NATO has agreed to extend Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's contract by a year, opting to stick with an experienced leader as the Ukraine conflict continues on the alliance's doorstep rather than try to agree on a successor.

Stoltenberg had already lined up a job as head of the central bank in his native Norway but Russia's attack on Ukraine pushed allies last year to ask him to stay on throughout 2022. In fact, in February he said he would not seek another extension of his tenure, having already had it prolonged three times.

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But now the Western military alliance's 31 nations are again asking the former prime minister to keep his position after failing to agree on a replacement.

The latest one-year extension announced on Tuesday will see 64-year-old Stoltenberg complete 10 years in charge at NATO and take him to a 75th anniversary summit in Washington in July 2024. His decade as NATO boss started just months after Russia sent troops into Crimea, making him a key figure in European politics as the continent faces its largest conflict since World War II.

During the last ten years, he has steered the alliance through multiple crises.

He was dubbed the "Trump-whisperer" for convincing Donald Trump to stick with NATO after the then-U.S. president complained that allies were spending too little on defense and threatened to pull out.

He also had to handle NATO's controversial withdrawal from Afghanistan, as skepticism over NATO's role on the international scene hit its zenith.

After that difficult period, Russia's all-out assault on Ukraine has appeared to bring new life to an alliance that often struggled for meaning after the end of the Cold War.

The conflict has seen NATO launch its biggest overhaul of its eastern defenses and welcomed in Finland - and allies hope Sweden soon. Recently, French President Emmanuel Macron, who described NATO as brain dead in 2019, said the conflict had given the alliance an "electric shock."

Under Stoltenberg's stewardship, NATO has had to balance funneling Western weapons into Ukraine while staving of a potential confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. "Because of his strong and steady hand, our alliance is stronger and is more unified than it's ever been," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said recently.

Long-haired anti-war protester

The former Norwegian prime minister, who is an economist by training, says that originally he had little interest in working in politics.

While he is now known for his straitlaced appearance and robotic style, as a long-haired teenager in the 1970s, he had thrown stones at the U.S. embassy in Oslo in reaction to the Vietnam War.

"Actually I made one decision, one clear conscious decision, about my career and that was not to become a politician," Stoltenberg has said of his approach to the world of politics. 

In fact, he had initially hoped to become an academic, but the NATO boss ended up following in his family's footsteps: his father was minister, his mother a deputy minister.  

After entering parliament in 1991, he rose rapidly, becoming minister of energy and then finance, before being named the country's youngest prime minister in 2000 at 41. He won international respect for his response to Norway's worst peace-time massacre, when right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people one year later.

Three years later, when the NATO job came up, he was backed by two centrist heavyweights - German chancellor Angela Merkel and then-U.S. president Barack Obama.

"I was surprised when I was asked to become the secretary general of NATO because I have never planned for being that," Stoltenberg recounted.

'Master Trump-whisperer'

One of Stoltenberg's biggest challenges was to placate Trump, who resented what he saw as European freeloading and famously declared NATO "obsolete."

"He kept Trump in NATO, which was far from certain," said former senior NATO official Jamie Shea. "He was one of the few European leaders that Trump was positive about."

Stoltenberg has also had to deal with other less-compliant leaders, notably Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is still holding up Sweden's accession to NATO. His next challenge came when U.S. President Joe Biden left European allies scrambling with the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, which cleared the way for the Taliban to seize power.

However, the Ukraine conflict has forced NATO to move on, but it has also shown new splits within the alliance. Stoltenberg is trying to strike a consensus at a summit in July on Ukraine's bid to join NATO in future.

Eastern Europeans are pushing for Kyiv to join, but the alliance's de-facto leader, the U.S., is less keen. One thing the allies cannot yet agree on is how to replace the Norwegian veteran.

In May, Stoltenberg offered some advice to any eventual successor who should come in late next year. 

"Make sure that we stay together. That's the main task, the most important thing... to keep this family together," he said. "Of course, that's not always easy."

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