The word “audacity,” defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as “courage or confidence of a kind that other people find shocking or rude,” is, as its definition suggests, construed mainly in personal terms, and often, as with Barack Obama’s “the audacity of hope,” in positive ones. But there is another kind of audacity, one that is both less discussed and less amenable to being conceived of in positive terms. This is structural audacity: the ability and willingness of small sets of operators to enter institutions then turn them to their own ends without demonstrable concern for the opinions of the people those institutions are supposed to serve.
Structural audacity is what powerful Jewish supporters of Israel have practiced in America the past forty years. As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute many times, they have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness and ability to turn American defense, policing, finance, technology and education, academic, philanthropic, political, and media institutions to work to the benefit of the “Jewish state” at Americans’ expense.
Yet to some extent these Zionist operators were swimming with the current. All of the institutions they co-opted were at the center or downstream of America’s military-industrial complex, the “merchants of death” President Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned against in 1961, which meant these institutions wanted to be co-opted in exactly the way that Zionists co-opted them. These were institutions, in other words, that made their existence off the practice of war, and after the end of the Cold War in 1991 they were in search of a new playing field. This made them more than willing to be used by influential Zionists to support America’s endless presence in the Middle East and wars in foreign lands to fight Muslim “terror.”
All of this is ugly audacity: the practical politics of voluntary co-option. But to co-opt an institution so that its agenda is 180 degrees the inverse of what it was set up to do without concern for the people it is meant to serve is a rare and perhaps unprecedented form of structural audacity. It is fitting that the person pioneering it is not only Israel’s closest ally but also the most audacious player in world politics today.
The player is Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, since 2009 the de facto leader and since 2022 the de jure leader of the United Arab Emirates. The target of Mohammed’s audacious co-option is the United Nations: since 1945 the venerable, flawed representation of a commitment by the world’s countries to human rights and international cooperation. The vessel for Mohammed’s co-option is Lana Nusseibeh, the 48-year old Palestinian-Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of the UAE who served as the UAE’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2013 to 2024; and who the UAE has recently sponsored as a contender for the position of UN Secretary General.
What might seem to be a side-show matter of internal politicking in a fading institution in a world consumed with trade wars, oil wars, actual wars, and genocide is anything but. It is in fact an act of such structural audacity in an institution of such symbolic weight with such global connections that it shines a clearer, cleaner light on murky depths only rarely glimpsed.
These hidden depths are the strategic operations of a rising duo of neo-colonial operators, Israel and the UAE, which have allowed them to reverse-colonize their own western underwriters. I have written in the past for the Libertarian Institute about Israel’s and the UAE’s unprecedented success bringing their influence back to Britain and America. But the UAE’s play with the United Nations is a step beyond. It is a move by one of the world’s preeminent imperial powers and violators of human rights to take over the most venerable institution representing sovereign nations and human rights.
What investigating the development of the United Nations, the role of Lana Nusseibeh, and the mechanics of the UAE’s co-optive play reveals goes well beyond the play itself. It reveals that Israel and the UAE, with the support of Donald Trump’s White House, are not simply shaping global power to their ends. They are also shaping a narrative that legitimizes this power: making it seem humanitarian, secular, liberal, even progressive. And in this way they are further obscuring from citizens the audacious exercises of unregulated authority being committed against their interests and in their name.
Today, with its finances and influence in tatters after both the second Trump administration’s accession and a genocide live-streamed from Gaza, the United Nations can seem opaque and irrelevant. But the United Nations, seen on its own terms, is a rationally if contradictorily constructed institution which, though deeply and perhaps irredeemably flawed, retains structural influence today. It was created in 1945 as a compromise between nationality and empire: a forum for all nations to debate, compromise, and pass resolutions underwritten financially by the “big five” imperial or quasi-imperial powers of Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and China. This has created opposition from conservatives in America who rightfully believe that the UN’s Security Council is an unwarranted expansion of American empire, and that its General Assembly resolutions are threats to national sovereignty.
It has also created a predictable dynamic of mutual friction within the United Nations itself: one in which the member states of the General Assembly speak on behalf of their own sovereign interests, only to have many of their initiatives go nowhere thanks to the “big five” on the UN Security Council in the interests of empire. The logic behind this friction is that of loyal opposition or, more pejoratively, co-opted dissent, and it is the logic of the “postwar” world in which the UN was created. The universities, media, corporations, and nonprofit organizations which created internationalism’s scaffolding in the late 1940s may have been governed by representatives of empires, mostly WASPs. But they also took care to construct the scaffolding in such a way as to allow outsiders, or potential dissenters to the project such as developing nations, a platform for criticism. Their purpose was twofold: to encourage buy-in to the structures and to keep the structures honest.
