I was awakened out of my reverie the other morning by a shocking news flash: Nikki Haley was resigning from her post as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations! According to initial reports, the envoy’s announcement was “sudden” and “unexpected” and “caught Washington”—certainly caught me—“off guard.”
Given the protocol of breaking news stories, and the breathless way they’re reported, I assumed that Ambassador Haley, who is generally regarded as one of the shinier lights in the Trump administration, had reached the limits of her endurance with our mercurial president and quit overnight. I guessed that Donald Trump had blundered into some diplomatic briar patch, making Haley’s thankless task more burdensome than usual, or that Haley had (at long last) recovered her conscience after an inflammatory White House tweet.
I pictured the demure, dignified ex-governor of South Carolina firing off a more-sorrowful-than-angry letter of resignation, thanking the president for the opportunity to serve but letting everyone know that she’d reached the end of her tether.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I switched on the television to find Ambassador Haley and President Trump seated beside one another in the Oval Office, trading compliments and downplaying the significance of her impending departure. It turned out that far from being “sudden,” Haley’s intention had been communicated to Trump as long ago as the spring and was, therefore, “unexpected” only by the assembled press corps. She had not, as the bulletins suggested, marched (or been shoved) out of her office onto the pavement but planned to step down at the end of the year, three months hence.
At this point, speculation switched immediately from why Haley was leaving to what she intended to do as a private citizen. Far be it from me to have the slightest idea: She has already been a two-term governor of her home state, both of whose incumbent senators (Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott) seem in place for the long haul. Perhaps she has a presidential campaign in mind, or another high-ranking post, or the presidency of something other than the United States.
In any case, Haley’s future seems bright. And the only conclusion I could draw with confidence about this episode was that the media are so intent on revealing discord in Trumpworld that a standard-issue news story with a happy ending was initially cast as a White House implosion.
What intrigues me about it, however, is not so much what it reveals about Nikki Haley as what it tells us about our complicated relationship with the U.N. Inasmuch as the United Nations, since its birth in the postwar euphoria of 1945, has fallen considerably in public esteem in the past seven decades, it is interesting to note that the American representatives remain, almost invariably, public figures of consequence. Nowadays, the average citizen is unlikely to be able to identify the secretary general of the organization—for the record, it’s António Guterres of Portugal—but the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. still enjoys a certain celebrity.
There are two reasons for this. The first is strictly vocational. Being the American representative to the world organization is, in practice, a signal of intent—why has the president appointed this person?—and a sign of the nominee’s status in political life. Some of our better-known envoys have been statesmen rewarded for past services: Henry Cabot Lodge (1953-60), Adlai Stevenson (1961-65), William Scranton (1976-77), Vernon Walters (1985-89), Richard Holbrooke (1999-2001), John Danforth (2004-05). Others have been professional diplomats capping distinguished careers: Charles Yost (1969-71), Donald McHenry (1979-81), Thomas Pickering (1989-92), John Negroponte (2001-04), Zalmay Khalilzad (2007-09).
A more intriguing category has been the appointee in mid-career whose tenure at the U.N. may be seen as a kind of proving ground. George H.W. Bush (1971-73), Madeleine Albright (1993-97), and John Bolton (2005-06) passed their respective tests; Andrew Young (1977-79) and Bill Richardson (1997-98) were less successful. And in that sense, the alignment of the stars has a certain significance.
A natural opportunist like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1975-76) shrewdly parlayed his brief diplomatic tenure into an unlikely campaign for the Senate. Moynihan had arrived at just the moment when public disenchantment with the United Nations—this was the era of the Zionism-is-racism resolution (1975)—was reaching critical mass. Accordingly, his performance as a bull in the U.N. china shop played well to American audiences, enabling him in the following year to fend off a left-wing challenger (Rep. Bella Abzug) in New York’s Democratic primary and to defeat the Conservative incumbent (Sen. James Buckley) in the general election.
Sometimes, however, the cup is a poisoned chalice. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s famous persuasive powers managed to induce Justice Arthur Goldberg to abandon his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and succeed the recently deceased Adlai Stevenson at the U.N. Whatever Goldberg may have thought (or been promised) about future prospects, his tenure coincided with the flood tide of the Vietnam war—and his career in public service essentially ended with LBJ’s.
Which brings us to the second reason. Nikki Haley’s success during the past two seasons has had little to do with diplomacy and everything to do with American policy. No one is under the illusion that the United States exercises anything resembling the influence it wielded at the U.N. a half-century ago or that Haley would have had much effect on the institution. In the present epoch, the point of being envoy is not to shape the United Nations but to represent the United States, emphatically and without apology, in the world forum.
Like her predecessor Jeane Kirkpatrick (1981-85), Haley has been a steady, skillful, and formidable advocate for the policies of the president who appointed her and for the interests of the country she represents. Whatever effect this has had on the General Assembly, Ambassador Haley’s performance has been helpful to her patron, impressive to her colleagues, and deeply satisfactory to American opinion.
As it happens, Jeane Kirkpatrick’s public career never advanced beyond her U.N. tenure. The jury is just being impaneled on Nikki Haley’s.
