NATO Selects No-Nonsense Leader

George Robertson, the British defense secretary who delivered a great deal of the bark and bite in the air war against Yugoslavia, and now says the conflict spotlighted Europe’s need to catch up militarily with the United States, was appointed NATO secretary-general Wednesday.

Robertson, a florid-faced 53-year-old Scot, is a son and grandson of policemen and was raised on the whiskey-producing island of Islay. He will succeed Javier Solana of Spain, who was appointed the 15-nation European Union’s first coordinator for foreign and security affairs. Robertson, who is expected to take office in October, said at a news conference in London that his new job is one of the biggest and toughest in the world.

“One of the clear lessons of the Kosovo conflict is the need for Europe to enhance its military capabilities,” he said. He also focused on relations with Russia and Ukraine, as well as the potential enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization beyond the three countries--Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary--that became members this year.

From the U.S. point of view, Robertson is an excellent choice to lead NATO as it copes with the complex aftermath of the 11-week Balkans bombing campaign and searches for its role in the post-Cold War world. Some British newspapers even said the Clinton administration pressured the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair to release Robertson for the NATO job.

But the British official is also highly acceptable to European NATO nations such as France that want a beefed-up Europe capable of operating independently of Washington.

“The fact that some 80% of the necessary, and relevant, air power [in Kosovo] had to be supplied by the United States drove home the message of how critical it is that Europe tackle its own capability shortfalls,” Robertson said in a June 29 speech.

Asked his opinion of Robertson, one Brussels-based diplomat flashed two thumbs up to show how the British official’s selection as NATO’s 10th secretary-general meets both European and U.S. criteria.

“He’s committed to an active European defense,” the diplomat said. “He’s also committed to the transatlantic link [between the United States and Europe].”

Robertson is singularly lacking in diplomatic polish or military swagger and did not start off in the inner circle in Blair’s government, which has been in power since May 1997. Apparently, the former leftist student leader and union organizer had wanted to be Cabinet secretary in charge of his native Scotland but instead got defense--normally not a high-profile portfolio in Labor governments or in times of peace.

Starting in March, the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia changed that. The growling, ruddy Robertson was on television nearly every day. In one memorable figure of speech, delivered in a thick Scottish burr and moral dudgeon, he denounced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as “a serial ethnic cleanser.”

To some at NATO headquarters in Brussels, the British Cabinet minister seemed the most Churchillian of all Western officials in his rhetoric and gumption. Some of the furniture in his London office was once used by Sir Winston.

Ironically, Robertson has said, what turned him on to politics was joining a movement against the use of military force--Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He recalls at age 15 standing on the pier at Holy Loch, a submarine base the U.S. Navy operated in Scotland, and shouting antinuclear slogans. As he got older, Robertson says, he developed more realistic views of a world he recently said “teeters on the edge of self-destruction.”

“George has exactly the right mix of defense skills and political and diplomatic skills,” Blair said Friday as he made Robertson’s candidacy public during a summit on the Balkans in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Officials in Blair’s government said they got the green light then from leaders of many of NATO’s 19 member nations, including President Clinton, French President Jacques Chirac, Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.

Succeeding the well-respected Solana will be a major challenge. During the aerial war against Yugoslavia, the urbane and genial Spaniard worked hard to keep an often fractious group of allies unified and in sync as NATO fought the first real conflict in its history.

At the Washington summit celebrating the alliance’s 50th anniversary, NATO set an ambitious agenda for an age devoid of the raison d’etre for the organization’s creation, the Soviet Union.

The alliance’s highest-ranking civilian job, which by unbroken custom is reserved for a European, was by consensus supposed to go to a northern European this time around.

For months, German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping had been the leading undeclared candidate to succeed Solana, but Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder nixed the appointment for domestic political reasons. In the absence of other candidates, “the British took advantage of the vacuum,” one French diplomat at NATO said. But he stressed that in the view of his country, Robertson is a “superb candidate.”

In more than two years as Britain’s top government official for defense, Robertson has grown popular with generals and average people alike.

People talk about him like a comfortable and well-worn pair of shoes: sensible rather than stylish, no glitter but dependable. Robertson talks straight with the top brass and has won their trust. But he also comes across as someone who cares a great deal about ordinary soldiers and their families.

“He is an old-fashioned, middle-of-the-road Scottish Labor Party figure, solid and sensible, and that goes down well with northern Europeans,” British military historian John Keegan, defense editor of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, said in an interview.

In matters of substance, it was on Robertson’s watch that Britain completed a sweeping defense review that recommended converting the island nation’s armed forces from the static position of territorial defense dictated by the Cold War to mobile units that could deploy quickly during regional crises and peacekeeping operations, such as in Kosovo. The review, well received despite its cost-cutting recommendations, won Robertson the reputation of an innovator. It is now hailed as a model by other European members of NATO.

In 1976, Robertson, an economics graduate of the University of Dundee, came within a whisker of being killed--by members of his own country’s military. A car he was traveling in collided head on with a Royal Navy Land Rover carrying a mine disposal team, and the Scot was so badly injured he had to undergo extensive reconstructive surgery on his face.

A member of the British Parliament for 21 years, Robertson was also shaken by the 1996 schoolroom massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, in which 16 children and their teacher were killed by a gunman. Robertson and his wife, Sandra, live in the town and knew many families at the school, which their three grown children had attended.

After the killings, Robertson became a leader of Britain’s successful campaign to ban handguns.

One European diplomat predicted that 70% of the new NATO secretary-general’s four-year mandate will be spent on Kosovo and related problems in the Balkans.

Relations with the Russians, broken off in everything but name during NATO’s bombing operations, must be put back on track. European members also plan to look for ways they can cooperate to spend their defense appropriations more wisely and coordinate procurement.

If Robertson has been reproached with anything, it is that he was a publicity hound during the Kosovo conflict and that he miscalculated or exaggerated the damage NATO did to the Yugoslav armed forces.

In any event, the record shows he will be no shrinking violet in Brussels. During a visit to Kuwait last year to meet Royal Air Force crews involved in the air patrols against Iraq, he climbed a ladder to a Tornado warplane and ran into an overzealous crew member.

“It’s my job to make sure no one stands on the aircraft,” the crew member said.

“Stand aside, because it’s my Tornado,” the British defense secretary ordered.

Dahlburg reported from Brussels and Miller from London. Special correspondent Billy Adams in Edinburgh, Scotland, contributed to this report.