October 11, 2018
Daniel McAdams
Nikki Haley’s resignation as President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations came as quite a surprise. Haley seemed pleased to play her imagined role as the world’s procurator, as she used her UN perch to incessantly threaten and condemn all the global enemies of her fellow neoconservatives. She came to the job with no foreign policy experience and she will be leaving exactly as she arrived.
If Haley’s departure came as a surprise, so too did her appointment in the first place. During the primaries, she was famously in the “anyone but Donald Trump” camp of neocons, saying that Trump was “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president.”
Trump soon returned the compliment, Tweeting that, “The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!”
Nevertheless, like many neocons who had been critical of Trump, she found herself rewarded with a top position in the Administration. From her position she had consistently gotten ahead of her boss, the President, in policy pronouncements and at almost every turn she appeared to be pushing a Haley foreign policy rather than a Trump foreign policy
For example, just as President Trump was returning from his historic summit meeting in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin, where the US President spoke very optimistically about a new approach to US/Russian relations, Nikki Haley gave an interview in which she said, “we don’t trust Russia, we don’t trust Putin; we never will…they’re never going to be our friend…that’s a fact.”
Last September she acted as if she, rather than Trump, were the commander-in-chief, Tweeting of North Korea, “we cut 90% of trade and 30% of oil. I have no problem kicking it to Gen. Mattis because I think he has plenty of options.” The idea that she, and not her boss, would “kick it” to Defense Secretary Mattis was preposterous, but contradicting and countermanding Trump’s disappointingly rare bobs toward diplomacy and disengagement over bluster and bombs was a chief characteristic of Haley’s reign as UN chief finger-wagger.
President Trump had been extremely critical of Syria’s Assad, particularly after he fell for two false-flag rebel gas attacks blamed on Assad, but he had been careful not to explicitly set US policy as “Assad must go,” as had his predecessor. Nevertheless Nikki Haley again got out ahead of official US policy with her own policy, stating in September 2017 that, “we’re not going to be satisfied until we see a solid and stable Syria, and that is not with Assad in place.”
Nikki Haley had long been associated with neocon warhawk John Bolton and had also benefited from the largesse of GOP moneybags Sheldon Adelson, the Israel-obsessed casino magnate who bankrolled Haley’s PAC to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars in 2016 alone. Haley was Adelson’s kind of governor: While South Carolina’s executive, she signed the nation’s first law making it a criminal offense to support a boycott of Israel.
How did the mainstream media handle the surprise resignation of such an extreme warhawk? Someone one might consider on the far fringe of US political life? The New York Times mourned the departure of Ambassador Haley, Tweeting that it would be “leaving the administration with one less moderate Republican voice.”
“Moderate” voice?
For such a pro-war extremist to be considered “moderate” by the newspaper of record may strike some as odd, but as Glenn Greenwald so accurately explained
The reason NYT calls her “moderate” is because she affirms all of the standard pro-war, pro-imperial orthodoxies that are bipartisan consensus in Washington. That’s why @BillKristol reveres her. She was a Tea Party candidate, but “moderate” means: loves US wars & hegemony.
That’s it in a nutshell. Because in Washington being extreme pro-interventionist and pro-war is the orthodoxy. The facade that there are real differences between the Republican and Democrat party is carefully crafted by the mainstream media to cover the fact that we do live in a one-party state. Pro-war, pro-intervention, pro-bombing, pro-overthrow, pro-meddling – these are moderate positions. For Washington and the mainstream media, the extremists are the ones who wish to abide by the admonitions of our Founding Fathers that we go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
Well, it seems there are plenty of monsters closer to home.
So good riddance to Nikki Haley…but don’t hold your breath that it means the end of Nikki Haley-ism, which is the foundation of US foreign policy. Clearly we have much work left to do.
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Emma Olive 