Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a career diplomat, is the presumptive President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Ms. Greenfield has a lengthy record of foreign service experience. Her long in-depth involvement in African affairs will help her in her new job as U.S. ambassador to the UN, where African issues constitute a significant part of the Security Council’s agenda. However, Greenfield will also bring with her a bureaucratic foreign policy establishment mindset.
From 2013 to 2017, Greenfield was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. The Trump administration terminated her in 2017. Greenfield previously served as Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources (2012-2013). Her 34-year diplomatic career also included an ambassadorship to Liberia, and foreign postings in Switzerland (at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations), Pakistan, Kenya, The Gambia, Nigeria, and Jamaica. However, Greenfield has no discernable experience dealing with issues relating to China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, all of which will most certainly come up at the UN. She also has no discernable experience on issues pertaining to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, where the UN invariably sides with the Palestinians.
At Greenfield’s appearance in Delaware last week when Biden introduced her as his pick for the UN ambassador position, Greenfield declared that “America is back. Multilateralism is back. Diplomacy is back.”
America, smart multilateralism, and smart diplomacy never left. The Trump administration put America first to be sure. Realists know that every country advances its own national interests first, whether they say so or not. But putting America first and smart multilateralism are not mutually exclusive, as Biden and his team seem to think. Responding to Greenfield’s comment about multilateralism, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that “multilateralism for the sake of hanging out with your buddies at a cool cocktail party, that’s not in the best interest of the United States of America. We work with nations when we have common interests, and we develop coalitions that actually deliver real results and reflect the reality on the ground.”
What worries believers in American exceptionalism the most about Linda Thomas-Greenfield is her defeatism regarding America’s future and its role in the world. Greenfield co-authored an article for Foreign Policy, along with William J. Burns, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, that contained this very disturbing passage:
“The contours of a new agenda for diplomatic reform have to flow from a sensible reinvention of the United States’ role in the world. … U.S. diplomacy has to accept [this] country’s diminished, but still pivotal, role in global affairs. It has to apply greater restraint and discipline; it must develop a greater awareness of the United States’ position and more humility about the wilting power of the American example.”
Diminished role? Humility? Wilting power? These are the words of an apologist who will enter the UN with her head down, ready to go along to get along.
Greenfield also believes that a “major priority is the need to treat the lack of diversity in the diplomatic corps as a national security crisis.” This is taking political correctness to a whole new level. Greenfield listed in her remarks last week “social justice” as one of the “challenges we face,” along with “a global pandemic, a global economy, a global climate change crisis, mass migration and extreme poverty.” Global terrorism, cyberattacks, nuclear proliferation and raging armed conflicts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East did not make her list of challenges.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield should look to former U.S. ambassadors to the UN like Nikki Haley, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan as role models to follow. Unfortunately, it is more likely that she will follow in the footsteps of America’s feckless UN ambassadors such as Samantha Power.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a career diplomat, is the presumptive President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Ms. Greenfield has a lengthy record of foreign service experience. Her long in-depth involvement in African affairs will help her in her new job as U.S. ambassador to the UN, where African issues constitute a significant part of the Security Council’s agenda. However, Greenfield will also bring with her a bureaucratic foreign policy establishment mindset.
