NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg cuts the birthday cake with Belgium’s Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib; her parents come from a country that is still mentioned as a French colony in NATO’s founding document of April 4, 1949: Algeria
Photo: picture alliance/dpa/AP/Geert Vanden Wijngaert
So this cake doesn’t look appetizing. As if cast from cement, with a steel plate on top with the words Nato and Otan on it (so that our Arab friends, who usually read from right to left, can also decipher the abbreviation). On top of that, quite unspectacular for a 75th birthday. One would have expected more in terms of imagination and originality from Brussels pastry chefs, such as tanks that shoot cherries, cruise missiles that dissolve into clouds of cream and NATO wire made of licorice. Well, if the host of the party is a nuisance like NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, of course that doesn’t exist.
What is this stiff man from Oslo, who always seems like an uptight schoolboy, who was touching the indefinable something with Belgium’s Foreign Minister yesterday, actually doing in Brussels? He has been causing mischief as head of the Norwegian central bank for two years now. Ah yes, … the Ukraine war reminded the brave desk soldier from Scandinavia of his military duty to hold out at his post and not to give in to his archenemy. That was once the Soviet Union and is now Russia. Which doesn’t rule out the fact that NATO states sometimes fight among themselves like nasty, naughty boys: Turkey against Greece, Great Britain against Argentina…
At the ceremony, Stoltenberg invoked the Oath of the Musketeers (which, from the very beginning, since 1949, in the alliance was reduced to “all for one,” namely for the US hegemon). He also expressed pride that there is no international treaty that uses as few words (and only 14 paragraphs) as the founding acts of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the Organization du traité de l’Atlantique nord (Otan). Which is also not surprising: military people are only willing to read to a limited extent and are generally averse to big talk.
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