Joint doorstep

Jens Stoltenberg:

Good morning.

It is a pleasure to welcome the new Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, to the NATO Headquarters.
I have known and worked with Mark for many years.
And he knows NATO well.
And he is well known across the Alliance.

And Mark has the perfect background to become a great Secretary General. He has served as Prime Minister for fourteen years, led four different coalitions governments. So therefore, he knows how to make compromises, create consensus.

And these are skills which are very much valued here at NATO. So Mark, therefore NATO will be in safe hands with you at the helm. And therefore it also makes it easier for me to leave the Alliance, knowing that you will take over as the Secretary General of NATO.

Having said that, I have to admit that I'm leaving the Alliance with mixed feelings. It's time to leave. There's a great successor coming in, but it's difficult to leave an Alliance and an organisation that I've served for 10 years.

All the people, all the nations I worked with. Of course, I will miss that, but I leave knowing that we have achieved a lot together. Over this decade, we have implemented the biggest reinforcement of NATO, our collective defence in a generation, with a higher readiness, more troops in the eastern part of the Alliance. And of course, the fact that we now have gone from three Allies spending 2% of GDP on defence to 23 Allies.

And we have added four new members, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Finland and Sweden. So our family is bigger. And then, of course, the fact that we have gone from only providing marginal support to Ukraine, back in 2014 to now, providing massive support to Ukraine, and NATO coordinating the support to Ukraine with a new command in Germany.

So NATO has changed as the world has changed, and Mark Rutte has been part of this change as the Prime Minister, one of the NATO Allies in Netherlands.

So therefore, it is a pleasure to welcome you, my good friend, Mark, and from one Secretary General to another, welcome to NATO.

Mark Rutte:

Jens, thank you. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. I cannot wait to get to work. And thank you for the friendship over all these years. We started to work together at a NATO table in Lisbon in 2010 at the NATO summit. We were both Prime Ministers then and we continued to work on the security issues ever since. Russia, terrorism, cyber threats.

You kept this great alliance on course during turbulent times. And can I say that largely thanks to you, NATO is now bigger. It is stronger. It is more united than ever. So, it is for me a great honour to follow you as Secretary General, to fill your big shoes so to say.

We both believe that a strong transatlantic bond is the foundation of our alliance, and I can assure you, I will do my utmost to ensure that it will stay rock solid. You already mentioned the priorities you have been working on, and these priorities we will take forward in the future.

Ukraine. We have to make sure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent and democratic nation. Of course, our deterrence and defence. We have to spend more. We have to increase our collective defence. And you have achieved so much yet, on that particular subject. And then, of course, you were the one building all those alliances all around the globe. NATO's partnerships. And they have to go wider and deeper, given all the insecurities in the world. But one thing will not change, Jens, and that is NATO's core mission, and that is to make sure that we defend our people, our nations, and, of course, our values.

So, thank you for the friendship, and thank you also, can I add that to my short introduction here, for all the cooperation over the last couple of months, you and my team working together in a seamless handover. It was really, really friendship and very important. Thank you so much.