Could Nikki Haley Emerge <br>As America’s Joan of Arc <br>Against World Government

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Could Nikki Haley emerge as our Joan of Arc in the struggle against the folly of world government? It’s starting to look that way as America gets set to mark the centenary of the League of Nations.

The League of Nations was the 14th of President Woodrow Wilson’s famous — or infamous — 14 points (or peace principles). He unveiled the idea in a speech to Congress 100 years ago next month.

Wilson, a Democrat, tried to hornswoggle the Senate into joining the League. Luckily for those who cherish American freedom, Republicans gained control of the Senate, which rejected the scheme.

The hero of that showdown was Senator William Borah of Idaho. (And the Chicago Tribune, which got a hold of the treaty while it was still a secret and, in a sensational scoop, published it.)

Borah gave a famous speech in the Senate, warning that if we accepted the treaty we’d have “forfeited and surrendered, once and for all, the great policy of ‘no entangling alliances’ ” — a reference to a principle George Washington expounded in his prophetic farewell address. The Senate rejected the League of Nations unambiguously.

After World War II, the idea of world government emerged again in the form of the United Nations. America ratified the UN Charter in 1945, opening the way for the redemption of the Jews in the state of Israel.

For the United Nations, it’s been downhill ever since. It has made it its business to marginalize the Jewish state that it once helped bring into being. It’s a cockpit of Israel’s enemies.

Enter the heroic Nikki Haley. We’ve had several towering UN ambassadors — Jeane Kirkpatrick, John Bolton, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan come to mind.

It’s hard, though, to top the performance of the former governor of South Carolina in her first year at Turtle Bay, where this week she wheeled on the General Assembly.

Mrs. Haley did that after the Security Council tried to ask America to withdraw its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. She used our veto to stop that colder than a mackerel.

Then the General Assembly, which includes all 193 UN members, set for Thursday a similar, but symbolic, vote. Mrs. Haley promptly tweeted a warning: “The US will be taking names.”

Brava, I say. Good for her. And bravo for President Trump, who, she warned in separate e-mail, will take note “of each and every vote on this issue.”

What a contrast to the Obama administration. When Congress wouldn’t approve President Barack Obama’s appeasement of Iran’s atomic ambitions, he took it to the United Nations, which obliged.

A month before leaving office, Mr. Obama abstained while the U.N. Security Council declared as illegal Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and its stewardship of Judaism’s holy sites in Jerusalem.

Mr. Trump, though, reacted to Mrs. Haley’s warning by reminding the White House press that the United Nations mendicants take hundreds of millions, even billions from the United States “and then they vote against us.”

“Let them vote against us,” he added. “We’ll save a lot.”

Which brings us back to Woodrow Wilson and world government. A century after the League and after nearly 75 years of the United Nations, what has world government delivered for America?

So bankrupt is the United Nations that even President Clinton’s ambassador, Madeleine Albright, started questioning its value and pushing the idea of a world body limited to the democracies.

That sounds great, in theory. Feature, though, what Haley is confronting this week. The European democracies are at the forefront of this fight against America and Israel. It’s not the revanchist right in Europe. It’s Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and their whole ilk.

There’s no benign way to explain what’s going on. It’s an example of how the idea of world government has emerged as an enabler of the old hatred.

The centenary of the League of Nations is a moment to start rolling back the folly of world government. Mr. Trump, after all, warned during his campaign that he could take on the United Nations.

He called it “not a friend of democracy” and “not a friend to freedom.” Which is no doubt why he made a point of praising Mrs. Haley this week. He’s not going to let the United Nations burn her metaphorically at the stake.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.


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