Online Program Enrolling Now - Seton Hall - United Nations Institute for Training and Research
Online Program Enrolling Now - Seton Hall - United Nations Institute for Training and Research

BLUE SMOKE: A monthly column, from PassBlue and UNA–UK, spotlighting senior appointments at the UN

Irwin Arieff

Irwin Arieff is a veteran writer and editor with extensive experience writing about international diplomacy and food, cooking and restaurants. Before leaving daily journalism in 2007, he was a Reuters correspondent for 23 years, serving in senior posts in Washington, Paris and New York as well as at the United Nations (where he covered five of the 10 years that Sergey Lavrov spent in New York as Russia's senior UN ambassador). Arieff also wrote restaurant reviews for The Washington Post and Washington City Paper in the 1980s and 1990s with his wife, Deborah Baldwin.

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It can be upsetting to see government officials, as they so often do, report vast new wealth on their annual financial disclosure forms shortly after taking a new government job. What enabled them to take in all that money…

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It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, a popular French proverb cautions. But that’s just what Ambassador Nikki Haley has been doing in trying to justify Washington’s exit from the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council. Haley has…

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As one of the world’s oldest areas of human settlement, Syria has seen it all: glory and irrelevance, conflict and calm, dynamism and stagnation, tyranny and tolerance. While it has gone through long periods of international obscurity — pretty…

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Nikki Haley is the most popular member of Donald Trump’s national security team, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, which found that 63 percent of voters approve of the job she is doing as United States ambassador to…

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Some people at the United Nations remain in mourning since Matisse shut down in February after serving as the corner cantine to hungry diplomats and their friends and neighbors for nearly nine years. If you are still feeling a…

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Whatever else came out of the latest American-led strikes on Syrian chemical weapon sites, it put on display rare signs of diplomatic skill on the part of the Trump administration, even if those signs first surfaced at the Pentagon…

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Nikki Haley insisted all along that she had no desire to become Donald Trump’s secretary of state. But with Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, in line to succeed Rex Tillerson as the State Department’s top dog, Haley may soon…

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Nikki Haley is appealing to the Palestinian people for “negotiation and compromise” in search of Middle East peace, denying that Washington is biased against them even as she warns their leaders that holding out will “lead to nothing but…

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Per conventional wisdom, it’s a big mistake to go out for Chinese food in Midtown Manhattan. For great Chinese dishes in New York, make your way to Chinatown; if not the one in Manhattan, then in Brooklyn or Queens….

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Unable to win converts with fake facts, Nikki Haley has turned to threats to persuade her fellow United Nations diplomats to support her boss’s incendiary foreign policy. Haley tested this novel approach to counter a General Assembly vote on…

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Nikki Haley must have raised eyebrows at the White House with her bold off-the-cuff defense of the women complaining that Donald Trump sexually abused them before the election. “[A]ny woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any…

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When working on sticky world problems, should the United States use the United Nations as a forum to try to drum up global support for its policies, reasoning that it gains strength by linking its interests to as many…

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When you’re a reality TV star running for president who likes to talk tough and you know nothing about foreign policy, maybe it makes sense to repeatedly attack the Iran nuclear agreement as “the worst deal ever” and to…

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Will it never end? When will time run out on the array of shape-shifting militant Islamist movements intent on moving into shaky trouble spots around the world to impose their extreme ideology, harness the population and hijack the local…

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Donald Trump will have his third chance this October to weigh in on Iranian compliance with the international nuclear agreement reached by Tehran in 2015 with the United States and five other world powers. The United States Congress requires…

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Online Program Enrolling Now - Seton Hall - United Nations Institute for Training and Research

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