Nikki Haley, Leader

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, one of Team Trump’s shining stars, will leave at year’s end. We hope she’ll return to government service in due course, because she’s exactly the kind of leader this nation needs.

Moving to the United Nations from the South Carolina governor’s mansion, she hit the ground running, emerging from her first Security Council meeting on the Middle East to blast the world body’s obsessions with Israel at a time when ISIS was still in full slaughter mode, the Assad regime was killing civilians and terrorists were stockpiling rockets in Lebanon.

She’s kept on the same way: tough, graceful and principled. She led the way for new sanctions on North Korea, called out Iran’s weapons proliferation and support of terrorism, flagged Russia’s global crimes and generally whaled on the bad guys.

Oh, and also put a spotlight on profligate waste at the United Nations itself. It was also on her watch that Washington parted ways with the tyrant-coddling, Israel-bashing UN Human Rights Council.

In her resignation letter to President Trump, Haley wrote of her pride in serving with an administration that “stood strong for American values and interests, always placing America first.”

She preached sense at home, too, recently telling a high-school audience: “Real leadership is about persuasion, it’s about movement, it’s bringing people around to your point of view. Not shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way you do.”

Leaders, she said, must “have the courage to stand up to the mob.”

In 14 years in public office, Nikki Haley did just that — not least when, as governor, she got the Confederate flag removed from the statehouse grounds in the wake of the horrific 2015 Charleston church shooting.

Enjoy your time off, Ambassador: America will need you back soon enough.