Hi everyone, I'm thrilled to be here with Jens Stoltenberg, who just finished off as the Secretary General in NATO, and before NATO, he was the Prime Minister of Norway. Warm welcome, Jens. Thank you so much for having me. So I'm having here a book which you wrote, which came out eight years ago, which basically covered the period until ten years ago, and it's got a beautiful picture of you on the front here. But just, what are the most important changes in the world since that book came out?

The most important changes, at least related to my task, my responsibilities in NATO, is that the world has become more dangerous. That's the bad news. The good news is that NATO has become stronger to protect close to one billion people. Of course, there are many other changes, but seen from a security perspective, we have now a full-scale war in Europe. We have a new, very devastating conflict in the Middle East, with a risk of escalation, and we have significantly more global rivalry between great powers like the United States and China. And then we have cyber, hybrid, and terrorist threats as a constant threat to our security. So, fundamentally, we live in a more unpredictable, more dangerous world.

And we have done for decades if we cover some of these points here. So, how do you think the Ukraine situation will end? What's the most likely? Wars are by nature extremely unpredictable, so therefore I will be very careful predicting how that will end. But of course, we all want this war to end. The challenge is that the quickest way to end the war is to lose a war, but that will not lead to peace. That will lead to occupation of Ukraine, and Ukraine will not be a sovereign, independent, democratic nation in Europe anymore; it will be a country controlled by Moscow. So if you want the war to end in a way where millions of Ukrainians still can live in a free, democratic society, then we need to convince President Putin that he will not win on the battlefield, that he has to sit down and negotiate, agree on a solution where Ukraine can still be a sovereign, democratic nation.

The fact that there are stronger and stronger links between the autocrats in the world, what are the implications for the Western world? That we have to be together when we see that the autocrats are more and more aligned. And then of course, that's partly "we," meaning partly NATO allies, so 32 nations on both sides of the Atlantic, but also with other countries which at least don't want to be part of a kind of autocratic alliance. And again, Ukraine is perhaps the clearest example. Russia is responsible for war aggression. The main providers of weapons and enablers of that war are North Korea, Iran, and China. And this is not rhetoric; this is real and makes a difference on the battlefield. And we also see how Russia and China are exercising more together, also around Japan and other parts of the world. So this is really a global picture that makes it even more important that of course NATO allies stand together, but also that we work with partners all around the world, including South Korea, Japan, and many other countries.

There are some voices that want the EU to play a more important part in defense policy. What is your view on that? My view is that if it's done in the right way, it's very good; if it's done in the wrong way, it's very bad. So what's the right way? And the right way is that the EU should do more, and they have started to step up when it comes to, for instance, strengthening the defense industry, meaning overcoming the fragmentation of the European defense industry, to increase defense spending, and to generally strengthen European defenses, meaning that that will also strengthen NATO.

What's going on in space from a warfare point of view? So first, I think what we see is that there is more and more weaponization of space, and what happens in space matters more and more for what's going on on the Earth. That's obvious for communications, GPS, cyber, and then of course, targeting. A lot of military operations in Ukraine are dependent on satellites in space, and in any future conflict, space will be important. What we also then see is that again, Russia and China are developing capabilities that can actually be used as offensive weapons, and this is a dangerous development.

In a way, a bit related to that, AI, what are the issues surrounding that when it comes to warfare? Some people in America say that we should build AI into everything we do, into all the weapons, all the cars, everything, to beat the Chinese in this kind of fight. How do you see AI impacting warfare? I think what is obvious is that AI has, and will even more so in the future, change the nature of warfare, perhaps as fundamentally as the Industrial Revolution did. I think we see something similar now, a fundamental shift where we don't fully understand, but autonomous systems, facial recognition, drones, cyber attacks by using also AI, have the potential of changing warfare so much that it's very hard to fully understand the full implications. We have already seen it on the battlefield in Ukraine. It's not a secret that some of the drones and the surveillance systems that NATO operates also use AI to process information. So this has already started, but we have only seen the beginning of a fundamental change of the nature of warfare.

You ran this country during the July attack, the terror attacks that we had, and through the Ukraine situation in NATO. How does one lead during these traumatic situations? What's the key? It's to remain calm in a way, and to make sure that you sleep, because it is important to be able to function. So I've seen some people in crisis exhausting themselves too early. How do you work with feelings? I'm a bit strange there because when the crises are acute, I suppress them. I just keep them away, and in one way, I think that helps me dealing with feelings. Is it lonely? It is lonely, but perhaps less lonely than people believe. If there's anything I'm quite good at, it is to allow people to help me.

Talking about people, just how you at NATO have been dealing with people who are perceived to have large egos. What's the key to reaching consensus with them and getting to agreement? I think it's about taking their concerns seriously, and even if we disagree on many issues, they may actually also have relevant points and concerns. Without being too specific, of course, there has been a lot of attention on how we managed four years of President Trump in the White House. And it's no secret that I disagree with him on trade, or abortion, or climate change, but that was not core issues for NATO. So what I focused on was what matters for NATO, and actually on those issues, we had a large degree of agreement. His main message was that European allies had to invest more in defense. He conveyed that message in a way which was a bit different than many other political leaders, but the core of that message was absolutely the same as President Obama had done before him, or President Biden does now. And I took that concern seriously, and I think that helped. The same with President Erdoğan. People asked me how that works. Well, he has expressed serious concerns about the fact that no other NATO country has suffered more terrorist attacks than Turkey. So take that seriously. So I think focusing on the issues, that's the best way of addressing strong political leaders.