Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has announced her candidacy for President today, becoming the first potential candidate to take on Trump in 2024.

With little in her record from her time in the Trump cabinet or at the UN to brag about, Haley’s announcement speech involved a lot of talk about race and racism, being the daughter of Asian immigrants.

“I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants — not Black, not white. I was different,” she said in a tweeted video of herself amidst family photos.

As usual, with presidential candidates favored by the mainstream press, reports on her announcement didn’t include any clues as to what manner of leader the country would have if she were elected. Many of America’s former UN ambassadors have used their position to try and gain support for war crimes—there’s no sense in sugar-coating it.

Madeline Albright, UN Amb. for Bill Clinton famously admitted that she thought 500,000 dead Iraqi children due to US sanctions was “worth it”. UN Amb. for Obama Susan Rice lobbied the UN for support in the NATO attack on Libya on humanitarian grounds, which turned it into a humanitarian nightmare of anarchy, chattel-slavery, and Islamic insurgency across North and West Africa.

John Negroponte, UN Amb. for George W. Bush Jr. did much the same as Rice on behalf of the Iraq invasion in 2003, knowing full well Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Richard Holbrooke did the same during the Balkans War when NATO intervened to bomb Serbia.

Haley didn’t get the chance to advocate for the start of or support for a war, though she did express contentment at the US withdrawing from several UN accords and positions including UNESCO and the Human Rights Council.

She did however try extensively, saying that because North Korea didn’t respond to US sanctions they should be destroyed, that China and Russia should lose their seats on the UN Sec. Council over their response in Syria, and that Iran’s government wasn’t legitimate.

Haley’s record for future reference

In September 2017, following another round of sanctions that blocked 90% of trade and 30% of gas imports to the impoverished country of North Korea, Haley admitted she had “no problem” with them being attacked by the US. She said she was particularly proud to help continue the “Maximum Pressure” sanctions campaign on North Korea, even following more than 30 years of abject failure in that policy throughout many presidential administrations.

In April of 2018, Haley went on a tangent at the UN Security Council over Russia’s exception with the renewal of the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JMI) that was meant to investigate claims that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attacked civilians with sarin gas in 2017 and chlorine gas in 2018.

“The Assad regime continued using chemical weapons against the Syrian people,” Haley said. “One member of this council shielded the Assad regime from any consequences”.

It must have been difficult for the mainstream press to admit at the time, judging how far down in the report the fact was, that the Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia disputed the findings of the JMI because the investigators didn’t even visit the attack site.

That would become a theme, as investigative reporter Aaron Mate for The Grayzone spent years covering a scandal that tore the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons apart following their faked reports on the sites of the alleged gas attacks in Syria.

Here she is unsurprisingly backing the US regime change operation in Venezuela, which WaL recently updated now is the opinion of virtually only the United States, and consists of backing a man who doesn’t and can’t hold political office, who was elected as a sort of Speaker of the House by a congress that has since been changed, and who was sent into exile by the government-in-exile he purported to represent.

Also chief on Haley’s resume was her enduring hatred of the Iranian regime. First she pushed for Trump not to certify Iranian compliance to the 2015 nuclear deal, and falsely claimed that there was proof that Iran was violating the deal, and then she supported reneging on the agreement entirely.

In 2021 her advocacy group Stand for America released a “policy book” which claimed without any evidence or even historical trend setting that China “is striving to control and conquer the world,” and warned that Iran is “plotting” terrible things against America, again without so much as a footnote.

If Republicans are looking for an alternative to Trumpism in 2024, let them look beyond this architect of his disjointed and disastrous foreign policy that made America’s diplomatic role in the world weaker than nearly any to come before. WaL

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