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President-elect Trump‘s designated ambassador to the United Nations opposes any “slash and burn” of U.S. funding for the U.N., and assured Congress that Trump’s national security team would “educate” the incoming president about foreign policy issues.
“I know that [Trump] had made comments about the U.N., but those are not my feelings and I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen,” Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., said during her Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing.
GOP threats about U.N. funding cuts have been brewing since December, when President Obama allowed the Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the expansion of Israeli settlements in territories. Haley’s South Carolina colleague, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, threatened U.N. funding cuts in an unsuccessful effort to induce other members of the U.N. Security Council to veto the resolution.
“I do not think we need to pull money from the U.N.,” Haley told Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “We don’t believe in slash and burn. It wasn’t anything I considered as governor, it’s not something I would consider as ambassador, or anything that I would suggest back to you for Congress.”
That conflicts with Trump’s comments during the campaign. “We get nothing out of the United Nations other than good real estate price,” Trump told the New York Times in March. “We get nothing out of the United Nations. They don’t respect us, they don’t do what we want, and yet we fund them disproportionately again. Why are we always the ones that funds everybody disproportionately, you know?”
Haley said Americans and world leaders shouldn’t put as much weight on Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
“Once the president-elect gets to hear from his national security team, I think what he says after that will be most important,” she said. “And I think those are the focuses that we’re going to have with the National Security Council in making sure that we educate and inform him of what we know, inform him of strategies, and go along with whatever decision he decides to make.”
Haley said that doesn’t mean U.S. funding for the U.N. will never change. But Haley will only recommend cuts when programs are ineffective, rather than as a way to punish other countries for voting in a way that the United States opposes.
“If, for example, we see in the Human Rights Council that Cuba’s there and China’s there and we’re not seeing human rights move in a way that American values are supposed to, yes I’m going to come back to you and I’m going to say: ‘This is a real problem; this doesn’t follow our mission,” she said. “I may go there and find out there’s a way to resolve that. And so, with those I’ll come back to you; but, no, I do not think we should have a slash and burn of the U.N.”
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/haley-downplays-trumps-threat-to-defund-un/article/2612224