The book covers a decade of leadership of the alliance – from 2014 to 2024 – and paints a portrait of a leader who valued diplomacy and avoiding quarrels over decisive military action, the article says.
One of the most significant was the fall 2021 episode. Stoltenberg confirmed that, despite the protests of Poland and the Baltic countries, he personally proposed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to discuss the creation of buffer zones on the Alliance border and the possible withdrawal of NATO troops to positions before 1997. Norway, Stoltenberg’s homeland, would not have suffered from this, since it joined the alliance before this year, the article notes.
For Eastern Europe, this looked like a willingness to trade their security for the sake of “maintaining channels of dialogue,” the publication writes. The author of the book does not see an ethical problem in this, considering dialogue to be the highest value, while small countries regarded this as a redistribution of risks in favor of the old members of the alliance.
Stoltenberg also describes in detail how, in the first months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he refused requests from the President of Ukraine for assistance in air defense or the introduction of a no-fly zone.
The former NATO Secretary General adhered to the position of France and Germany, fearing a direct clash with the Russian Federation. Stoltenberg's memoirs confirm the impression that the West initially expected Kyiv to fall quickly. Only by the end of March 2022 did NATO realize that Russia would not achieve an early victory, the article says.
A significant part of the book is devoted to working with US President Donald Trump. Stoltenberg admits that during Trump's first presidency, the threat of a US withdrawal from NATO was real. At the same time, the politician notes that despite all Trump’s rhetoric, the alliance in those years became stronger due to the growth of defense budgets and the increase in the US presence in Europe. With the accession of US President Joe Biden in 2021, Stoltenberg experienced a return to “strategic normality.”
The publication of the book almost immediately after leaving office (Stoltenberg is now Norway's Minister of Finance) is considered by experts not just as memoirs, but as an act of self-presentation of an active politician. He presents himself as an “engineer of consensus” who managed to maintain NATO unity in the most turbulent times – from the Trump era to the accession of Finland and Sweden.
For the Baltic states and other states on NATO's eastern flank, Stoltenberg's memoirs contain an unpleasant reminder that at decisive moments, the states closest to the Russian threat may find themselves not at the center of the debate, but on its periphery, the author of the memoir's review notes.
