Jens Stoltenberg’s memoir of his time at the helm of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (2014–24) is partly a valuable addition to the historical record and partly a manifesto for the author’s vision of Atlantic security. It is also often a pedestrian read. That’s not a terribly central criticism. The tall, handsome, straight-shooting social democrat did not become prime minister of Norway by being witty or entertaining. Neither did NATO appoint him to his role as its thirteenth secretary general for his charisma or his literary verve. It appointed him to hold together the transatlantic alliance in a turbulent decade that began with Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and ended with Russia’s occupation of Ukraine, with a newly elected President Donald Trump signalling hostility to the United States’ North Atlantic alliance commitments even while trying to play peace-broker, and with Afghanistan under Taliban rule after NATO’s withdrawal. 

Stoltenberg used his pulpit and convening capacity to bridge hard gaps between Europe and America, Easterners and Westerners, Washington and Moscow. Inevitably, his reach exceeded his grasp. He had some ‘influence’, but only ‘limited power’. The overall judgement here – and the author’s own – is that he played a weak hand well, but that he couldn’t tame the larger forces which bore down on him and his organisation. 

On My Watch serves as a record of a dysfunctional relationship between a superpower and its junior allies. European NATO states emerge in the pages as the anxious wards of an increasingly impatient, crisis-ridden overdog. If there is a wider theme, it is the interplay of European overdependency and American