Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Two offices define the record. Rasmussen governed Denmark for seven and a half years, winning three consecutive elections, and then ran NATO for five, the first former prime minister to take the alliance's top job in more than four decades. The administrative reform that collapsed 13 counties into 5 regions is the kind of structural change most European governments talk about and few complete. At NATO he presided over expansion into Eastern Europe and the Libya operation. Since 2014 he has built a second career as a consultant and commentator, and his 2026 warnings about the alliance's future carry weight precisely because of the years he spent inside it.