This watchdog dynamic played out, imperfectly, at universities where immigrants and people of color made anticolonial and ethnic studies as well as anthropology into significant scholarly forces. It played out more seamlessly at the United Nations, where the concerns of developing nations were regularly broadcast via General Assembly sessions. There was enough perceived legitimacy to this setup that the United Nations became, for many years, the decisive pronouncer on genocide, humanitarian crises, and various other global concerns.
From the 1950s through the 2000s, the decade I was in middle school, United Nations posters were ubiquitous in secondary schools, and UN personnel featured heroically, directly and indirectly, in various American movies about international crises. When the W. Bush administration waged war in Iraq in 2003, it felt the need to make its case to the United Nations, and sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to do so. Even today, the UN retains enough symbolic meaning that political candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier took the opportunity this year to be arrested and zip-tied in front of the building to raise awareness of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Like elevator music, the UN is ubiquitous and in the background. Like elevator music, some of what it says and does seeps into our heads unawares.
Lana Nussebeih, the UAE’s longtime representative at the United Nations and now its nominee for UN Secretary General, is in some sense a product of this world—and in some sense its exact inverse. She is a scion of a prominent Palestinian family which is also the oldest Muslim family in Jerusalem, with its lineage stretching back to the seventh century. Her grandfather, Anwar Nusseibeh, was an official in the British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s who, after 1948 and the creation of Israel, served Jordan’s government as a minister. But both he and his son, Lana Nusseibeh’s uncle the prominent intellectual Sari Nusseibeh, consistently engaged with representatives of Israel on behalf of Palestinians. Lana Nusseibeh, for her part, was instrumental in her role at the UN in delivering significant aid to Gaza after Israel’s incursions following October 7, 2023.
So far, so traditional, as origins stories go. This one is about an aristocratic family with longstanding ties to the land which knows, in the aftermath of catastrophe, how to leverage its contacts and prestige: to make itself a legitimate communicant with the occupying power without reneging on its commitments to Palestinians. It is the story of exactly the type of family, spokespeople for the dispossessed via the institutional mechanisms of the postwar world, whose members would traditionally be considered ideal candidates to lead the United Nations. (In fact, past Secretary Generals like Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan very much fit this bill.)
What throws the wrench in the story is Lana Nusseibeh’s father, Zaki Nusseibeh, and his choice in 1967 to decamp to Abu Dhabi, just then in the process of forming the United Arab Emirates with six other Emirates under Sheikh Mohammed’s father Sheikh Zayed. According to the Middle East magazine Bidoun, Zaki Nusseibeh “became the translator and interpreter for Sheikh Zayed…he quickly became a trusted advisor to the rulers of Abu Dhabi, and he has been at the center of political and cultural life in the country’s largest emirate ever since.”
In 1967 this move must have made sense. Sheikh Zayed seemed not too different than the Jordanian monarchs, or than the Nusseibehs must have seen themselves. He was a rooted but pragmatic player invested in pan-Arab unity and the Palestinian cause but also aware of the necessity of working with unwelcome western colonizers. And in fact this was pretty much the UAE’s playbook until 2004, when Sheikh Zayed died and, in the absence of a powerful successor, Zayed’s second son Mohammed took increasing control of the country’s affairs. By 2009 Mohammed was de facto managing the country. This was the same year that Benjamin Netanyahu was returned as Israel’s prime minister. As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute and elsewhere, 2009 marked the beginning of a partnership between Mohammed and Netanyahu which has relentlessly remade the Middle East on terms that advertise themselves as realpolitik but are nonetheless deeply ideological and quietly Manichean.
The guiding principle of Mohammed’s and Netanyahu’s remaking, in the words of Robert F. Worth in a 2020 New York Times’ profile of Mohammed, is that there is “little distinction among Islamist groups” and that “they all share the same goal: some version of a caliphate with the Quran in place of a constitution.” This assumption has led Mohammed to the “Hobbesian” and “self-serving” forecast that “the Middle East’s only choices are a more repressive order” of forced modernization “or a total catastrophe.” Mohammed’s was a diagnosis shared on some level by both “Liberal” Israeli leaders like Shimon Peres—the originator of the forced modernizing Singapore-on-the-Levant scheme for Gaza—and “conservative” Likudniks like the Netanyahu family. But Mohammed, a monarch ruling over a tiny country of 1.4 million subject citizens and unaccountable to anyone so long as he kept oil flowing west, could go much further than Netanyahu, who is at least nominally democratically accountable to Israel’s electorate. And the results of the actions taken by Mohammed, sometimes in partnership with Netanyahu and sometimes underwritten by him, have been predictably extreme.
