Once a Trump critic, Nikki Haley casts herself as his leading diplomat

Before and after he became president, Donald Trump made it pretty clear that he didn’t see much value in the United Nations. So when he named Nikki Haley as his choice for United Nations ambassador, many wondered whether he was simply shunting a tough critic into a trivial post.

In the past week, Haley has made it increasingly clear that she has no intention of being sidelined. To the contrary, as diplomats at the United Nations saw it, she managed to elbow herself into a leading, outspoken role in the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, wielding pictures of dead Syrian children, she was the first senior official in the administration to warn that the United States could take unilateral action against Syria’s president for the chemical attack that killed more than 80 people in his country. The same day, she was named a full member of the coveted principals’ committee on Trump’s National Security Council, where crucial policy work is done.

In the United Nations Security Council, she pushed for a sharply worded draft resolution to remind the Syrian government to share the flight logs of all its air operations with international investigators. She confronted Russia for blocking it, and on Thursday evening, in what diplomats described as tense, closed-door negotiations, Ms. Haley not only rejected a compromise, but made it clear she was not happy to be led by other countries in the direction of a compromise. Their attempt at diplomacy had changed her script of pushing Russia to veto.

Soon after she walked out of the Council’s chambers that evening, news emerged that the United States had, in fact, fired dozens of Tomahawk missiles at an air base in Syria.

Diplomacy is as much theatrics as it is dialogue. And Haley, 45, a former governor of South Carolina, has created at least the impression among her fellow ambassadors that she is carving out a space for herself in an administration where it isn’t always clear who is guiding contentious policy. The French ambassador, François Delattre, concluded Thursday evening that she was “clearly very influential in the Trump administration.”

On Friday, it was left to her to dangle yet another warning. She called the American strikes “fully justified,” though she offered no clear legal justification.

“The United States took a very measured step last night,” she said during a Security Council meeting. “We are prepared to do more. But we hope that will not be necessary.”

Haley’s office has not responded to repeated requests for interviews, but when asked onstage at the Women in the World conference in New York on Wednesday whether she liked her the job, she cheerfully put it this way: “You can move the ball. It’s not just about talking.” Is she actually setting foreign policy? That would be highly unusual for any envoy to the United Nations. But in these unusual days, vital positions in the State Department remain vacant, Secretary of State Rex W Tillerson is far more distant from the public than his predecessors, and many American embassies are still without an ambassador.

©2017 The New York Times News Service