Steven Groves is an avowed opponent of international pacts

The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, has candidly described herself as a newcomer to the world of international diplomacy.

For guidance, she has relied, in part, on an important adviser plucked from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank: Steven Groves.

Mr. Groves, who is Ms. Haley’s chief of staff, has described himself as a champion of U.S. sovereignty and has written forcefully against international agreements. Some of those ideas have infused the Ambassador’s remarks so far.

He has argued for the United States to “sever relations” with the UN Human Rights Council (Ms. Haley this week called the council “so corrupt”), and has outlined steps that the Trump administration could take to pull out of the Paris climate agreement (Ms. Haley has said she worried about international commitments that could hurt U.S. business).

He has inveighed against U.S. cooperation with the International Criminal Court, and has been critical of international treaties on subjects including the banning of anti-personnel land mines, the rights of disabled people, and the law of the sea, accession to which, he once testified, “would obligate the United States to answer to a committee of ‘disability experts’ in violation of principles of U.S. sovereignty”.

He has also argued against the so-called responsibility to protect doctrine that advocates foreign intervention, including through military means, in cases where civilians face the risk of genocide.

Some of his previously expressed views are no longer public.

After the Orlando, Florida, nightclub shooting, he took a swipe at Loretta Lynch, then the Attorney General, who sought to assure Muslims that their rights would be protected. “THAT must be reassuring since the patrons of the #Pulse nightclub were also under DOJ ‘protection,’” Mr. Groves said on Twitter, with the hashtag #ShootBack.

That post has since been taken down. A screenshot of it was available on the Internet Archive. The U.S. Mission did not respond to a request for an interview with Mr. Groves.

Top agenda

One of the main issues Ms. Haley has promised to tackle at the United Nations comes from the Heritage Foundation’s playbook: how to fix peacekeeping operations, the organisation’s biggest, costliest element.

Heritage Foundation analysts have advocated mission-by-mission scrutiny of peacekeeping operations, and argue that the United States should pay no more than 25% of the total budget — down from a little more than 28%. Both items have become part of the Ambassador’s agenda.

Cap on funding

Ms. Haley said this week that she wanted to do a thorough review of the United Nations’ 16 peacekeeping operations to “determine where we need to augment, where we need to restructure, and where we need to cut back”.

She also said she would seek to cap U.S. funding at 25%. Morgan Vina, another Heritage alumnus and a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations aide, is involved in the review of peacekeeping missions.

“Haley is left with the unenviable task of finding logic for cuts,” said Richard Gowan, a foreign-policy analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations, who calls himself a “liberal” scholar of the United Nations. “The work Heritage has done on peacekeeping gifts her that on a plate.”

Ms. Haley won praise from Brett D. Schaefer, a Heritage Foundation fellow. “She’s asking the right questions in terms of UN peacekeeping operations,” he said. NYT