As I reported for the Libertarian Institute in March and April, the UAE has colonized land, maritime, and mineral resources in sixteen African nations. In the process it has encouraged the illegal expropriation of precious minerals and so denied national treasuries revenue; scooped up arable land from farmers; and in some cases (Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo) encouraged regional separatism, militia wars, and actual genocide. In the Middle East and North Africa the UAE has encouraged or sponsored “anti-Islam” coups against legitimate democratic governments in two countries; and sponsored proxy or direct wars against Muslim governments it calls Islamist in three others. It is aggressively dealing in AI technology, playing America and China off each other, and it is increasingly bringing its influence to America via a $2.4 trillion investment in assets ranging from data centers and energy infrastructure to NBA teams and parking meters. This is Mohammed’s UAE: not a pragmatic aristocratic nation state like his father’s but a colonial laundering operation on a global scale.
The use of old names by new money to furnish a garland of respectability for power grabs is a recurring trope in fiction and in life—but even by past standards the 1400 year old Nusseibeh name has become extraordinarily closely attached to the nouveau riche power spender Sheikh Mohammed these past twenty-some years. After graduating from the University of Cambridge and University of London (the latter of which awarded her an MA with Distinction in Israeli and Jewish Diaspora Studies) Lana Nusseibeh began her career in 2004. This was the exact year that Mohammed began assuming control over the United Arab Emirates, and Lana Nusseibeh’s career has tracked his at crucial junctures since. In fact, throughout this time, she has served as a sort of advance scout on issues which seemed to matter most to him.
It was Nusseibeh who beginning in 2004 served a two-year stint at the Security and Terrorism Program of the Gulf Research Center, just as Mohammed, in response to what he saw as Iran’s expansion of influence in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq, “began investing billions of dollars of Abu Dhabi’s wealth into strengthening the UAE’s military and its technological capabilities.” It was Nusseibeh who in 2006, aged 28, became the head of a vital part of this investment project at a vital time: the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) Taskforce, tasked to create a major international agency focused on sustainability and renewable energy. That agency, IRENA, was formally launched in 2009, and it was in that year that the UAE engineered the location of IRENA’s permanent headquarters in Abu Dhabi; a considerable triumph for a small nation known mainly for its export of oil and its dubious record on human rights.
According to the scholar Elham Fakhro, the UAE “relied on Israeli support to host the permanent headquarters of IRENA, in exchange for future commitments to allow Israelis to attend conferences and sporting events held in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.” Nusseibeh’s UN biography touts the fact that she “led the UAE’s successful diplomatic campaign to secure Abu Dhabi as the headquarters of IRENA” as “a landmark achievement that established the first major international organization headquartered in the Middle East.” But what she in fact achieved was to legitimate the UAE as a major investor in renewable energy and sustainability. This served as a cover for the UAE’s investment in “sustainable” surveillance cities; its buyup of huge tracts of foreign land in service of the “carbon credit” boondoggle; and the general burnishing of its “progressive” reputation despite its human rights abuses and its militarism. Nusseibeh’s reward for helping ensure this clean energy curtain was a promotion.
It was Nusseibeh who, in 2009, was appointed to the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the founding Director of the Policy Planning Department, which was tasked with creating a long-term strategic framework for the UAE’s foreign policy. 2009, the year Netanyahu returned to the prime minister’s office and Mohammed assumed full de facto power in the UAE, was also the year that a long term foreign policy relationship developed between Israel and the UAE. According to Elham Fakhro, “backchannel conversations between Israeli and Emirati officials translated into open, joint lobbying efforts in Washington, DC” with such figures as Obama’s Middle East advisors Dennis Ross and Brett McGurk, “showcas[ing] a level of cooperation that was both ‘real and practical’ and ‘went far beyond intelligence sharing.’”
Over the next eleven years this coordination would become the basis for the 2020 Abraham Accords. These were the “normalization” agreements reached between Israel and the Gulf states which effectively cut out Palestine as a major issue of Arab-Israeli negotiations for the first time since 1948. The agreements occurred with the reported help of de facto payouts from the UAE to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. They also occurred with the guidance and the input, particularly when it came to finding inventive ways to minimize the Palestinian issue while claiming to prioritize it, of the Policy Planning Department Nusseibeh had founded. But by the time her Policy Planning work bore fruit, Nusseibeh had again moved up, this time to the United Nations.
