Democrats should be able to get behind Kelly Craft’s nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations given her commitment to diplomacy and defending human rights around the world, Greenwood writes. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call file photo)
OPINION — It was Eleanor Roosevelt, an icon of my Democratic Party, who summoned the energy and conscience that inspired a young United Nations to produce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights out of the rubble of World War II. The declaration built on the U.N.’s founding promise to promote and encourage “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms,” ideals that sadly, 70 years on, are being casually violated, from the reeducation camps of Xinjiang to the gulag-like jails of Moscow and Cairo.
So at a time when leaders who should be Roosevelt’s spiritual heirs are mostly missing in action, it was heartening to hear a member of the Trump administration publicly pledge to “reinforce the values, our values, that were central to the U.N.’s founding.” That’s what Kelly Craft told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month during her confirmation hearing to become the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She promised to do the job with “an unwavering commitment to universal human rights and freedom” and vowed to “tackle human rights abuses every day.”