Did Nikki Haley Do a Good Job?

Richard Gowan, Politico, October 9, 2018; see also

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Trump’s U.N. ambassador handled a tough assignment surprisingly well.

What has Nikki Haley stood for at the United Nations? The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. has been showered with plaudits on announcing her decision to exit at the end of this year. President Donald Trump praised her for making the job “glamorous” and earning foreign diplomats’ respect.

For once, his foreign policy analysis was on the money. Since arriving in New York in January 2017, Haley has impressed other ambassadors as a tough-minded and politically savvy operator.

Despite having little prior knowledge of the U.N., the former South Carolina governor steered a series of hefty packages of sanctions against North Korea through the Security Council in 2017. She has been a consistent and forceful critic of Russia’s war in Syria, in contrast to the administration’s lack of strategic direction over the conflict. She has worked with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to streamline the institution’s bureaucracy and cut the costs of its peace missions.

Yet while Haley has been one of the Trump administration’s most prominent members, her vision of international affairs has been opaque. That’s in part because her ambassadorship has been a diplomatic juggling act. Haley has tried to speak forcefully for the U.S. about Israel and Iran but also maintain decent working relations with other nations in the Security Council. Her foreign counterparts have willed her to succeed, shrugging off her more egregious boasts about “taking names” of U.S. opponents.

With Haley’s departure, there is a high chance that the U.S. posture at the U.N. will become both less opaque and more aggressive. Trump and national security adviser John Bolton, America’s leading critics of the U.N., may well aim to replace her with someone much more hawkish. Addressing the U.N. General Assembly two weeks ago, Trump blasted international institutions ranging from the World Trade Organization to the International Criminal Court. It would be logical for him to send a die-hard anti-multilateralist to New York.

This would be unfortunate, as Haley’s efforts to balance U.S. and foreign interests at the U.N. have proved unexpectedly effective. Grappling with the North Korean issue in mid-2017, as Kim Jong Un’s missile and nuclear tests created a deepening crisis, Haley managed to work out a series of compromises on sanctions with China that put Pyongyang under serious economic pressure.

U.N. officials and foreign diplomats also say they have been impressed by her handling of trouble spots in Africa, a region in which she initially had little interest. This summer, she coaxed China to acquiesce to an arms embargo against war-torn South Sudan that Beijing had strongly opposed.

This sort of work involved give-and-take diplomacy over sanctions terms of the type not normally associated with the Trump administration. While Haley often relied heavily on expert foreign-service officers to hash out the details of such efforts and was sometimes criticized for appearing at U.N. meetings too infrequently, she showed a politician’s knack for hard, transactional diplomacy. Other ambassadors enjoy the cut-and-thrust of dealing with her.

Haley has not, however, always been so successful when the Middle East has been up for debate. When discussing Israel, Palestine or Iran, the ambassador has generally become less pragmatic and far more focused on advancing the administration’s hard-line positions. This has often backfired. Haley failed to stop the Security Council and General Assembly from condemning Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem last December. In contrast to the quiet diplomacy over North Korea with China, the U.S. turned this dispute into a high political drama, threatening allies with aid cuts if they did not fall into line. Many did not. When Haley tabled an amendment criticizing Hamas to a Security Council resolution on Gaza this June, all 14 other members voted against her, the biggest margin in a council vote since the 1960s.

Haley has also been markedly unsuccessful in swinging other council members, including Britain and France, behind U.S. attacks on the Iranian nuclear deal. Overall, her ambassadorship offers two pretty straightforward lessons for U.S. foreign policy. First, despite Washington’s deepening tensions with China and Russia, it is still possible for the big powers to carve out significant deals in the Security Council if the U.S. is willing to engage in hard-headed bargaining. Second, trying to bully those powers—and even U.S. allies—through public diplomacy is a recipe for failure. Haley is said to have found her defeat over Gaza especially embarrassing and looked for ways to tone down disputes with other Security Council members after that to avoid further isolation.

“Bargain hard” and “don’t get too loud” are not exactly new lessons in diplomacy. But they may be worth repeating, because there is a significant risk that the administration will ignore both at the U.N. after Haley moves on. Bolton, who was notoriously unwilling to compromise with other countries while ambassador to the U.N. in 2005 and 2006, appears to have been hardening Trump’s already tough line against multilateral institutions and international law. Having already pulled out of a litany of international bodies and treaties—ranging from the Paris climate agreement to the U.N. Human Rights Council—the administration is now looking to curb the powers of the International Court of Justice and even potentially walk away from the WTO.

In this context, it might seem tempting to put an ardent proponent of “America First” atop the U.S. mission in New York, to find new ways to cut back the U.N.’s supposed encroachment on U.S. sovereignty. Trump has said that he will nominate Haley’s replacement in the next two to three weeks. U.N. officials will spend the run-up to Halloween scaring themselves silly with stories about which right-wing maverick the White House will try to impose on Turtle Bay.

But if the administration does opt for a hard-liner who alienates other powers and hollows out the U.N. system, it will ultimately only reduce its own diplomatic clout. Haley was always ready to defend Trump’s anti-U.N. maneuvers in public. She made some—such as quitting the Human Rights Council over its persistent criticisms of Israel—hallmarks of her tenure. But when it came to crises like North Korea, she knew multilateralism had to work. Haley was never, as she often pointed out, an unquestioning friend of the world organization. But, just as diplomats from other powers learned to respect her, Haley learned to respect the U.N. as a place where the U.S. can cut urgent political deals. The U.N., and U.S., may soon come to miss her.

Richard Gowan is senior fellow at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research in New York and fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.