By John J. Miller
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Hours after Houthi militants in Yemen launched a new
missile at Saudi Arabia on December 19, the U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations, Nikki Haley, took her blue seat at the horseshoe-shaped table of the
Security Council. “Thankfully,” she said, “the missile was intercepted before
it could hit its intended target,” which apparently was a palace in Riyadh, the
Saudi capital. “But the very fact of this attack is a flashing red siren for
this council.” Backed by Iran, Haley said, the Houthis have fired missiles at
civilians before. “Unless we act,” she warned, the latest one “won’t be the
last.”
Haley’s remarks came during the most intense week of her
yearlong tenure at Turtle Bay, at a time when most of the rest of the U.N.
preferred not to discuss Iranian threats and instead wanted to jabber about
Israel — in other words, to ignore literal missiles and instead lob figurative
ones at President Trump for his decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv
to Jerusalem. On December 18, as the 14 non-American members of the Security
Council rushed to approve a resolution condemning Trump’s decision, Haley cast
her first veto.
“It was an unfortunate moment but a proud moment, knowing
we were in the right,” she said the next day, in an interview with National Review at her office across the
street from U.N. headquarters. “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Everyone
knows this. We have to acknowledge the truth. Once you get the truth out of the
way, you can do so much.”
Ambrose Bierce once defined “diplomacy” as “the patriotic
art of lying for one’s country.” Haley nevertheless has become America’s great
truth-teller, flouting diplomatic conventions to speak plainly and with
toughness about the provocations of Iran, the rights of Israel, U.S.
sovereignty, and much more. Before Trump tapped her for the United Nations, she
was the young and attractive Republican governor of South Carolina with a
bright future in domestic politics.
A year later, she has transformed herself into a hero of
many foreign-policy conservatives, even drawing comparisons to Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, her predecessor who in 1975 famously denounced the U.N.’s efforts to
equate Zionism with racism. Moynihan’s moment of moral clarity propelled him to
the U.S. Senate, where he served four terms. Haley’s future is anybody’s guess:
Will she succeed Rex Tillerson as secretary of state? Does she harbor
presidential ambitions? It remains as bright as ever, even as it now appears
headed in new and unexpected directions.
***
Haley’s parents are Sikhs from the Punjab. The
birthplaces of her three siblings trace the family’s journey around the globe:
India, Canada, and the United States, where her father took a job as a biology
professor at Voorhees College in South Carolina. The future ambassador was born
in nearby Bamberg in 1972 as Nimrata Randhawa. She soon became known to
everyone as “Nikki,” a childhood nickname that means “little one.” Accounts of
her youth often mention her participation as a four-year-old in the Wee Miss
Bamberg pageant. Traditionally, the town had picked two winners, one black and
one white. The judges didn’t know what to do with Nikki, whose father wore a
turban and her mother a sari. So they disqualified her.
Haley has observed that reporters enjoy this anecdote
because it helps them show the backwardness of her rural southern home. She
sees it differently: “The same town that disqualified me was the one that
accepted me into a Girl Scouts troop, helped my dad get a job in a community
college, and helped my mom get a job as a sixth-grade social studies teacher,”
she wrote in Can’t Is Not an Option,
her 2012 autobiography. “My family and I have some disheartening stories, but
every family does. What matters isn’t the stories themselves; it’s how the
stories end.”
Her own story continued with school and the family
business: a clothing company founded by her mother. As a teenager, she kept the
books. “I noticed how hard it was to make a dollar and how easy it was for
government to take it away,” she wrote in her autobiography. “We were
struggling just to survive, and government was making it harder, not easier.”
She went to Clemson University, earned an accounting degree, and met her
husband, Michael Haley. Somewhere along the way, she picked up a soft southern
twang. These days, in New York City, she usually wears a standard-issue
U.S.-flag pin on her lapel as well as a symbol of South Carolina on a necklace.
“I want to remember where I’m from,” she says of her palmetto-tree pendant.
As a young wife, Haley began to attend meetings of
businesswomen — and found herself recruited to run for the state legislature.
In 2004, she challenged an entrenched incumbent in a Republican primary,
beating him in a runoff. She served three terms in the statehouse, where she
adopted a signature issue: roll-call voting. Her colleagues preferred to pass
legislation by unrecorded voice votes, making it impossible for their
constituents to keep track of their records. Haley believed this anonymity contributed
to wasteful spending and bloated government. By taking up this cause — she
persisted, and eventually she prevailed — Haley became a favorite of tea-party
activists and ran a winning campaign for governor in 2010.
Even now, her words carry echoes of her tea-party past.
