President Donald Trump has picked State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations (U.N.). This the same person who mentioned the allied D-Day invasion while praising the "strong relationship" between Germany and the United States. The problem with what Ms. Nauert said was not that she misspoke. The problem is that it showed that she had a complete lack of the most basic understanding of world history. Does the U.S. really want as an Ambassador to the U.N. someone who did not realize that in World War II the U.S. and its allies were fighting Germany? Are our choices for Ambassador that limited? The State Department employs roughly the following number of employees:
13,000 Foreign Service employees
11,000 Civil Service employees
45,000 local employees
Among all of those workers, apparently, the best that President Donald Trump could manage for U.N. Ambassador was someone who did not know who our enemies were in World War II. We need a U.N. Ambassador to be someone both highly intelligent and well educated, like former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, Madeleine Albright, or Susan Rice. In addition, for some people, like Madeleine Albright, the U.N. ambassadorship can be a stepping stone to Secretary of State. What if President Donald Trump decides someday to make Ms. Nauert his Secretary of State? That idea might seem farfetched, and yet, President Trump thinks his son-in-law Jared Kushner can solve the Middle East peace problem that no one else could solve.
You see, if a person does a good enough job worshipping President Donald Trump, he thinks that that person can do anything. He made Rick Perry head of the Department of Energy, and Rick Perry thinks that that department should be abolished. He made Matthew Whitaker Acting Attorney General, and Acting AG Whitaker got paid by a flim-flam company to intimidate and threaten its customers. Yet, I think both of them smile and nod at the correct times when President Trump is around—so one shall be head of the Department of Energy and one shall be the Acting Attorney General—President Trump has so commanded. So, the idea of making Heather Nauert America’s top diplomat is not completely out of the question in Trump World.
Regarding Spokeswoman Nauert’s possible new job, diplomacy, an essential part of being an ambassador, can make a huge difference in the relationships between countries. During the Cuban Missle Crisis in the early 1960s, it was diplomacy along with a restrained use of force by President Kennedy that may very well have saved the entire planet from burning up. At the start of the Gulf War in 1990, some think that better diplomacy might have made a big difference.
In 1990, Iraq complained that Kuwait was slant oil drilling into its own oil reserves. In other words, they claimed that Kuwait was basically drilling at an angle so that it was actually sucking out oil that was under Iraqi soil. In July of 1990, the current President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, deployed a massive amount of troops on Iraq’s border with Kuwait, which was seen by some around the world as a possible precursor to invasion. You see, in the 20th Century, there was generally only one reason why a country would mass troops on the border with another country—that country was planning to invade the country upon whose border it was massing its troops.
On July 25, 1990, after mentioning to President Hussein that his massive buildup of troops on the Kuwaiti border was of concern, American Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie later that day said:
We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.
So, President Hussein was massing his troops on the border, the same thing that the former U.S.S.R. did in December 1979 just before invading Afghanistan (when Russia lied to President Carter by telling him that they had no intention of invading), and Ambassador Glaspie thought that the proper thing to say was that the U.S. had no opinion on the dispute. It is true that that was the official U.S. position. Yet, a proper student of history might have mentioned to President Hussein how Hitler built up a huge army and invaded Poland, and at first the world sat back, but eventually, by the time World War II was over, Germany could only staff its army with twelve-year-olds because all other abled body men had been killed. She might have mentioned how by the end of the war, most German industries had been destroyed, much of the farmland had been bombed into disuse, and a huge number of houses had been obliterated.
Ambassador April Glaspie could have told him that the way wars ended was often totally different from what people expected. Furthermore, she might have said that, although Kuwait might not have been an ally with the U.S. at that exact moment, if Iraq invaded, Kuwait might suddenly decide that it wanted a whole lot of help from any country that was willing to help, since it had a much smaller army than Iraq. In addition, Kuwait might also suddenly decide that it wanted very much to be a U.S. ally the very day of the invasion--just as Poland wanted all of the allies it could get after Hitler invaded in WWII, and just as Afghanistan wanted all of the allies it could get after the U.S.S.R invaded in December 1979. In addition, Kuwait had something very valuable to offer the countries that helped it—a whole lot of oil—which it could use to entice other countries to help Kuwait if needed.
Ambassador Glaspie could have also mentioned that the U.S. might really like to have an ally in the Middle East with so much oil, especially since then-President George H.W. Bush was a Republican, and Republicans really liked helping the Oil Companies because the Oil Companies contributed so much money to Republican campaigns. She could have also mentioned that the U.S. vigorously and massively supported all of our allies. She could have said that in world politics, the invaders often are seen as the bad guys, and that often many other countries rush to the aid of the invaded country, even if those countries might not have intended to do anything at first, and that if enough countries helped Kuwait, the end result for Iraq might turn out to be very bad, just like the end result for Germany at the end of WWII.
As one can see, having the right diplomat, who is highly intelligent and also well versed in things like politics and world history, might have made all the difference in the world back in 1990. Yes, it is true that even if our ambassador to Iraq had gone into great detail about how many ways Iraq invading Kuwait could go wrong, President Hussein might have invaded anyway, but wouldn’t it have been nice to have an ambassador that at least had the sense to realize that the there was a real possibility that Iraq might invade Kuwait and to also realize that it might make sense to try and give President Hussein some good reasons not to invade?
This is why the idea of appointing Heather Nauert as U.N. Ambassador is essentially a terrible idea—because with Heather Nauert, trying to do something like talking the representative of a country out of a really bad idea probably would never occur to her, and even if it did, she probably would have neither the intelligence nor the knowledge to pull it off. Nikki Haley as U.N. Ambassador did not blindly parrot whatever she was told to say—instead, she did what she thought was right. When the chips were down, would Heather Nauert try do the right thing, or would she just do what she was told to do, regardless of the consequences?