Dutch-American is Obama's choice for Nato ambassador

US president Barack Obama has named a Dutch-American, Ivo Daalder, to be his next ambassador to Nato in Brussels.

Ivo H. Daalder launched his newest book, In the Shadow of the Oval Office, in Washington last week. His historical study about the role of the National Security Advisor in the US was hailed by the Washington Post. The review recommended the work especially to Jim Jones, president Barack Obama's security advisor.

Daalder and Jones will actually be working closely together in the near future. On Wednesday Obama announced his intent to make Daalder the US ambassador to Nato.

Daalder was born in the Hague in 1960 and moved to the United States when he was seventeen. He had developed a fondness for the US after his father - a professor emeritus at the university in Leiden - had taken the family to temporarily live there for two separate periods. Ivo Daalder stayed in the US and acquired nationality in 1994. He is married to an American woman and they in Washington live with their two sons.

Daalder is considered a liberal hawk. He was a signatory to the January 2005 Project for a New American Century letter to Congress urging an increase in the number of troops in Iraq. The Project for a New American Century is a neoconservative think-tank linked to the Amerian Enterprise Institute, where much of the foreign policy of the Bush administration originated. But Daalder is also known to be a strong advocate of a return to diplomacy and multilateral action.

It is up to secretary of state Hillary Clinton to officially nominate Daalder, who served as director of European affairs on president Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff from 1995-1996, but endorsed Obama early in the campaign for Democratic candidate for the presidency. Daalder decided to support Obama over Hillary Clinton after having diner with him. He then became a foreign policy adviser to Obama's election campaign, where he led a task force on nuclear proliferation

That was also one of the many issues he dealt with at the Brookings Institution, a political think-tank in Washington where he is a senior fellow. He has published dozens of books, including the awarded America Unbound, a critical analysis of the foreign policy of George W. Bush.

Daalder also voiced his ideas on the opinion pages of the international and Dutch press, including NRC Handelsblad. He often wrote about the right (or duty) of the international community to use military and humanitarian action to intervene in countries that fail to meet their responsibilities. His pleas didn't always gather a following.

In 1999, as the was in Kosovo was raging, he firmly criticised his president, Bill Clinton, because he thought Serbia would not withdraw from Kosovo if only air strikes were used. However, after weeks of Nato bombing - and the threat of a ground offensive - Milosevic did bow down.

In 2002, Daalder believed Iraq could not be invaded without a mandate from the United Nations Security Council and he called on the US to give UN weapons inspectors more time, also to no avail.