“That’s a city over there with a lot of bureaucrats,” she says, gesturing out
her office window toward the U.N.’s 39-story Secretariat Building. “They still
have elevator operators.” (This is true: I encountered one later that day.) “That
drives me crazy as an accountant.” The United States currently supplies the
U.N. with around $10 billion per year, or about one-fifth of the U.N.’s total
annual revenues.
Seven years ago, Haley became the country’s second
Indian-American governor (following Bobby Jindal of Louisiana). Vogue profiled her. GOP presidential
candidates sought her endorsement. Meanwhile, she battled with state lawmakers
who overrode dozens of her vetoes of spending bills. She won reelection in
2014, and then widespread praise the following year for her delicate handling
of the aftermath of the racist church shooting in Charleston, S.C., including
the removal of the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds — an emotional
issue that had festered in state politics for years. At the start of 2016,
national Republicans tapped her to deliver their response to President Obama’s
State of the Union address. A year later, the Senate approved her as President
Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.
***
Her nomination came as a surprise: Prior to it, she had
demonstrated little interest and even less expertise in foreign policy. Her
book includes almost no discussion of it. A single mention of Iraq refers to
her brother’s service in the Army during Desert Storm. “International diplomacy
is a new area for me,” she confessed at her confirmation hearings. “Like most
government agencies, the United Nations could benefit from a fresh set of eyes.
I will take an outsider’s look at the institution.” Then she added a gentle
criticism of the Obama administration’s approach: “At the U.N., as elsewhere,
the United States is the indispensable voice of freedom. It is time that we
once again find that voice.”
Just a few weeks earlier, that voice had fallen silent:
President Obama’s ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, refused to veto a
Security Council resolution that denounced Israel for its policies in Jerusalem
and the West Bank. The abstention broke a longstanding, bipartisan practice of
defending Israel against the U.N.’s ceaseless assaults, and it looked like a
petty parting shot at Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom
Obama had clashed. “It should hurt the conscience of Americans that we didn’t
stand up for an ally,” says Haley today. “If we can’t be there for Israel, and
let it get bullied once again in such a forum, it doesn’t speak well for
anything else we do around the world.”
Over the past twelve months, Haley has earned a reputation
for sharp rhetoric. “Your voice is your strength,” she says. “I put a lot of
weight into what I say and how I say it.” At her first Security Council meeting
last February, she condemned Russia’s aggression in eastern Ukraine as well as
its takeover of Crimea. She also has focused on North Korea. “Imagine being a
North Korean soldier, so desperate and so ravaged by hunger and disease that
you would take five bullets from your fellow soldiers in order to escape across
the DMZ,” she said on December 22, referring to the video that had riveted the
world a month earlier. Although the U.N. has not revoked North Korea’s
membership, as Haley urged, it has continued to tighten sanctions.
On February 16, when she was still new on the job, Haley
attended a Security Council meeting on the Middle East. She came out annoyed.
“The first thing I want to do is talk about what we just saw in there,” she
said at a press conference afterward. She mentioned all the things the Security
Council didn’t discuss: Hezbollah’s arms build-up in Lebanon, the menace of
ISIS, and Iran’s support of terrorism. “No, instead, the meeting focused on
criticizing Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East,” she said. “I’m
here to say the United States will not turn a blind eye to this anymore. I am
here to underscore the ironclad support of the United States for Israel. I’m
here to emphasize the United States is determined to stand up to the U.N.’s
anti-Israel bias.”
In October, the United States quit UNESCO, the U.N.’s
cultural agency, after it declared parts of Hebron to be Palestinian territory.
Next up may be the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, whose members include the likes
of Cuba and Venezuela. “We’re not going to be a part of a council that doesn’t
represent its name,” Haley says. In June, on a visit to Geneva, she cited this
hypocrisy and others, including the council’s mere seven resolutions on Iranian
human-rights abuses, compared with more than 70 that have singled out Israel.
“It reinforces our growing suspicion that the Human Rights Council is not a
good investment of our time, money, and national prestige,” she said. Then she
demanded that the body reform the way it elects members and abandon its
“relentless, pathological campaign against a country that actually has a strong
human-rights record.” So far, nothing about the council has changed, but Haley
says talks are ongoing: “We said we’d put in a good year.”
***
Haley had hoped to wrap up 2017 by putting a spotlight on
Iran. On December 14, she traveled to Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in
Washington, D.C., home of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to present evidence
that Iran has violated arms-export agreements. “In this warehouse is concrete
evidence of illegal Iranian weapons proliferation, gathered from direct
military attacks on our partners in the region,” she said, standing before an
assortment of weapons relics, including a large piece of a missile that
officials say Houthis in Yemen had fired at Saudi Arabia on November 4. (The
Saudis say they shot it down.) “The missile’s intended target was the civilian
airport in Riyadh, through which tens of thousands of passengers travel each
day,” she said. “Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles
Airport or JFK or the airports in Paris, London, or Berlin.” The militants
received it from Iran, she said, pointing to several distinguishing marks. “The
weapons might as well have had ‘Made in Iran’ stickers all over [them].”
