Carlos Holmes Trujillo, left, Colombia’s foreign affairs minister, with Jonathan R. Cohen, center, deputy ambassador of the US to the UN, and Karel van Oosterom, Netherlands’ ambassador to the UN, in the Security Council, Oct. 10, 2018. Cohen has been nominated by Trump as ambassador to Egypt, which could leave the US mission to the UN desperately short of ambassadors. RICK BAJORNAS/UN PHOTO
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with President Trump at lunch with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc in Hanoi, Feb. 27, 2019. Pompeo and Trump marked international women’s month in March by actively eroding the reproductive health rights of women globally. RON PRZYSUCHA/STATE DEPARTMENT
Here’s how the United States government marked the 2019 monthlong celebration of the world’s women in March:
Koki Muli Grignon, a Kenyan diplomat, center, who managed the negotiations on the final document summarizing the annual UN meeting on women’s rights, told delegates that she had been sent nearly 1,000 text messages attacking her because of her work leading the debate. LAURA E. KIRKPATRICK
Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011 in Washington. As president, he has let the US ambassadorship to the UN, the country’s second-most important foreign policy role, sit empty for months. GAGE SKIDMORE/CREATIVE COMMONS
In August, 2017, more than half a million Rohingya refugees flooded across the border from Burma to Bangladesh to escape violence in Rakhine State, including pregnant women and children. The United States gave about $28 million in food and other goods, but the government’s global gag rule banned family planning aid, violating women’s rights, say the authors. ASHIQUE RUSHDI/USAID
Kelly Knight Craft, the US envoy to Canada, has been nominated by President Trump to be the next US representative to the UN. Here, she celebrates the Fourth of July in Ottawa with her husband, Joseph Craft III, a billionaire coal investor. The couple’s coal wealth could present a conflict of interest for Kelly Craft at the UN, where climate change is a major thrust of its work.
It’s easy to figure out why Donald Trump picked Kelly Knight Craft to be his ambassador to the United Nations.
At the 2018 meeting of the annual UN megaconference on women, a scene of which is captured above, the United States delegation created controversy over its conservative stances on women’s rights. This year, days before the meeting starts, the US has offered scant information on how it will participate, revealing major disorganization in the government. RYAN BROWN/UN WOMEN
Nikki Haley, the former US envoy to the UN, has been nominated to join the Boeing board, among other new ventures that could raise a lot of money for a possible presidential run by her. As governor of South Carolina, she helped Boeing expand its plant there, a move celebrated above, May 10, 2013. CREATIVE COMMONS
Two months after leaving the United Nations, Nikki Haley has assembled a political network that is laying the groundwork for a possible presidential run in 2024, or even in 2020 — should her mentor Donald Trump not run.
In Dakar, staff members from UN Women Senegal and other UN agencies attend a presentation on sexual harassment in the workplace, part of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, 2016.
As multilateralism takes a beating from President Trump amid the “new world disorder,” as one European diplomat put it, three women who know the United Nations inside and out through previous top leadership jobs have originated a Group of Women Leaders for Change and Inclusion.
Afghan migrants in Iran are leaving in droves for urban areas back home as US sanctions squeeze Iran’s economy. The influx could further destabilize Afghanistan, with young male returnees vulnerable to recruitment by insurgents. A Kabul bazaar, above. FARDIN WAEZI/UNAMA
