Over at Harper’s yesterday, Washington journalist Max Blumenthal broke a major story about the Trump administration and North Korea. His scoop was buried in a typically gutsy story from Max about UN Ambassador (and major neocon) Nikki Haley and a speech she delivered to an extremely right-wing think-tank shortly before she resigned on October 4th.
Less than a week before her resignation, Ambassador Haley made a pilgrimage to a decidedly immoderate, highly secretive organization of right-wing, mostly evangelical Republican operatives known as the Council for National Policy, or CNP. Her appearance before the group featured her last major speech before she announced that she would leave her official post. There was no public notice, no transcript. I was present as the only journalist inside the closed-door gathering.
Here’s the kicker. To work up her neo-fascist crowd, Haley cajoled them with “boastful yarns” about her tenure in New York and how “she used the widespread perception of President Trump as erratic and unpredictable to frighten her Chinese counterparts.” One way was by threatening them, as Richard Nixon liked to do, with some kind of apocalypse if they didn’t straighten out.
She once attempted to intimidate the Chinese ambassador with threats of a military invasion of North Korea, she said, warning that she had no idea what her boss was capable of. In a way, Haley had deployed a version of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” holding up Trump as an unstable actor who might do anything. It seemed that she herself also genuinely had no idea what Trump would do.
Incredible. Now imagine what might have happened if that Chinese diplomat had decided her threat to invade the DPRK was serious enough to warrant telling Kim Jong Un? Who knows what the response might have been if he thought it meant Trump’s “fire and fure” was now imminent? Harry Kazianis, the editor of The National Interest who was in Seoul with me last month, had an idea: they might have “decided to launch a preemptive nuclear attack.”
And to think that Haley is considered by our liberal elite to be the “moderate” and the “grown-up” in the ship of fools known as the Trump White House. So go read Max’s piece – it’s already getting wide exposure. Today it got picked up by Page Six at the New York Post and London’s The Daily Mail.
Nice work, Mr. Blumenthal.
