Many eyes in Europe are fixed on the leadership transition currently taking place in the EU. Pundits are trying to anticipate what sort of change the new European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, European Council President Donald Tusk, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, and others will bring. Much less fuss is made about the other big transition that is happening at the same time on the other side of Brussels. Yet it is just as important - if not more so.
At NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, will take over as the new secretary general on October 1. He enters the job at a time when many deem NATO's hard-power contribution more crucial to European peace than the EU's integrationist soft power.
Even though these are unpleasantly exciting days in the alliance after the Ukraine crisis, many expect Stoltenberg to be an "implementation SecGen," as the jargon has it-meaning that his main job will be to bring to life the decisions NATO made at its September 4-5 summit in Wales. There is some truth in this.
But for a successful career politician from a well-known political family, just executing what others have tasked him with seems too small an ambition. Many speculate about what agenda and leadership style Stoltenberg will bring to NATO headquarters after the visibly ambitious and at times polarizing approach of his predecessor, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
Irrespective of the style Stoltenberg chooses, there are three top tasks the new secretary general should embrace in the coming years.
First, he needs to be exceptionally skillful in defusing the ticking credibility time bomb that NATO has created for itself. When the 28 allies announced at their summit near Cardiff that they intended to raise their defense spending to 2 percent of their respective GDPs within a decade, it was clear from the outset that this would not happen.
A small handful of NATO members are indeed inclined to get there, but the overwhelming majority - Germany among them - is not. Most countries have either said they won't fork out on defense or stayed tellingly silent on the issue.
To be sure, the entire agreement was downgraded from "commitment" to "pledge" before the summit, so that all 28 could be brought on board. So the real (non)intentions of many NATO countries should not come as a surprise.
The problem is that allies have signed the document at the highest political level - of heads of state and government - which gives the text a political gravitas beyond its mere wording. The 2 percent goal can no longer be dismissed as just an informal political argument brought forward by a few defense hawks. It is now an official goal, and it is likely to come back to hurt NATO very soon.
The new secretary general must engage in a dual strategy: On the one hand, he must try to keep the promise, however vague it is, alive. On the other hand, he must manage expectations (which, as always, means lowering them) so that the failure to get near the spending goal does not look too much like, well, failure.
Stoltenberg could lead the campaign by presenting a plan to phase in 2 percent spending, including a time frame of the next five or ten years. That plan could then define real benchmarks not purely in terms of a percentage of GDP but in terms of tangible military assets. This way, the 2 percent goal could be redefined elegantly and brought within a more realistic reach of success.
Second, Stoltenberg needs to make himself the custodian of the readiness action plan agreed on in Wales. This elaborate project is designed to reassure the alliance's Eastern members that NATO's Article 5 security guarantee is more than just words on paper.
The most important component of the plan is not the high-readiness force NATO plans to set up as a response to the new "jab and pause" tactics employed by Russia - even though this element received the biggest press coverage. The real core of the project is the rotating exercise scheme that will significantly increase the nonpermanent troop presence of alliance forces in Central and Eastern Europe. The crucial task will be to keep this scheme alive over the long term.
