Political analysts see
Trump favors U.N. Ambassador Haley over State’s Tillerson
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s star on the rise in the orbit of White House politics.
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump’s two most high-profile diplomats, Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley, were with him at a meeting with African leaders in New York last week when the president took the lectern to offer a big reveal.
He had decided to dispatch one of them to a new on-the-ground peace mission in violence-plagued South Sudan and Congo.
“I’m sending Ambassador Nikki Haley,” Trump declared of his administration’s United Nations representative.
That the president gave the nod to Haley and not Tillerson — the secretary of state who outranks her as a member of the Cabinet — was not necessarily evidence, in and of itself, that she was upstaging him.
But Haley’s prominence at Trump’s side through days of meetings at the annual U.N. General Assembly continued a rapid and remarkable rise for the former South Carolina governor, and highlighted her growing influence and ambition within an administration struggling to project a coherent foreign policy.
As Trump made his debut at the General Assembly, he was accompanied nearly as often by Haley as by administration officials like Tillerson who are technically higher in the pecking order. Back in Washington, Haley’s rising profile has led to speculation that she would be a potential replacement for Tillerson if the increasingly isolated State Department chief decides to step aside.
Haley has vehemently rejected the idea, saying repeatedly she is not considering such a move and that Tillerson is not planning to leave.
“There’s going to be chatter about things,” she said at a press briefing last week when asked about speculation on her future.
“What I’m trying to do is do a good job,” she said. “I’m trying to serve the president and the country the best I can. If people want to take it as anything else, that’s not something I spend time on.”
It’s not that Tillerson was missing in action here; he also accompanied Trump to numerous events and held meetings with foreign delegations, including blunt discussions with the Iranians over Trump’s sharp criticism of the U.N.-backed nuclear deal. The president appears to be leaning toward declaring Tehran in violation of the agreement before a certification deadline next month.
But it was Haley and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, not Tillerson, who previewed the trip for reporters in the White House briefing room. And it was Haley who introduced Trump on Monday at the U.N.’s opening session on internal reforms, touting his “businessman’s eye” for seeing potential in the world body that Trump had criticized as ineffectual during his campaign.
To outside observers, the differences between Haley, a former politician, and Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil chief executive, have been stark. Though she came to the job with virtually no foreign policy experience, Haley has worked hard to establish relationships with foreign officials and journalists, while Tillerson has exhibited a sense of isolation within his own department and has kicked most of the State Department reporters off his government jet.
“Nikki is a politician and has worked as a politician her whole life,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, global risk assessment firm. “She’s more flexible and willing to be charismatic. The lack of experience has not hurt her.”
Haley’s influence within the administration has emerged in surprising ways for a onetime critic of Trump, whose foreign policy and national security views hewed to mainstream conservatism.
She is an interpreter for Trump’s “America First” agenda at the U.N. and has become a frequent presence on political talk shows, emerging as the loudest administration voice, outside the president himself, in criticizing the Iran deal. Despite nearly universal support for the Iran deal among her U.N. colleagues, Haley has become the megaphone for Trump’s deep suspicions about the landmark agreement negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
It was Haley who spearheaded U.S. efforts to convince the United Nations to enact two recent rounds of tough new economic sanctions on North Korea.
The task required some tricky diplomacy with China and Russia, and won admiration among important U.S. allies.
At the same time, her contention during a Security Council session that North Korea is “begging for war” provoked a round of eyerolling from foreign diplomats who interpreted her comments as a needlessly bellicose echo of Trump’s amped-up language.
But she has made an impression at the United Nations, joking about using her high heels to kick opponents in the shin. And for a Trump administration that has been criticized for a lack of minorities and general hostility to foreigners, Haley, the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants, offers a prominent public face of diversity.
Analysts said Haley would pursue a different course at State than Tillerson, who has focused on cutting the budget and the bureaucracy in the name of efficiency.
“That’s not what Nikki would do,” Bremmer said. “But she would be a more capable spokesperson for the Trump administration’s foreign policy.”