OPINION:
NEW YORK — U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has no regrets.
Nor should she. The exiting ambassador has done a tremendous job of representing America on the global scale — of turning ’round the “please be my friend” type of diplomacy pressed by the previous administration to something bolder, something even brasher, something that says to the forces at the world body: Hey, we’re not going to cower in a corner.
“You go in with body armor because you know you’re going to fight each day,” Haley said, in a sit-down roundtable discussion at the U.S. Mission to the U.N., across the street from the United Nations’ building. “You just don’t know who.”
She later added, of the open animus and hostility toward Israel: “I think when we first got here, they did it because they could. They did it because no one told them to stop. When we started to call them out, they started to retreat.”
Haley counts the strong pro-America, pro-Israel messaging as part of her successes; another? Accountability. The ability to shine some light in some dark, very dark corners of the global body, and also to demand that certain standards be upheld — or else.
“One-point-three billion cut off the U.N. budget, right off,” Haley said, of the peacekeeping budget.
Bam.
Under her watch, America has seen a sizable savings of U.N. peacekeeping dollars, to the tune of $350 million since January of 2017, according to her office’s numbers. Meanwhile, in her “first full budget year,” her mission “returned $245,000 of the [fiscal 2018] budget to the U.S. Treasury to date, with the potential to return $324,000 total once all accounts are closed out for the year,” a spokesman for Haley said in a followup email.
The bigger deal, perhaps, are the peacekeeping performance standards that were created by the United States under Haley — standards that now give the Secretary-General the power to hold back on payments to nations caught in the transparency trap engaging in corrupt or abusive or outright criminal acts.
And Haley expresses confidence these changes will last.
“I think [these] U.N. reforms will stick because they’re actually put in place in the budget,” and are therefore not so dependent on who’s in the White House, or which political party leads in America, she said.
That may be. But it still doesn’t address the matter of whether America should even be a part of the United Nations. It still doesn’t address the question that goes like this: Yes, obviously the United Nations needs behemoth America, needs behemoth America’s money, needs behemoth America’s leadership, needs behemoth America’s support — but does behemoth America really need the United Nations? For anything?
Haley wouldn’t say. She couldn’t say. She hadn’t made a hard and fast decision on that, she said. But she also said it’s a matter President Donald Trump put to her as well, just recently.
Ticking off the negatives, Haley said the global body is guilty of plenty of “waste and abuse,” bureaucratic bloat and political unfairness, particularly against America and Israel. At the same time, the United Nations comes in handy on issues such as arms embargoes, she said. So her final answer?
“I think the American people need to decide on that,” she said.
Fair enough. Let the people decide.
And speaking of the future: America, she suggested, needs to keep on top of Russia — a country she described as constantly creating “distractions” at the United Nations, particularly when tones shifted in favor of America — and China, “how they’re investing,” and of course, Iran. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “owes us some accountability” for the killing of journalist and author Jamal Khashoggi, she said, and he ought to “lose his thuggish nature” and stop being so “careless” at times.
“That being said,” Haley went on, the Saudi royal “has a lot of good ideas,” he’s “made reforms for women” that are steps in the positive direction.
Also of note: Cyber warfare seems one of her biggest concerns.
“We have to realize we’re really behind” on cyber, Haley said.
Indeed. China is coming on strong with the technology; Russia, meanwhile, is one of the leading hackers of the world. But at least the United Nations, in recent times, has been set on notice: America demands respect.
“I think [the previous White House was] well-intentioned,” Haley said. “But I think they just wanted to get all the countries to like us. They just did not want anyone not to like us. I believe what’s better to be liked is to be respected. We never backed down — even if that meant standing alone.”
So any regrets? Any unfinished business? Any nagging fears that bring on sleepless nights?
“There’s really not,” Haley said. “I have faith in the goodness of America. … I have faith that there’s no other country like us.”
Couldn’t have said it better. The fact that she did is why Haley will be so missed.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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