By Julie Kelly
Monday, April 10, 2017
Nikki Haley just stuck a stiletto in the flat-footed
legacy of her predecessors, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. Our soft-spoken,
poised ambassador to the United Nations (UN) has emerged as the star of the
Trump administration, earning new admirers (and undoubtedly some new foes) for
her performance last week on the international stage.
On April 5, the day after Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad attacked civilians with chemical weapons he’s not supposed to have,
Haley calmly took the floor to call out both the perpetrators and their global
coddlers. She stood and held up photos of Assad’s young victims.
“Yesterday morning, we awoke to pictures. To children
foaming at the mouth, suffering from convulsions, being carried in the arms of
desperate parents. We saw rows of lifeless bodies, some still in diapers, some
with visible scars of a chemical weapons attack.” She paused. “Look at those
pictures. We cannot close our eyes to those pictures.”
The next day, President Trump authorized a surgical
strike against Assad, sending Tomahawk missiles to bomb the airfield where the
attack originated.
In front of the Security Council on Friday, Haley again
blasted Assad, his enablers in Iran, and the impotent ambassadors sitting
before her (not to mention the ghosts of Obama’s feckless diplomats). But she
saved her harshest words for Russia. It is a must-watch moment in American
diplomacy, especially for those malcontents still harboring the
Trump-hearts-Russia conspiracy:
Every time Assad has crossed the
line of human decency, Russia has stood beside him. Russia is supposed to have
removed all the chemical weapons from Syria, but obviously that has not
happened. Let’s think about the possible reasons for Russia’s failure. It could
be that Russia is knowingly allowing chemical weapons to remain in Syria. It
could be that Russia has been incompetent…or it could be that the Assad regime
is playing the Russians for fools.
That same day, she denied a request from Bolivia to hold
a closed-door emergency session of the Security Council to discuss Syria. Haley
said the meeting should occur in the open because “any country that chooses to
defend the atrocities of the Syrian regime will have to do so in full public
view, for all the world to hear.”
You go, girl.
Meet Nikki Haley
Nimrata “Nikki” Haley, who turned 45 on Inauguration Day,
is only the third former governor to serve as UN ambassador. She was in the
middle of her second term as South Carolina’s governor when she accepted her
new post. That means she didn’t take the usual route from academia, the foreign
service, or the military, which will be a plus as she assumes the role of UN
disruptor.
She’s the daughter of Indian immigrants. Her father, a
PhD and university professor, and her mother, an educator turned clothing retailer,
were not the typical-looking Southern parents: “We grew up as an Indian family
in a small town in South Carolina. My father wears a turban. My mother at the
time wore a sari. It was hard growing up in South Carolina,” she told CNN’s Don
Lemon in 2015. “But what I’ve worked toward is to make sure today is better
than yesterday, and that my kids don’t go through what we went through.”
It’s likely that experience will give her a good measure
of both compassion and toughness when dealing with a UN hostile to American
interests and allies. Her performance so far has cleared the UN’s headquarters
of the large thud left by Power, Obama’s last UN ambassador. Power ended her
service by abstaining from a vote condemning Israel and delivering a toothless
rebuke to Syria and Russia over the unchecked genocidal rampage that led to
Aleppo’s fall.
During her impressive but overlooked confirmation hearing
in January, Haley embraced her new challenge, telling the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, “I love to fix things, and I see a UN that can absolutely
be fixed.”
She laid out her views about the UN, particularly its
long-standing enmity toward Israel: “Nowhere has the UNs failure been more
consistent – and more outrageous – than its bias against our close ally,
Israel. In the UN General Assembly session just completed, the UN adopted 20
resolutions against Israel and only six targeting the rest of the world’s
countries combined. Last month’s passage of Resolution 2334 was a terrible
mistake. I will never abstain when the UN comes in direct conflict with the
interests and values of the United States.”
Nikki Haley On Key
Issues
She addressed other key issues in her confirmation
hearing.
Russia: “I
don’t think we can trust them. I think Russia has to have positive actions
before we lift any sanctions on Russia.” She told the committee she believed
Russia committed war crimes when they bombed civilians and hospitals in Aleppo.
Iran nuclear deal:
“It was a huge disappointment and created more of a threat and I think we are
going to have to do a lot of things to fix what happened.”
NATO: “NATO
has been an alliance that we value, and alliance that we need to keep, and I
think that as we continue to talk to him (President Trump) about these
alliances and how they can be helpful…I do anticipate he will listen to all of
us and hopefully we can get him to see it the way we see it.”
Strengthening
America’s role at the UN: “The world has seen us gray. They haven’t seen a
black and white of where we stand and where we don’t stand. The world wants to
see a strong America.”
Haley also discussed allegations of sexual abuse and
exploitation by some UN peacekeeping forces—“I think it is devastating when you
have a child or mother who sees peacekeepers and are afraid”—and continuing
access to family planning education and contraceptives, during which Haley
referred to herself as “strongly pro-life.”
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