Prime Minister Theresa May has appointed Gavin Williamson as Britain’s new defense secretary. It’s the wrong choice — she should have gone with Rory Stewart.
Following the shock resignation of former defense secretary, Michael Fallon, on Wednesday, the British defense department needs Stewart’s intellectually robust and experienced leadership. Stewart has three qualifications that make him particularly well-suited to the job.
First, he’s ready to lead. Following high achool, Stewart spent a short period as a junior officer in one of the British army’s elite light infantry battalions, so he understands British military culture and could win the trust of civilian and military personnel.
But the member of Parliament also knows diplomacy. After all, following Stewart’s graduation from Oxford University, he became a foreign service officer.
That job took him to Indonesia, Montenegro, and Iraq, where Stewart was a coalition deputy governor in a southern province. Considering current foreign policy issues surrounding Iran, the Islamic State and the political future of Syria and Iraq, Stewart’s formative experiences would be well-suited to shaping government policy.
Second, Stewart understands the government bureaucracy.
As a former member of Britain’s equivalent of a congressional armed services committee, Stewart has defense policy experience from the parliamentary side. That would allow him to work effectively with current committee MPs in unifying Britain’s defense policy, planning, and procurement strategy. This matters because over the past 30 years, the Ministry of Defence has wasted tens of billions of dollars on rifles that don’t work, aircraft carriers that don’t have planes and planes that never flew.
Equally important here is Stewart’s ability to speak plainly when so needed. Last month, the MP proved he has that quality when he outlined the complexities of dealing with ISIS fighters on the battlefield. “They are absolutely dedicated, as members of the Islamic State,” Stewart explained to the BBC, “towards the creation of a caliphate, they believe in an extremely hateful doctrine which involves killing themselves, killing others, and trying to use violence and brutality to create an eighth century, or seventh century, state. So I’m afraid we have to be serious about the fact these people are a serious danger to us, and unfortunately the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.”
Third, Stewart is intellectually curious and morally determined.
The best example of Stewart’s qualities in this regard are his various walking trips in the early 2000s. Spanning over 5,000 miles, Stewart traversed through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. In 2006, the New York Times listed Stewart’s account of his travels as one of its top ten books of the year.
Regardless, intellectual curiosity is pointless unless it is matched to a sense of purposeful determination. And Stewart has also shown that character trait in his life’s work. In 2012, he eloquently explained why democratic governance requires constant re-imagination. In 2013, he articulated why military service is both moral and necessary. In 2015, he explained why NATO is so crucial and why states have an existential interest in their mutual defense.
All of this speaks to one central truth. Theresa May should have picked Rory Stewart.
