Who should lead NATO?

One small item on the Sunak-Biden agenda in Washington was the next Secretary General of NATO. The current holder of the post, the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg, leaves in September.

The London Establishment’s default setting when the Nato leadership vacancy opens is to try and find a British defence secretary for the role. The first SG when NATO was created was General “Pug” Ismay, one of Churchill’s favourite military advisors.

Ismay famously (if not very tactfully) said that the job of Nato was to “keep the Americans In, the Russians Out, and the Germans Down.”  NATO (and to a lesser extent the EU) have had a remarkable rebirth thanks to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Only yesterday President Macron was calling NATO “brain-dead” and no British prime minister since 2016 until Rishi Sunak has had a friendly word to say about Europe.

Yet Nato members in Central Europe and the Baltic have given a greater share of their GDP in military and other aid to Ukraine than the UK, the US, Germany or France. The EU has been galvanised to fund arms for Ukraine, making the EU de facto a military as well as a political and economic alliance.

In the recent past Nato has looked to Scandinavia for its SGs. The incumbent, Jens Stoltenberg, comes from Norway, which only spends 1.4% of GDP on defence. His predecessor was a former Danish PM, and Denmark too spends well below the Nato target of 2 per cent of GDP on defence. One much-touted candidate, the ex-Danish social democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, has ruled herself out.

London’s Foreign and Defence establishment view is that the Defence Secretary Ben Wallace is a perfect successor to Stoltenberg. Wallace is Old Etonian ex-Guards captain and a qualified Austrian ski instructor. He has had to preside over major cuts to the Army, with armed personnel carriers that give the men inside dreadful headaches. But the total battle-ready number of soldiers is lower than in the 18th century, and one of the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers, the Prince of Wales, has spent most of its time since being launched in dry dock for repairs.

Wallace has stayed out of Tory Brexit wars but post-Ukraine Nato will have to develop a European pillar, as the US pivots to Asia where the major threat to the US economy and its democratic freedoms now comes from. It is unlikely that Berlin, Paris, Madrid and Italy will bow to the idea of a Nato Secretary General from Brexit Britain.

The UK should quietly forget about Wallace. Instead there is a strong pro-British candidate, who also happens to be the first woman who could lead Nato. She is Chrystia Freeland, currently the deputy Prime Minister of Canada.

Ms Freeland learnt Ukrainian from her Ukrainian mother and speaks it at home to her children. (Canada has long had a large Ukrainian community.) This will be a big plus for the foreseeable future. Like all top Canadian ministers, she is bi-lingual in English and French, useful in dealing with Francophone nations; she also speaks Italian. Her background, though, is Anglophile. She was educated at Oxford and was a star Financial Times foreign correspondent before becoming chief executive of Reuters. She can connect to European Nato members in a way that few recent Secretary Generals, who only had English as a second language, could manage.

Ms Freeland was Canada’s foreign minister and few possible Nato candidates have her foreign policy experience. Canada is a country that knows how to handle the US, but is also a leading member of the Commonwealth. Since the war in Ukraine it has been increasing its defence spending and there is strong public support to reach the NATO target of 2 per cent as soon as possible.

Perhaps most important of all: Ms Freeland has written a book exposing Putin’s Russia, understands the threat Putin represents and has been warning about it for years. She not only knows how to keep the Americans in Europe, but also how to get the Russians out of Ukraine. She could hardly be better qualified for the job of leading NATO. Sunak should come in behind Chrystia Freeland before it’s too late.

In an earlier version of this article, we stated that Chrystia Freeland’s mother was Jewish. This is untrue and we apologise for this error to Ms Freeland and to our readers.

Denis MacShane is a former Minister of Europe. He was a UK delegate to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly for five years.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.