Ben Wallace was the obvious candidate for Nato chief

It is a bad outcome. A good man has been denied a post which he would have done well. In these perilous times, Nato needs a first-class Secretary-General. Ben Wallace would have filled that role, and there is no other obvious candidate.

So why did this happen? There is a simple answer. An incompetent leader was abetted by an unworthy one. In both cases, their performance was almost criminally irresponsible. When Joe Biden was Vice-President, he often had cordial meetings with senior members of David Cameron’s government. There might be a certain amount of joshing on the subject of Ireland, with Biden claiming to believe that Hibernia had been a nation of saints, scholars and beautiful colleens until the wicked Anglo-Saxons introduced original sin.

But in those days, Joe Biden could tell the difference between a ceilidh in a Boston bar and geo-politics. These days, he would be forgetting the words of the ceilidh. President Macron has no such excuse. There is a certain type of French intellectual who seems to devote his mental powers to the pursuit of frivolity. Such is Emmanuel Macron, who is also at least as Anglophobic as Biden. The French President is the sort of Gaullist who cannot forgive the British for D-day and who appears to believe that if the allies had only held back, the French could have done the whole thing on their own.

Ben Wallace had other disqualifying virtues. He came across as strong, resolute, determined and leaderly. This did not go down well in Washington or Paris. Almost no American President enjoys being overshadowed by a lesser ally. Ronald Reagan appears to be the obvious exception, but even under him, there were some problems over the Falklands – and later on over nuclear weapons and the Reykjavik talks. 

When George Bush senior took over, he told some of his advisors that: “Margaret has to learn that she was not the leader of the Western world. He was.” Given longer, it would have been interesting to see how that relationship would have developed. As for Biden’s powers of leadership, God Save the Queen.

Apart from a general distaste for all things British, reinforced by AUKUS, Macron would like to align Nato more closely with the EU, and therefore under French control. He probably intends to exploit weak US Presidencies in order to achieve this. Given French ambivalence – to put it politely – over Nato for several decades, this could be seen as a blend of insolence and folie de grandeur, a quality Macron often displays, and there is a further factor. The Americans are still paying most of the bills. If they became increasingly preoccupied with the Pacific, they might well conclude that they should be happy for Nato to become more Euro-centric, just as long as the Europeans made a much larger financial contribution. That type of hard-headed calculation does not interest the French President. For him, Nato would be just another opportunity for strutting and preening. A few years ago, he described the Alliance as brain-dead (it might be tactless to use that term in Washington these days). But even a pointy-headed énarque show-off might now recognise that Nato is still an essential part of the West’s security structure. Not, apparently, in President Macron’s case.

A serious appraisal of Western security needs ought to convince everyone of the need for a strong Secretary-General and the obvious man was available. No such seriousness could be found in the right quarters. That aversion to strength may lead Putin to draw conclusions which would not be in the West’s interests.

In helping to manage those interests, Wallace could have had a further asset. Without succumbing entirely to Kissingerian pessimism, it is possible to believe that the Ukrainian war ought to end with a negotiated settlement. It might well be that Vladimir Putin could not survive that process. The loss of power and prestige would be too great. But a wholly humiliated Russia could be a dangerous adversary, for it would still possess nuclear weapons. Ben Wallace has already shown his willingness to succour the Ukraine. But his recent comments have also shown a sense of proportion, by inviting the Ukrainians to be realistic in their requests for materiel. So when it comes to diplomatic manoeuvres, Ben Wallace could also be the right man to urge President Zelensky to rein back.

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