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, hit back
on Twitter. He posted a photo of Haley alongside a separate picture of former
secretary of state Colin Powell, taken at Powell’s appearance at the U.N. in
2003, when Powell accused Saddam Hussein’s Iraq of owning weapons of mass
destruction that it did not in fact possess. “When I was based at the UN, I saw
this show and what it begat,” Zarif tweeted.
“I saw that,” says Haley. “We are trying to expose
violations. This is not about going to war. We’re trying to get in front of a
situation. There are lots of examples of what can happen when we don’t: North
Korea, Syria.”
The New York Times
joined the counterattack: “U.S. Accuses Iran of U.N. Violation, but Evidence
Falls Short,” it said in a headline. Times
reporters John Ismay and Helene Cooper noted the possibility that Iran had
transferred the weapons before the Security Council adopted Resolution 2231 in
2015, which endorsed the Obama administration’s deal with Iran concerning its
nuclear program. Officials at the Departments of Defense and State, however,
consider this unlikely and also note that the U.N. has banned Iran from
shipping weapons since 2007.
“There will be naysayers who want to protect the nuclear
deal,” says Haley. What she means is that many diplomats and their media
enablers are reluctant to criticize Iran’s export of weapons or its support of
terrorism for fear that these revelations might endanger the international
agreement that allows Iran to develop its nuclear program for supposedly
peaceful purposes.
When Haley presented her case against Iran to the
Security Council on December 19 — citing the Houthis’ brand-new missile attack
from earlier the same day — several of her foreign colleagues expressed concern
over Iran’s behavior, but all of them offered seemingly ritual praise for the
nuclear deal. British ambassador Matthew Rycroft, in a typical statement,
called it “one of the greatest diplomatic successes of recent memory.” The
meeting adjourned without any consideration of Haley’s calls to strengthen
Resolution 2231 or even, as she had urged, to “explore sanctions on Iran in
response to its clear violations of the Yemen arms embargo.”
Instead, Haley’s U.N. colleagues were too busy with what
already had become the theme of the week: lambasting the United States for
deciding to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, as Congress had mandated
in 1995 but presidents had delayed until now. As the Security Council ganged
up, Haley held her ground: “The United States will not be told by any country
where we can put our embassy,” she said, citing the “basic truth” that
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. She also explained that President Trump’s
announcement involved no judgments about Jerusalem’s final boundaries in the
event of a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. The Security
Council nevertheless pushed ahead with a vote. The United States is one of five
nations with the power to veto a Security Council resolution — and on December
18, Haley issued her first. “The fact that this veto is being done in defense
of American sovereignty and in defense of America’s role in the Middle East
peace process is not a source of embarrassment for us,” said Haley. “It should
be an embarrassment to the remainder of the Security Council.”
Her veto blocked the Security Council, but it couldn’t
prevent the U.N. General Assembly three days later from passing its own
condemnation in a body where America’s vote carries as much weight as
Estonia’s. “At the UN we’re always asked to do more & give more,” Haley
tweeted from her phone beforehand. “So, when we make a decision, at the will of
the American ppl, abt where to locate OUR embassy, we don’t expect those we’ve
helped to target us. On Thurs there’ll be a vote criticizing our choice. The US
will be taking names.” This vow, CNN grumbled in a website headline, “upsets
diplomatic norms at the UN.”
It sure did, and Haley kept on upsetting them. On the day
of the vote — almost exactly a year after the Obama administration abstained on
the Security Council’s anti-Israeli resolution — she scolded the chamber. “To
its shame, the United Nations has long been a hostile place for the state of
Israel,” she said, visibly angry. “I’ve often wondered why, in the face of such
hostility, Israel has chosen to remain a member of this body. And then I
remember that Israel has chosen to remain in this institution because it’s
important to stand up for yourself.”
In the dispute over the American embassy, she resolved
that the United States would stand up for itself, even if that meant standing
alone. “This vote will make a difference on how Americans look at the U.N. and
on how we look at countries who disrespect us,” she said in her speech to the
U.N. General Assembly. In the kind of roll-call vote that Haley once fought for
as a lowly state lawmaker, the tally went this way: One hundred twenty-eight
countries chose to condemn the United States, 35 abstained, and only eight
other countries voted in its defense. Much of the press interpreted the result
as a humiliating rebuke of the United States. Former U.S. ambassador to the
U.N. John Bolton, suggested, correctly, that Haley’s rhetoric had prompted the
large number of abstentions.
Before it was over, Haley made a promise: “This vote will
be remembered.” So will her bracing candor as America’s iron lady at the U.N.
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