Jens Stoltenberg to step down after ten years as NATO chief

Jens Stoltenberg will step down after 10 years as NATO's secretary general in October and will be replaced by former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Stoltenberg held his final NATO summit as chief on July 9. Last year, NATO decided to extend Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s contract by a further year, opting to stick with an experienced leader as war rages on the alliance’s doorstep rather than try to agree on a successor. It has been rumoured he may take over as chair of the Munich Security Conference when he finishes his term.  Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, has been the transatlantic security alliance’s leader since 2014 and his tenure had already been extended three previous times. Stoltenberg has guided the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through a series of crises since taking charge in 2014, most recently rallying NATO members in support of Ukraine while seeking to prevent the war there from escalating into a direct conflict between NATO and Russia. With honed skills in both confrontation and compromise the former prime minister and U.N. climate change envoy assumed the role at NATO in October 2014 at a delicate time for the security group with Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region. The son of a former defence and foreign minister, Stoltenberg, 65, negotiated a deal with Russia that ended a four-decade dispute over their Arctic maritime borders and built a personal friendship with then-president Dmitry Medvedev. Stoltenberg, who as a child lived several years in Belgrade where he learned to speak Serbian, served 22 years in parliament and was prime minister from 2005 to 2013 at the head of a Labour Party-led coalition. Norway's diplomats also helped bring Colombia's government and Marxist FARC rebels to the negotiating table in 2012 and mediated between the Taliban and the West, once even bringing Taliban leaders to Oslo to engage them on democratic rule. A cross-country skiing fan often seen on the trails around Oslo, Stoltenberg started in politics early and admitted to having thrown rocks at the U.S. embassy as a teenager in the 1970s, protesting against the Vietnam War. When he took over leading the Labour Party's youth wing in 1985, he initially affirmed the platform's position that Norway should leave NATO but eventually pushed the group to reverse its position. He served both as finance and trade minister in the 1990s, advocating that Norway should save up its oil wealth for a rainy day, and during the global financial crisis, he used the saved-up cash to "spend" the country out of the crisis, helping the economy escape relatively unharmed. As prime minister, he also backed NATO's military campaigns in Afghanistan and Libya, and his government was also an unwavering supporter of the Lockheed Martin Corp Joint Strike Fighter programme, despite delays and a cost blowout. Many people outside Norway know him best for consoling his nation and advising against hate-driven reactions after far-right gunman Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, mostly teenagers, over Labour's support for immigration in 2011.