UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace pulled out of the race to succeed Jens Stoltenberg last month
US President Joe Biden speaks to members of the press while meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (unseen) at the NATO Summit on June 29, 2022 in Madrid, Spain © Getty Images / Denis Doyle/Getty Images
US President Joe Biden objected to UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace’s candidacy for NATO leadership, likely because he served as a British soldier in Northern Ireland during the period of sectarian violence known as ‘The Troubles’, the Daily Mail has reported.
Wallace was among the foremost candidates to replace Jens Stoltenberg as NATO Secretary General when the Norwegian’s term expires later this year. However Wallace, who was appointed as the UK’s defense chief by ex-PM Boris Johnson in 2019, withdrew from the running last month.
According to unnamed sources cited by the Daily Mail on Sunday, Biden’s hesitance over his credentials – particularly as it relates to Northern Ireland – were key to Wallace’s decision to not stand in the NATO leadership race.
“Biden wears his southern Irish roots on his sleeve and he will be well aware Ben served in the British Army during The Troubles,” the newspaper quoted an anonymous source close to Wallace as saying. “He’s hardly particularly pro-British either, so we suspect it was one of the reasons why the President failed to throw his weight behind his candidature.”
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Wallace served two tours in Northern Ireland with the Scots Guards throughout his military career and was mentioned in dispatches as having helped foil an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb plot in 1992.
British troops were highly unpopular within Republican communities in Northern Ireland throughout The Troubles. In 1972, British paratroopers killed 13 unarmed protestors and injured at least 15 more in a notorious incident known as the ‘Bloody Sunday massacre’, which came to partly define the sectarian conflict.
It had previously been suggested that the next NATO leader would ideally come from an EU-member state, and that the UK’s Brexit withdrawal from the bloc had undermined Wallace’s candidacy. UK defense chief Wallace has been an ardent supporter of Ukraine’s military forces throughout its conflict with Moscow.
The claims made in the Daily Mail report come months removed from Biden’s visit to Ireland, which he would later tell the Democratic National Convention Reception in May was designed to “make sure the Brits didn’t screw around” when it came to their commitments to support peace in Northern Ireland.
A White House spokesperson said that it was “100% false and not accurate” that Biden rejected Wallace’s NATO ambitions due to him having served as a British military officer in Northern Ireland.
