By Noah Rothman
Monday, November 11, 2024
Donald Trump has tapped Representative Elise Stefanik to lead the United
States mission to the United Nations. Her nomination is likely to be well
received by the Senate — assuming the upper chamber of Congress is interested
in retaining the powers reserved for it in the Constitution — and she’s likely
to perform admirably in the role. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. should
understand that their role is to challenge the shibboleths smuggled into the
General Assembly via the world’s most contemptible despotisms and their allies
in captured Western bureaucracies. Stefanik has demonstrated ample felicity in that role in the
Republican minority in the House. Being outnumbered by people who are wrong and
showing the courage to inform them of their impropriety was good training for
the job she is about to assume.
There is, however, also a managerial aspect to serving at
the head of the U.S. mission in Turtle Bay that requires more than just
high-strung performance art. To succeed in that role, Stefanik should look to
the tone Nikki Haley set and emulate it.
Beyond her rhetorical stridency in support of
American diplomatic objectives, Haley’s U.N. mission cast a spotlight on the
institution’s most grotesquely corrupt appendages and stripped them of their
undue influence.
She oversaw the U.S. withdrawal from the unsalvageable
U.N. Human Rights Commission — an Orwellian place in which the world’s worst
human-rights abusers elide their records, cranks and conspiracy theorists set
the agenda, and anti-Israel obsessives practice
their monomania. Joe Biden’s administration restored normal U.S. relations with
the UNHRC. Trump and Stefanik should restore the status quo ante and promote
that as the new normal.
During Haley’s tenure, the United States also withdrew
its support for the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) — an ostensibly apolitical body that has been perverted by
anti-Western regimes into a vehicle for the promotion of alternative historical
narratives designed to rob Israel and its allies of legitimacy. Similarly, her
office stripped the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of the U.S.
taxpayer-provided largess to which the agency had become accustomed.
The world beat its chest and tore at its garments over
Haley’s indictment of that “irredeemably flawed” organization, but the exposure
of the nexus between UNRWA and Hamas terrorists in
Gaza has proven her right.
By most accounts, including her boss’s, Republican
establishmentarians viewed Haley’s tenure at the U.N. as a success. But there
were tensions between that assessment and those who believed she was too
independent of Trump. Some balked at Haley’s criticisms of Turkish president
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan even as the president congratulated the strongman on his
suspect electoral victory. Trump’s apparent interest in ingratiating himself
with Russian president Vladimir Putin proved no obstacle to Haley castigating Moscow over its support
for its blood-soaked puppet in Damascus. Behind-the-scenes reporting at the
time occasionally indicated that the president had “grown exasperated by her outspokenness,” but her record of
success spoke for itself and Trump himself never repudiated her works.
As the forgettable and ephemeral U.N. ambassadors who
succeeded her in that role attest, Haley established a presence at the United
Nations that is worth replicating. That involves more than merely taking an
adversarial approach to navigating that institution, which Stefanik will no
doubt excel at.
Success in that role requires a clear-eyed assessment of
America’s permanent interests abroad that does not shift with the political
winds in Washington. It demands a complex assessment of the multilateral
institutions that serve only to limit America’s freedom of action on the world
stage and those that offer some instrumental utility to the practitioners of
statecraft. A successful ambassador will be comfortable making herself a
performative pariah, but not to the degree that the act alienates would-be allies
who are necessary to ensure the success of U.S. diplomatic initiatives.
Stefanik can do it all. She will forge her own pathway to
success, but she would also be well-served by taking a page or two from her
predecessor’s playbook. Putting the U.N. back in its place and liberating
America from its shameful association with that outfit’s moral perversion
should be a core Trump administration objective. If she follows the road map
laid out by her distinguished forerunners Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jean
Kirkpatrick, and Haley, it will not just advance America’s geopolitical prospects
but the interests of humanity as a whole. Fortunately, Stefanik seems to be up
to the job.
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