There was a time in the not-so-distant past when dissidents in the Republican Party saw Nikki Haley as the perfect antiseptic to another four years of President Trump. Writing in Foreign Policy in 2018, Duke University professor and former National Security Council official Peter Feaver trial-ballooned the former South Carolina governor as the vessel through which Never Trump Republicans could recapture the party. Haley was seen as a serious, optimistic policy wonk who had weighty national security chops courtesy of her tenure as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, someone who could return the GOP back to some romanticized, enlightened pre-Trump age.
Haley’s Monday night speech during the GOP convention should put all of that speculation to rest. It’s highly unlikely she is going to be the anti-Trump as she almost certainly prepares for the 2024 presidential race. Based on her remarks, she is anything but the foreign policy intellectual her advocates claim.
One would expect an overdose of partisanship in any speech given at a political convention. Haley’s comments, however, were beyond the pale: unserious and hyperbolic.
She described the U.N. as a forum where evildoers congregate to shield themselves from accountability and band together to undermine the United States. “Now, the U.N. is not for the faint of heart,” Haley said. “It’s a place where dictators, murderers, and thieves denounce America and then put their hands out and demand that we pay their bills.” What she didn’t mention is that the U.S. very often uses its political power and influence at the Security Council and various U.N. bodies to protect some of the very dictatorships she complains about. Washington, for instance, has frequently laid itself on the railroad tracks to protect Saudi Arabia from punishment or censure for its years worth of war crimes in Yemen. The U.S. also has no problem selling billions of dollars worth of munitions and military hardware to those regimes. The Trump administration is not new in this regard; President Barack Obama sold over $115 billion to the Saudis during his two terms in office.
It was under Trump’s leadership, Haley said, that the U.S. “passed the toughest sanctions on North Korea in history.” True enough. The sanctions are very tough. On paper, they place a significantly low quota on the amount of coal the Kim dynasty can export and the number of barrels of fuel oil it can import. They also crack down or outright prohibit pretty much every North Korean export. Yet those sanctions, while relatively effective in squeezing Pyongyang’s accounts, have done nothing whatsoever to change Kim Jong Un’s calculus (does anyone honestly think Pyongyang is going to trade away its nuclear deterrent?). The sanctions have become an end in themselves.
“President Trump did the right thing and ripped up the Iran nuclear deal,” Haley declared. Her definition of “right,” however, is a curious one. If by “right” she means making the situation worse, then Haley is on the money. Iran has responded to the U.S. withdrawal by boosting its enriched uranium stockpile fivefold, installing more advanced centrifuges, and rejecting any negotiations until Washington first returns to the agreement. Not once did Haley speak about any of this. Why give viewers the full context when you can just stick with dishonest one-liners?
A foreign policy heavyweight Nikki Haley is not.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
