Elise Stefanik Should Model Her Tenure at the UN on Reagan Patriot Jeane Kirkpatrick
President Trump has nominated New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the fourth-ranking member of the House of Representatives who served on House committees dealing with our armed services and intelligence agencies, to be America’s ambassador to the United Nations (U.N.). Stefanik was educated at Harvard University and previously served on Bush 43’s domestic policy council and in the office of the chief of staff.
In her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, she pledged to bring Trump’s “America First” and “Peace Through Strength” agenda to the U.N., and emphasized the need to reform the U.N., including withholding U.S. money from “entities that are counter to American interests, antisemitic, or engaging in fraud, corruption, or terrorism.” If Stefanik is confirmed, which is likely, she should take as her model Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Kirkpatrick served as President Reagan’s U.N. ambassador between 1981 and 1985. She got that job largely based on an article she wrote for Commentary magazine titled “Dictatorship and Double Standards,” which criticized President Carter’s foreign policy of ignoring the important distinctions between totalitarianism and authoritarianism and abandoning long-time American allies in Iran and Nicaragua in the name of “human rights” — leaving those countries to the tender mercies of Islamic mullahs and Sandinista communists.
When Richard Allen, who served as Reagan’s first national security adviser, showed Reagan the article, Reagan called it “terrific,” and after meeting with Kirkpatrick offered her the U.N. position. Kirkpatrick, a Democrat, accepted the job and became one of Reagan’s best foreign policy advisers and pushed Reagan’s agenda forcefully and articulately at the U.N.
Kirkpatrick was given Cabinet rank and a place on the National Security Council. As her biographer Peter Collier noted, Kirkpatrick inherited a staff of career employees “who seemed to think that their job was to promote and defend the U.N., and who reacted sullenly when she told them that the job of the U.S. mission was representing the interests of the United States.” Stefanik will likely face the same reaction from career employees from the Obama and Biden years who will resist Trump’s “America First” agenda. She should meet such resistance with the same steely resolve that Kirkpatrick did.
Kirkpatrick was an outspoken advocate of Reagan’s foreign policy, using the U.N. forum to promote U.S. interests in Central America, the Middle East, southwest Asia, and vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. She did not apologize for the United States; she proudly proclaimed its virtues and put other countries on notice that the United States was no longer a punching bag and would treat other countries the way they treated the U.S.
This was quite a change from the days of Carter’s U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young who once called Ayatollah Khomeini a “saint,” compared dissidents in Soviet prisons to “political prisoners” in American prisons, and almost derailed Middle East peace talks by meeting with the PLO.
If confirmed, Stefanik will succeed Biden’s U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield who condemned the U.S. for “the original sin of slavery” and for “weav[ing] white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.” Thomas-Greenfield was in the mold of Obama U.N. Ambassadors Susan Rice and Samantha Power, who Jonathan Tobin noted, embraced multilateralism and bowing to Third World dictators. Power is noted for her promotion of humanitarian military intervention under the ideology of “responsibility to protect,” a recipe for endless wars that have no relation to U.S. national security interests.
Stefanik is well-advised to study Kirkpatrick’s tenure at the U.N., which clearly put America first. Biographer Collier called it “diplomacy without apology,” and Stefanik should replicate it.
A good place for her to start would be to read some of Kirkpatrick’s U.N. speeches and state papers that are collected in two volumes under the title Legitimacy and Force.
Jeane Kirkpatrick once remarked to Collier: “I’ve always been passionately in love with my country.” Collier wrote that for Kirkpatrick this was “not just a sentiment but a reflection of her inner light.” Watching Stefanik at her confirmation hearing gave me a sense that her passionate love of her country is also part of her inner light.
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