Israel policy defined Nikki Haley at the U.N. Will it define her next act?
WASHINGTON – One year since leaving the Trump administration, Nikki Haley’s tenure at the United Nations is already paying back dividends as she plots the next steps in her political career.
The former U.N. ambassador’s embrace of Israel solidified her standing as a star of the right and endeared her to influential constituencies in a powerful political bloc should she seek higher office – like the presidency in 2024.
On the speaker circuit and in private dinners, the former Republican governor of South Carolina is building on a well-established national brand, nurturing a base of supporters and donors that will prove critical in any future political race.
“I’ve taken a break the past several months from being very public,” Haley said in a recent interview with Mcclatchy. “But I’ve been spending time talking to people, talking about my views, and you’ll continue to see that ramp up more.”
Haley is now promoting a new memoir, “With All Due Respect,” that tells a story of how she “stumbled” on Israel as the issue that would come to define her career at the United Nations – and which has continued to shape her public persona ever since.
“The issue has resonated because, to people over all in America, they appreciate Israel’s values, they appreciate Israel’s fight,” Haley told Mcclatchy. “There are a lot of Jewish communities that go out of their way to thank me. I feel bad for that, because all I did was tell the truth.”
But Haley’s support of Israel is also a product of the kind of calculation that has defined other moments in her political ascent – and the result of taking advantage of being at the right place at the right time.
Rob Godfrey, Haley’s longtime spokesman in the governorship, said that Haley has always balanced principle and politics in the causes she has championed.
“While standing up to legislators and standing up for Israel were the right things to do on principle, making those signature issues and getting loud about them was the right thing to do politically,” Godfrey said. “Very few people are as good at making issues work for them as Nikki Haley.”
Haley was groomed for her U.N. post inside a political framework.
When she was selected by newly elected President Donald Trump as U.N. ambassador in the fall of 2016, she had a gaping foreign policy hole in her resume.
As governor of South Carolina, the extent of her engagement with Israel
was when, in 2015, she signed a law _ the first of its kind in the country – to counter efforts to boycott, divest and sanction Israel over its policies toward the Palestinians.
In the lead-up to her confirmation hearings, Haley needed a crash course in international affairs. The Trump transition team supplied the tools.
Her briefing materials were culled mainly from experts with conservative points of view. Scholars with right-leaning think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and former Republican administration officials like Elliott Abrams were the tutors who helped inform Haley’s understanding of the global arena, including Israel.
She relied, too, on Jon Lerner, her longtime political consultant with an academic background in foreign relations, who would become her deputy at the United Nations.
When Haley was confirmed in early 2017, she also was aware the new administration wanted to do things differently at the United Nations than had been done during former President Barack Obama’s tenure. Conditions inside the organization were ripe for her to do that.
She started amid fierce bipartisan anger with the outgoing Democratic administration for its abstention on a U.N. Security Council resolution that declared Israeli construction in Eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank as illegal activity. That U.S. abstention allowed the resolution to pass.