement. But I don’t think that will be to throw in the towel and to give up,” he says. “It may include ways to try to get movement on the battlefield combined with movement around the negotiating table.”
“Ukraine still has to decide [when to negotiate]. But we need to make the conditions that make it possible for them to sit down with the Russians and get something which is acceptable . . . something where they survive as an independent nation.”
I ask what he would propose to Zelenskyy. He demurs, then suggests a historical comparison. “Finland fought a brave war against the Soviet Union in ’39. They imposed much bigger costs on the Red Army than expected,” he says. “The war ended with them giving up 10 per cent of the territory. But they got a secure border.”
But that came with Finnish neutrality, until it joined Nato last year. Ukraine wants immediate Nato membership, anathema to Putin.
The US and Germany have led opposition to granting war-torn Ukraine membership, arguing that its Article 5 mutual defence clause would mean instant war with Russia. “There are ways of solving that,” Stoltenberg says. “If there is a line that is not necessarily the internationally recognised border.”
“Again, it is always very dangerous to compare because no parallels are 100 per cent correct, but the United States has security guarantees to Japan. But they don’t cover the Kuril [Islands], which Japan regards as Japanese territory, controlled by Russia,” he says.
He proposes another comparison: “West Germany regarded East Germany as part of the bigger Germany. They didn’t have an embassy in East Berlin. But Nato was of course only protecting West Germany.”
“When there is a will, there are ways to find the solution. But you need a line which defines where Article 5 is invoked, and Ukraine has to control all the territory until that border.
Stoltenberg was appointed in 2014 for four years. He was then given four more. And then, shortly after Russia’s invasion, US President Joe Biden asked him for another year. He resolved that would be the last extension. But 12 months later, as his wife and staff began moving back to Norway, Biden asked again.
“I told him that’s not possible,” Stoltenberg says. “But, you know, when you sit in the Oval Office with the president of the United States and he says this is not about you and your wife, this is about the war in Ukraine,” he trails off, looks away. “It’s not possible to say no.”
I had heard Biden had promised to call Stoltenberg’s wife Ingrid to smooth it over.
“Yeah, he offered to call my wife. He said: ‘I will make some phone calls’,” Stoltenberg laughs wistfully. “But he didn’t.”
Former Dutch premier Mark Rutte finally replaced him this week. Stoltenberg’s multiple extensions meant missing his dream job: governor of Norway’s Central Bank.
We’ve been talking for two and a half hours and Stoltenberg is needed at home to cook reindeer for the family supper. As I pay the bill, he shares handshakes and selfies with visitors to the island. The fog has lifted. The cliffs, trees and fjord are bathed in late afternoon sunshine.
A January 2023 poll on who to elect as head of state if Norway ended its monarchy put Stoltenberg first, above the country’s crown prince.
“Yeah,” he says with a smile. “But I’m not going to be the president. I’m not going to be the crown prince. After this, I’m going to do some more normal work.”
Henry Foy is the FT’s Brussels bureau chief
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
Read the full article here
