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Report: Nikki Haley Is Resigning

Haley's tenure as U.N. ambassador was fairly brief and not very successful.
nikki haley

NBC News reports that Nikki Haley will be resigning from her position as ambassador to the United Nations:

In an unexpected development, President Donald Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, plans to resign, NBC News has confirmed.

Haley informed her staff that she plans to resign. The news, first reported by Axios, comes ahead of an announcement she plans to make with President Donald Trump at the White House Tuesday morning.

Haley’s tenure as U.N. ambassador was fairly brief and not very successful. The Security Council did approve additional North Korea sanctions during her time there. Otherwise, she was known mostly for ineffectively promoting the administration’s Iran obsession, picking fights with most other states over Israel, and calling attention to how isolated the U.S. has become following the withdrawal from the JCPOA. Her last big effort at the U.N. was the Security Council session last month that was originally supposed to focus on criticizing Iran. The administration changed the subject of the meeting to nonproliferation, but that still allowed all of the other members to tout their support for the nuclear deal and criticize U.S. withdrawal from the agreement. If that was meant to be Haley’s crowning achievement before she left, it didn’t work out very well.

Trump’s decision to appoint Haley to this position struck me as odd from the beginning. Haley had no diplomatic or foreign policy experience, and beyond the usual knee-jerk “pro-Israel” reactions she did not have any record of talking or thinking about foreign policy. It is taken for granted that she took the job to build up her credentials on foreign policy, but her stint as ambassador has been so short that I’m not sure that it will do her very much good in future political campaigns. When she was appointed, I said that “this may prove to be a rather fruitless detour for the next few years.” Haley’s resignation after less than two years in the job suggests that she concluded that there was no point in sticking around any longer.

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