THE United State’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has resigned.
Reports from the US media say Haley’s resignation came as a surprise to a number of senior foreign policy officials in the Trump administration. She is one of President Trump’s inner cabinet and was appointed just four days after Trump took office.
Although prior to Trump’s presidency, Haley had been one of his most frequent critics and she endorsed Marco Rubio during the Republican primary. Her appointment was viewed, at the time, as an Olive branch from Trump.
President Trump accepted Haley’s resignation, saying she had told him six months ago that she wanted to take some time off.
Haley served as governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, the first woman and Indian-American to serve as governor in that state.
As an Ambassador to the UN, Haley was quite outspoken and had overseen the U.S’ recent exit from the UN Human Rights Council, which Haley referred to as a “failure”.
Speaking to White House correspondents on Tuesday, Halley said she will not be leaving office until the end of the year in order to give room for a new ambassador to take over.
She also stressed that she will not be running for any office in the next US election by 2020, but will campaign for Trump. And in his response, Trump said the door is always open for Haley to return to the administration in any role she pleases. “You can have your pick,” he said.
Before accepting Trump’s appointment, Haley had given him the condition that she would be allowed to be herself and say what she wanted. She also demanded to be a member of the Cabinet and the National Security Council, privileges enjoyed by her predecessors during the Obama administration.
“I said ‘I am a policy girl, I want to be part of the decision-making process. He (Trump) said, ‘done.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to be a wallflower or a talking head. I want to be able to speak my mind.’ He said, ‘That is why I asked you to do this. In all honesty, I didn’t think they were going to take me up on everything I asked for. And they gave me all that. So how do you turn that down?” , Haley said during an interview with CNN in 2017.
And in the more than one and a half years that she served as the US Ambassador to the UN, Haley did speak her mind.