UPDATED (3/13): The Great Negotiator Never Negotiated With Nikki Haley. Trump Gave Her Power And Let Her Keep John McCain’s Foreign Policy Positions

Donald Trump,Foreign Policy,John McCain,Neoconservatism

            

Another mainstream Republican President Trump has empowered big time is Nimrata Nikki Haley, the 46-year-old daughter of immigrants from Punjab, India, former governor of South Carolina (where she disrespected Southern history by removing Robert E. Lee’s battle flag), and now US ambassador to the United Nations. I wonder which wars Haley will launch when her time comes to really call the shots?

Haley, heavily pushed by the Ivanka-Jared wing of the White House, waltzed into her job without conditions, having been given “a free hand to set foreign policy.”

Diplomats say “She doesn’t know enough about foreign policy to know what is her foreign policy.” Well, she knows enough to “distance herself from the new president on multiple key foreign-policy fronts, carving out an approach that hewed closer to Republican foreign-policy leaders in the Senate, including Bob Corker, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain. She pilloried Russia, denouncing Putin as an untrustworthy rival and dismissing the prospects of working productively with Assad in the war against the Islamic State.”

Even as she accepted Trump’s offer to serve at the U.N., Haley distanced herself from the new president on multiple key foreign-policy fronts, carving out an approach that hewed closer to Republican foreign-policy leaders in the Senate, including Bob Corker, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain. She pilloried Russia, denouncing Putin as an untrustworthy rival and dismissing the prospects of working productively with Assad in the war against the Islamic State….
Haley’s European colleagues noted that her core positions from Russia to Syria and Ukraine aligned neatly with their own, making her a potential partner who might soften the contours of the president’s controversial policies. “She couldn’t have been better from our point of view,” says one U.N. Security Council member. “She positioned herself comfortably at our end of the administration’s spectrum.”

MORE: “Candidate Haley: The portrait that emerges is of a retail politician turning U.N. diplomacy into a ticket to the White House.”

UPDATE (3/13):

The newly hired has Haley’s approval:

Neocons are happy about Mike Pompeo:

The woman who should have had the job. An old-school Democrat:

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