It was Nusseibeh who, in 2013, was appointed the UAE’s representative to the United Nations, a post she served in for eleven years. Nusseibeh, according to her UN biography, made for herself the primary project of “champion[ing] women’s leadership and meaningful participation in international peace and security.” And yet Nusseibeh actively worked against women in those instances when the bill for the UAE’s expansions in the Middle East and Africa came due.
By 2016, the UAE’s and Saudi Arabia’s interventions, with Israel’s support, against what they characterized as militant Islamic movements in Yemen had led Human Rights Watch to document “58 unlawful Saudi/UAE-coalition airstrikes, killing nearly 800 civilians and hitting homes, markets, hospitals, schools, businesses, and mosques, and the coalition’s use of cluster munitions.” By 2017, “food scarcity [was] putting the lives of 352,000 pregnant women at risk, and [could] harm the health of 2.2 million women of childbearing age who are in urgent need of assistance and protection.” In the face of mounting outrage at these crimes, “Nusseibeh issued statements defending UAE actions in Yemen,” first in 2016 and then in 2018, the latter “a few months before the UAE ordered humanitarian organizations in the coastal city of Hodeida to evacuate despite the immense humanitarian needs, while the Saudi/UAE-led coalition sought to take control of the city from the Houthis.” In 2021, Nusseibeh, along with Saudi Arabia’s representative to the United Nations, successfully lobbied to shut down “an international, impartial, and independent body the Human Rights Council had established to report on rights violations and abuses in Yemen.”
By 2023, the UAE’s anti-Islam African interventions had pushed the mineral-and-soil rich nation of Sudan into genocide. In response to increasing Muslim power in the Sudanese government, the UAE had made a proxy of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), run by a tycoon worth $7 billion off of deep ties to the illegal gold trade via the UAE. The UAE financed and armed the RSF, sometimes with weapons transferred from the UAE’s proxies in Libya, to engage in “mass executions and killings” and “sexual violence and torture”; what amounts to “[genocide]-level mass extermination.” As news reports began cascading about the violence in the Sudan, “Nusseibeh flatly rejected the findings of a UN panel of experts on the conflict, prepared for the Security Council.” She made a similar rejection to The Economist. And she told CNN that “allegations that the UAE backs the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were ‘categorically untrue’…even though the UN ha[d] gathered substantial evidence to the contrary.”
Nusseibeh was rewarded for her words. In 2025 she became the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. In 2026 she launched her bid with Mohammed’s support for UN Secretary General.
There is much that is instructive about Nusseibeh’s Secretary General bid when it comes to the ways in which neo-colonial players like Israel and the UAE exercise power. There is the use of economic and political influence to corral support for Nusseibeh from African countries or regions like Ethiopia and Somalia’s breakaway province of Somaliland, both of which have deep ties to Israel and the UAE. Relatedly, there are the former American government officials, among them Brett McGurk and Dennis Ross, who are backing Nusseibeh publicly. These are people who worked with Mohammed while in office, who have since moved into the security consulting and nonprofit networks he patronizes, and who are always on hand to provide a supportive quote as to his intentions. The presence of McGurk and Ross, and their willingness to be used in this way, speak to the depth of influence Mohammed enjoys in America. After all, the Obama administration in which both men served has been the most skeptical of the UAE of any American Administration in the twenty-first century, yet to its former officials Mohammed is, in McGurk’s words, “often more right than wrong” about his Hobbesian view of Islamism.
There is also the use of Nusseibeh’s gender identity (“No woman has ever been Secretary General of the UN”) by her supporters as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card to pre-empt the uncomfortable questions being raised about her complicity in human rights abuses in Yemen and Sudan. Relatedly, there is the use of Nusseibeh’s ethnic identity as a Palestinian to pull in legitimizing support from unexpected quarters—in this case from the state of Palestine, which has every reason to regard the UAE as an enemy. These are examples of Mohammed’s tendency to wrap his own colonialism in the garments of progressive Enlightenment—whether feminism, sustainability, ethnic solidarity, or universal “tolerance.”
And there are emerging indications that the UAE’s allies in the Trump White House and the Netanyahu government may be colluding, in true colonial fashion, to set the broader terms of the secretary general’s race by playing candidates against each other. There was for example the sudden floating for consideration, via Donald Trump, of a wildcard candidate for secretary general: former Hungarian president Victor Orban. Orban was not someone known for his management or diplomatic skills, nor particularly connected to monied networks. His only purpose in the race could be to discredit the entire process or make Lana Nusseibeh, who is sponsored by a country with significant financial investments in both America and the Trump family, appear to be a more reasonable choice.
