Showdowns loom in the new year as New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has been nominated to serve as United Nations ambassador by President-elect Donald Trump. Should she be approved by the Senate, Rep. Stefanik, who has served in the U.S. Congress for a decade representing upstate New York’s 21st Congressional District, will venture to Turtle Bay on New York’s East River to represent the United States at a place where conflict, acrimony and dysfunction abound.

Stefanik will enter the U.N. at a time — not unlike some of her predecessors such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Jeanne Kirkpatrick, or even Nikki Haley — when the American agenda and values are under attack by authoritarian regimes. It’s the duty of the ambassador to push back and regain the political high ground. But that’s easier said than done in the 193-member multinational body where the perennial Palestinian debate has been supplemented by many other simultaneous combustible global issues, from the Korean Peninsula to Ukraine.

A major ground war rages in Europe, the Middle East is in conflict, regional wars and humanitarian crises in Sudan, Syria and the Sahel, not to mention the greatly expanded role of communist China’s influence and threats to the international order,........

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