Biden blocks Ben Watson, supports Ursula von der Leyen for next NATO Secretary General after Jens Stoltenberg
Another example of Biden's poor foreign policy judgment, and/or simply an aversion to independent individuals who might challenge him?
Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) in International Law, Harvard University
Dispatches
1) Alan Cochrane and Nick Gutteridge,”Britain’s fury with US as Joe Biden ‘blocks’ Ben Wallace for Nato chief; Minister’s ambition to be the alliance’s next secretary-general thwarted as Washington reportedly refuses to endorse his candidacy,” The Telegraph, June 22, 2023 (9:56 pm);
2) Joe Barnes, “Biden pushing for Ursula von der Leyen to be next Nato boss after blocking Ben Wallace; Brussels chief has emerged as frontrunner amid difficulties finding a successor to Jens Stoltenberg, who has had his term extended,” July 4, 2023 (8:49 pm);
3) “Joe Biden blocked Ben Wallace from top Nato role after F-16 row; Defence Secretary had been a front-runner to succeed Jens Stoltenberg, but failed to secure support of Washington,” The Telegraph, July 5, 2023 (2:14 pm);
4) James Crisp, “The reason Joe Biden wanted Ursula von der Leyen as Nato boss; Ursula von der Leyen is a present to worried EU leaders from Joe Biden,” The Telegraph, July 5, 2023 (12:29 pm);
5) Joe Barnes, Nick Gutteridge and Dominic Penna, “Biden turned to Von der Leyen for top Nato role after F-16 row; Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, had been a front-runner to succeed Jens Stoltenberg, but failed to secure US support, The Telegraph, July 6, 2023 (1:00 am);
6) Jackson Diehl, “Joe Biden doesn’t have a perfect foreign policy record. But unlike Trump, he’s learned from his mistakes,” Washington Post,
September 27, 2020 (2:52 p.m. EDT);
7 ) “You can’t fill a bucket with a hole in it,” the Trenchant Observer, August 31, 2023;
Analysis
One can consider Joe Biden as a good candidate for reelection as President of the United States only if one excludes his foreign policy record from consideration.
He is now embarked on a course of action which could have a decisive impact on the war in Ukraine, and which if continued could result in the defeat of Ukraine and the West.
It is highly significant that no major U.S. newspaper has reported on this critically important strategic development.
By blocking or seeking to block Ben Wallace, the British Defense Minister, from election as Jens Stoltenberg’s successor as Secretary General of NATO, Biden is vetoing an outstanding defense leader capable of exercising strong leadership during a time of extraordinary peril in the current civilizational struggle with Russia. Instead of Watson, Biden is pushing Ursula von der Leyen, a former German Defense Minister with an abysmal record in that post. She is currently the popular President of the European Commission, the EU executive branch. Her selection as Merkel’s Defense Minister may have been influenced by a strong desire for gender balance among the ministries.
Watson has pushed hard for the weapons Ukraine needs, and is serious in his determination to help Ukraine win the war. Recently, he has furnished Uktaine with long-range Storm Shadow missiles (range 155 miles) , while Joe Biden continues to veto the supply of American long-range artillery rockets known as ATACMS (range 180 miles).
The reason for Biden’s restraint': his abject fear of Putin and Putin’s nuclear threats.
Von der Leyen is a politician with no military experience other than her time as a political appointee as Defense Minister in the government of Ãngela Merkel. She left the Defense Ministry as she found it, in a disastrous state of unpreparedness.
Her earlier cabinet positions were as follows;
1) After the CDU won the federal elections in 2005, she was appointed minister of family affairs, senior citizens, women, and youth in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first cabinet;
2) In 2009 she was elected a member of the Bundestag (parliament) and became minister of labour and social affairs;
3) In late 2010 von der Leyen was elected deputy chairman of the CDU;
4)In December 2013 von der Leyen—seen by some as a possible successor to Merkel—became the first woman to hold the defense portfolio.
In February 2018 a survey of German military equipment found that only a fraction of key weapons systems were combat ready. Fewer than one-third of Germany’s combat aircraft, fewer than half of its tanks, and just three of its heavy transport aircraft were available for deployment. Von der Leyen reacted to the findings by saying that it would take time to make up for decades of spending shortfalls, and Merkel’s government committed to a significant increase in its defense budget.
