US Foreign Relations

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo spoke at a UN Security Council session on Venezuela, Jan. 26, 2019, where he insulted China and Russia, the author writes, in his speech asking all Council members to back the Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaidó. (Immediately behind Pompeo is Elliott Abrams, the new US envoy to Venezuela.) STATE DEPARTMENT
When Secretary of State Michael Pompeo talks about global challenges, he insists that Donald Trump is doing a bang-up job steering the international community down the right path.

President Trump arriving at the United Nations with Nikki Haley, Sept. 18, 2017. The author describes how Haley, who is no longer US ambassador, is continuing to keep the spotlight on herself through Twitter, just as her former boss deploys the social media tool. RICK BAJORNAS/UN PHOTO
Nikki Haley is wasting no time revealing what her new act will look like now that she has ended her two-year gig toiling on behalf of Donald Trump at the United Nations.
Hint: It looks about the same — only more so.

Heather Nauert, center, in Helsinki, July 16, 2018. In December, Trump said he was nominating Nauert to succeed Nikki Haley as US ambassador to the UN, but the White House hasn’t sent the formal nomination to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which holds the confirmation hearing. STATE DEPARTMENT

On Dec. 10, the Twitter account for the Yemen embassy in Washington showed President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi of Yemen, right, leaving the US for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he lives in exile. It said he was in “very good health.”

In Quang Tri Province in Vietnam, above, hundreds of people have been killed or maimed from unexploded ordnances like cluster munitions, weapons leftover from the US war there. The US is reversing its policy on using older cluster munitions while it tests new ones with an Israeli company. WERNER ANDERSON/CREATIVE COMMONS

Nigerien troops patrolling outside Dirkou, Niger, Aug. 6, 2018, a key transit hub near the border of Libya. The author describes how the G5 Sahel force, a French initiative to combat jihadists in the Sahel region, is struggling to be useful as violence in the area soars. JOE PENNEY
BAMAKO, Mali — The G5 Sahel Force was conceived to enable greater coordination among five countries in the Sahel region of West Africa in fighting jihadist groups and to strengthen regional administration and development while relieving the United Nations mission in Mali of those burdens.

Heather Nauert, the spokesperson for the US State Department, holding a media briefing, June 6, 2017. Her nomination as America’s envoy to the UN has been harshly criticized by some human-rights groups and the country’s largest Islamic advocacy organization. 

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, center, standing told a gathering at the German Marshall Fund, on Dec. 4, 2018, that the liberal world order has been allowed to “corrode.” He also criticized UN peacekeeping work and UN climate-change mitigation efforts. SERGE VANDENDRIESSCHE/GERMAN MARSHALL FUND

A Sahrawi refugee at a camp near Tindouf, Algeria, 2016. A new UN envoy is taking a stab at ending the frozen conflict over the status of the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara territory of the indigenous Sahrawi people, prodded by the United States. EVAN SCHNEIDER/UN PHOTO

A memorial service was held for the six peacekeepers from Malawi and one from Tanzania who died during clashes with the ADF militia in the Congo on Nov. 15, 2018. Seventeen members of the same UN force intervention brigade were killed nearly a year ago battling the ADF. MIRIAM ASMANI/MONUSCO 
United Nations peacekeepers working for the mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were killed by a militia in a jungle in North Kivu Province on Nov. 15, leaving seven soldiers dead: six Malawians and one Tanzanian. Ten were injured.