U.S. President Donald Trump nominated State Department spokeswoman and former Fox TV news anchor Heather Nauert Friday as ambassador to the United Nations.
Trump told reporters that Nauert, who is in line to take over from Nikki Haley, had done well at the State Department.
“She’s very talented, very smart, very quick, and I think she’s going to be respected by all,” Trump said.
Nauert, 48, had been touted for the post since October when Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, seen as entertaining future political ambitions, announced that she was stepping down.
Nauert — a former anchor of “Fox and Friends,” among the television-loving Trump’s favorite shows — became the spokeswoman of the State Department with no foreign policy experience.
U.N. diplomats said privately they hoped that Nauert will be an advocate for the United Nations within the Trump administration, to counter the anti-U.N. views of national security adviser John Bolton.
French Ambassador Francois Delattre told AFP that he looked forward to working with Nauert and expressed hope that she will “continue, like Nikki Haley, to be a bridge between Washington and the U.N. at a time when we more than ever need an America that is engaged with the U.N. in world affairs and committed to our shared values, beginning with human rights.”
The United States in June quit the U.N. Human Rights Council, which it sees as biased against Israel and where countries with questionable human rights records have too much of a say.
Nauert needs confirmation in the Senate, where Trump’s Republican Party holds a majority.
It is widely expected that the position would lose its current cabinet status, meaning she would be clearly subordinate to Bolton and her current boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “very much looks forward to working with Ms. Nauert when she assumes her post and continuing the very productive and strong working relationship he enjoyed with Ambassador Haley,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.
Praise for the appointment came from Israel, which has long counted on the United States to veto unfriendly resolutions on the U.N. Security Council.
“Ms. Nauert has stood by the State of Israel in her previous positions, and I have no doubt that the cooperation between our two countries will continue to strengthen as ambassador to the U.N.,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said in a statement.
Haley, in what could be a final diplomatic push, on Thursday failed in a bid for the U.N. General Assembly to condemn the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas for firing rockets at Israel.
But for the United States, the vote also succeeded in reinforcing its stance that the world body is biased against Israel.