In that post she endeavored to reform the Bundeswehr (federal armed forces) while dealing with a number of challenges. In March 2014 Crimea, which was part of Ukraine, was annexed by Russia. The crisis sparked new concerns about NATO’s capabilities, especially after an independent review of Germany’s defense ministry, released in October 2014, uncovered scores of “problems and risks” in its procurement process. Doubts that the country could fulfill its military commitment to NATO, owing to a lack of battle-ready equipment, led some allies to pressure Germany to increase its military spending.
Key points to bear in mind are that Von der Leyen was Defense Minister under Merkel when Russia invaded the Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 She was part of a government which joined the EU in punishing Russia with merely a slap on the wrist for its invasion of the Crimea, which was followed by Putin’s invasion of the eastern region of Ukraine known as the Donbas. She was Defense Minister in the CDU government of Ángela Merkel which awarded Putin’s 2014 aggression in Ukraine with extraordinary German dependence on Russian gas, and with the construction of the Nordstream II Pipeline which would have further increased that dependence.
To be sure, Vice-President Joe Biden was in charge of U.S. Ukraine policy in 2014, and participated in the decisions in the Obama administration to punish Putin with merely a slap on the wrist for his invasion of the Crimea in February 2014. He was also part of the administration that declared it would not use force to oppose Russia in Ukraine, and which responded meekly to Russia’s invasion of the Donbas in the summer of 2014.
Biden will undoubtedly be comfortable with Von der Leyen with whom he shares so much history, whereas Ben Wallace has the stature,, character, independence of mind, and military expertise to challenge Biden on critical issues.
Joe Biden doesn’t like strong personalities who might challenge him. That is probably why Susan Rice, one of if not the most qualified senior foreign policy officials of the Obama administration, was shunted off to head the White House Domestic Policy office when Biden took office. Undoubtedly she contributed mightily behind the scenes to the success of Biden’s domestic policy agenda. But her foreign policy experience and expertise, which were great, were wasted by Biden who doesn’t like being challenged by independent-minded experts such as Rice. Rice has recently resigned from her White House domestic policy position.
If selected, Van der Leyen promises to be a pliant NATO Secretary General, and one who Joe Biden can be confident will not challenge his leadership of the alliance, however mistaken it may be in terms of military strategy and the requirements for winning the war.
With Watson, the primary goal would be to win the war. With Van der Leyen, the primary goal would be to maintain a political consensus among the allies. She is a politician. Watson is a military man with personal military experience.
Instead of appointing individuals of great stature and independent thinking, it was probably to avoid potential opposition that Biden appointed Antony Blinken as Secretary of State and Jake Sullivan as National Security Adviser when he took office in 2021.
Blinken had been Biden’s foreign policy adviser for over 20 years, since Biden’s days as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden had worked closely with Jake Sullivan for many years. Both Blinken and Sullivan were Biden’s boys, owing their positions and career advancement in large part to Joe Biden.
Both could be expected to not oppose Biden on a foreign policy issue about which the president felt deeply.
Thus, neither spoke out publicly or resigned in protest to oppose Biden’s decision to withdraw all American forces and contractors from Afghanistan in April, 2021.
This decision was perhaps the most catastrophic foreign policy decision by any Western leader since Brtish prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French leader Ėdouard Daladier agreed on September 30, 1938 to cede the German-speaking Sudetenland to German Führer Adolf Hitler, in the face of the latter’s massing of German troops on the Czech border and his imminent threat to invade Czechoslovakia.
The Afghan decision confirmed Biden’s disastrous foreign policy judgment, about which former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates earlier had the following to say in his 2014 memoir. Diehl reports:
In considering Joe Biden’s foreign policy record, it’s hard to overlook the scathing critique delivered by Robert Gates, the Washington wise man and veteran of half a dozen administrations who served as President Barack Obama’s first defense secretary. While Biden was “a man of integrity” who was “impossible not to like,” Gates wrote in a 2014 memoir, “he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
There is so much to unpack here. But we are out of space and out of time. Further analysis will follow in future articles.
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See also “Why I care about the war in Ukraine,” Trenchant Observations, June 26, 2023.