There was, similarly, the withdrawal of Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, a well-known human rights arbiter from Latin America and longtime rumored candidate for secretary general, from consideration for the post. Bachelet had shown her willingness to adjust to the interests of the UAE and Israel in the past, but the contender who replaced her from Latin America was an undeniable improvement in this regard. Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan, who became the frontrunner, happens to be Jewish, her parents fled Europe before the Holocaust, and she has close personal ties to Israel. Grynspan’s and Nusseibeh’s dual entries into the race have been read by close observers as a source of tension: “…two candidates with Jewish and Palestinian ancestry competing for the world’s top diplomatic post at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to divide the international community.” And yet what this supposed conflict most likely represents is a scrim, put up by Israel and the UAE, that distracts from more basic truths. Namely, that Nusseibeh has been one of the most prominent supporters in the United Nations of Israel’s agenda; and that, despite her lack of association with human rights abuses, Grynspan has deep ties to Israel, a genocidal state. This looks, for all intents and purposes, like another joint play by Israel and the UAE: entering two candidates in the secretary general race to take the heat off each other, and, no matter who wins, both countries benefit.
The tactics being employed here, again, are essentially colonial: induce, coerce, distract, divide. They are not too different from what Israel in particular has used elsewhere in the past. But the broader plays—the rhetorical play, the institutional play—are new. They amount to an attempt to rhetorically co-opt the values of a ubiquitous institution, the United Nations, in ways that will further weaken its structural integrity. If either of these two women become secretary general, they will, uniquely in the modern era, lead the United Nations while owing their careers or having deep ties to powerful colonial operators underwritten by the United States. Nusseibeh’s father Zaki still lives in the United Arab Emirates; Grynspan’s sister is an Israeli and a proud Zionist, and her niece and nephew have served in the IDF. Neither Nusseibeh nor Grynspan are people in circumstances to meaningfully oppose the actions of either government; in fact Nusseibeh’s career shows her dexterity covering these actions up.
Rhetorically, the United Nations under Nusseibeh, and perhaps more subtly under Grynspan, will quietly become a place where the language of humanitarianism—of lives lost, of people displaced, of tons of aid provided, of the moral onuses of war—is converted into a scrim for colonial endeavors. The garments of Enlightenment will now cover the actions of Mohammed and Netanyahu from the global seat of humanitarian authority, one whose pronouncements are still granted a degree of credence; the elevator music in people’s ears; the headline of the radio update from NPR or CNN. Land grabs will be recharacterized as climate management; displacements and genocides as bringing order in lands of savagery; acquiescence to colonial agendas will be repurposed into humanitarianism. This is the debasement of language that always occurs when empire replaces sovereignty.
And it is this replacement of sovereignty by empire that may be Nusseibeh’s, and perhaps Grynspan’s, structural legacy at the UN. Under their leadership, the United Nations will potentially cede its power in two directions. On the one hand, imperial powers and their proxies will gravitate to where they are already potentially gravitating: “alternative” bodies funded by corporate-funneled donations like Donald Trump’s Board of Peace which more overtly serve colonial interests. On the other, developing nations which no longer believe that the UN under Nusseibeh or Grynspan offers them a legitimate forum may form new, more radical regional or ideological alliances. That this latter outcome will almost surely occur under a Nusseibeh Secretary Generalship is clear from the mounting opposition to her nomination from human rights quarters. “The notion that this woman can lead the UN is a scandal in itself,” ran the headline of the front page article in the Friday October 30 edition of The Guardian, warning of the “autocratic capture of our most significant multilateral institution.” In this new normal, colonialists will break from the UN in one direction, toward oligarchic imperialism; anti-colonialists in the other, toward resistance. Corporatism will replace bureaucracy, empire will replace compromise, and militant, balkanized anticolonialism will replace forums for dialogue.
Conservatives have long distrusted the United Nations as ineffective as well as violative of national self-determination, and they are right to do so. But there is a worse possibility. It is that the United Nations will become a blank check for colonial supremacists, propagandizing the public on behalf of rogue players like Israel and the UAE while ceding its own authority to corporatist vehicles like the Board of Peace and encouraging radical anticolonialism in response. Far from being abolished in the name of national sovereignty, which was the old conservative aim, the United Nations will become a rubber stamp for the militarist oligarchic agendas of a few select imperial states—states with the structural audacity to co-opt institutions, use them to break things, then leave everyone else to pick up the pieces.
