UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has been in the news a lot recently.
Maybe you noticed.
Most notably she said the following about the future of Bashar al-Assad in Syria…
You pick and choose your battles and when we’re looking at this, it’s about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out.
…only to completely reverse course a few days later after the chemical attack in Idlib. And by “completely reverse course” I mean she said this:
There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime.
So basically, first there was no way the US was going to “sit there and focus on getting Assad out,” and then the next week there was “not any sort of option” that didn’t involve “sitting there and focusing on getting Assad out.”
To be fair, that second quote was made in a kind of “28 Days Later” scenario, so one can hardly blame her for changing her tone, but be that as it may, the 180 described above doesn’t exactly scream “consistency.”
And now we know why.
Because Haley, in her own words, is “a bull in a China shop.”
No, really.
Nikki Haley has displayed unusual prominence as a face of the Trump administration in its openings months. And according to her, the boss doesn’t mind.
Haley, with no prior national security experience and once a vociferous Trump critic, has nevertheless emerged as an outspoken foreign policy figure defending Trump’s worldview. And she’s doing so from her perch as the US Ambassador to the United Nations, a narrow gig that has not always been at the vanguard of an administration’s broader priorities.
“He has given me a lot of leeway to just say what I think and interpret what he thinks,” Haley said of the president in an interview with CNN’s Jamie Gangel. “I would never go rogue, because I’m very aware of who I work for.”
But Haley has used the UN to offer a hawkish veneer for Trump’s less interventionist foreign policy. She has blasted Russia in the wake of the domestic attack in Syria by Bashar al-Assad, which motivated a US airstrike by Trump earlier this month.
“I’m a strong voice by nature. I’m sometimes a bull in a china shop,” she said. “And, you know, he allows me to do that.“
I guess the problem there is it’s not entirely clear that what we want in a UN Ambassador is a “bull in a China shop.”
