Bilderberg Group changes itself for the modern world – and return of Trump

The former head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, has been named the new co-chair of the influential Bilderberg Group, which convenes a yearly transatlantic policy conference and has long been the subject of conspiracy theories around the extent of its power to shape global events.

After a turbulent decade at the helm of the alliance’s military, Stoltenberg now takes over at its pre-eminent discussion forum: a fiercely private four-day event frequented by prime minsters, EU commissioners, bank bosses, corporate CEOs and intelligence chiefs.

Stoltenberg’s first Bilderberg was back in 2002, a few years before his second tenure as Norway’s prime minister. His decade as secretary general of Nato saw further visits, and he even gave the keynote speech at the group’s Saturday night banquet in Turin in 2018. His appointment as Bilderberg’s co-chair cements the group’s role at the heart of transatlantic strategy.

In February, Stoltenberg will also take over as chair of the Munich Security Conference, another important defence and diplomacy symposium. With a fellow Bilderberg veteran, the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, replacing Stoltenberg at Nato, it marks a concentration of control at the top of the Atlantic alliance at a critical time.

Stoltenberg’s tenure at Nato was dominated by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which had begun in earnest not long before he took office in 2014. Stoltenberg oversaw what he recently described as “the largest reinforcement of our collective defence in a generation”, noting proudly that “defence spending is on an upward trajectory across the alliance”.

A number of his new colleagues at Bilderberg have been benefiting from this uptick.

Several of the group’s 31-member steering committee have senior roles in the defence industry. The billionaire former Google boss, Eric Schmidt, chaired the recent National Security Commission on AI, and is now busy launching a kamikaze drone company aimed at the lucrative Ukraine market. Meanwhile, the hugely wealthy Swedish industrialist Marcus Wallenberg is chair of defense manufacturer Saab, which enjoyed a 71% boost in orders in the first nine months of 2024, largely due to the war with Russia.

The tech luminary and Donald Trump insider Peter Thiel founded the fast-growing robotics company Anduril and the booming surveillance and AI giant Palantir. His loyal lieutenant Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, was voted on to the board of Bilderberg a few years ago. Karp, who claims his company is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine”, recently told the New York Times that the US will “very likely” soon be fighting a three-front war with China, Russia and Iran.

In some respects, the geopolitical mood today is not so different from how it was in the 1950s, when Bilderberg was born.

Top of the agenda at the first meeting in 1954 was “the attitude towards communism and the Soviet Union”, with the “strictly confidential” conference report referring repeatedly to “the communist threat”. Seventy years later, at the most recent summit in Madrid, the primary threat is “Russia”, which sat grimly at the foot of the conference agenda underneath “Ukraine and the world”, and “the future of warfare”.

In 1954, the alliance was facing “the emergence ofcommunist imperialism”. In 2024, it’s up against what Stoltenberg calls “the emerging axis of autocrats”, headed by Russia, China and North Korea.

Stoltenberg and his successor as secretary general, Rutte, were both at this summer’s Madrid meeting. Joining them in the conference hall were a clutch of high-up Pentagon officials and Nato’s second most senior military leader, US general Chris Cavoli, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe. It was Cavoli’s second conference, and he’s not the first Saceur to attend the talks: they’ve been coming along to strategise since the mid-60s.

Bilderberg has always had close links with the military: its founders included senior members of British and American intelligence, and a previous Nato leader, Lord Carrington, chaired the group from 1990 to 1998.

Even the shamefaced resignation of its founding chair, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, had a military twist: he was caught up in the Lockheed bribery scandal of 1976, the only year (pre-Covid) that the conference was cancelled. And it’s telling that arguably the most dominant figure at Bilderberg in the last several decades was the grand strategist and warmonger, Henry Kissinger, who was lauded as a foreign policy genius by some and despised as a mass-murdering war criminal by others.

Bilderberg thrives on discreet diplomacy, elite networking and intelligence: a former chief of MI6, Sir John Sawers, is a member of the group’s steering committee and the current head of the CIA, William Burns, was a member before quietly resigning when he took office.

But the arrival of Stoltenberg might signal a sea change: it’s a big-name appointment and follows the recent election of the high-profile CNN interviewer Fareed Zakaria to the group’s steering committee, perhaps signalling a shift out of the shadows for the publicity-shy group.

Bilderberg hasn’t held a press conference for decades, but the urbane politician Stoltenberg is far more used to media briefings and Q&As than the man he replaces: the Dutch economist and Goldman Sachs adviser Victor Halberstadt, who died in September.

In fact, Stoltenberg has already made a statement to the press about his new role, telling the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Näringsliv that Bilderberg, “together with the Munich Security Conference … is a good platform for cooperation between leaders in the political arena, business and the academic world”.

If Stoltenberg is hoping to steer Bilderberg towards a little more engagement with the press, he might hope to get a helping hand from his co-chair, Marie-Josée Kravis, who sits on the board of Publicis, one of the world’s largest PR and communications companies.

However, it’s quite possible that Kravis herself will step aside fairly soon: she’s been assiduously attending Bilderbergs since the late 80s. The younger generation of billionaires in the inner circle, particularly the Silicon Valley crowd, tend to be more at ease chatting into a microphone, while others on the group’s governing body, like the politician Stacey Abrams and the Starbucks board member Mellody Hobson, are accomplished public speakers.

It will have to wait until Stoltenberg’s first conference as Bilderberg co-chair to find out if he’s shaking up the group’s publicity policy. This will, appropriately enough, be in Sweden. While at Nato, Stoltenberg welcomed four new members to the alliance: and Sweden was the most recent.

The chief negotiator for Sweden’s accession to Nato, Oscar Stenström, was spotted hovering around the fringes of this year’s Bilderberg conference in Madrid: he is helping to organise next year’s summit in Stockholm on behalf of his new boss, the billionaire Wallenberg. The Wallenberg family conveniently own the venue: the magnificent Grand hotel, which will be cordoned off in mid-June for the event.

What we know for sure is that Stoltenberg in his new role will be laser-focused, like one of Schmidt’s kamikaze drones, on strengthening transatlantic ties – which may not be entirely straightforward with Trump back in the White House and US foreign policy shaped by the “America first” agenda.

Writing in the Financial Times last month, Stoltenberg noted that Trump’s “campaign rhetoric had raised legitimate concerns about his commitment to European security”. That said, Stoltenberg knows that however tricky things get with Trump, he’s got a hotline to the White House through Peter Thiel: the incoming vice-president, JD Vance, used to work for Thiel at Mithril Capital, and a healthy handful of Thiel’s tech network are lined up for senior posts in the second Trump administration.

But that’s the thing with the studiously bipartisan Bilderberg: they’ve always got someone on the inside, whoever wins.

For example, Karp, Thiel’s CEO at Palantir, was a big backer of Kamala Harris. Looking down the steering committee, Nadia Schadlow is Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, while Abrams is a high-profile Democratic politician and activist. Stoltenberg’s op-ed in the Financial Times last month stressed the bipartisan nature of the transatlantic alliance: “Support for and pride in the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen remains strong across the political spectrum.”

The former Nato chief was carefully welcoming of Trump 2.0. His strategy? Simply that “we need to invest more in defence” in order to “remind the incoming administration that, far from being a burden, the transatlantic relationship is a key strategic asset in this era of great-power competition”.

So all of the high finance high rollers who get invited to Stoltenberg’s Bilderberg can expect to get the hard sell on military and defence investment. Now’s the time for Jens to get networking and glad-handing in the transatlantic wings, keeping the war on the road, the alliance strong and the mil-tech billions flowing.