Donald Trump has appointed New York Representative Elise Stefanik as his incoming Ambassador to the UN.

Once widely seen as a rising Republican star, Stefanik at the time became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the age of 30, ten years ago. Back then, she championed a more conventional brand of GOP moderation. In 2016, she issued strong denunciations of Donald Trump but has since become one of his most loyal and ardent supporters. Following Trump’s consolidation of power within the Republican Party, she rose through the ranks to become a senior leader of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives.

The most important thing to know about Elise Stefanik is that she has no fixed ideological stance. While she does promote certain conventional GOP views—such as being staunchly pro-Israel and anti-China—her foremost allegiance is to Trump. Trump has now rewarded that loyalty by appointing her as UN Ambassador, marking his first cabinet selection.

For the UN, this could actually be a beneficial development. Here are three reasons why.

1. The Opposite of Love is Indifference

That Donald Trump would pick one of his closest allies as U.S. Ambassador to the UN suggests that he values American engagement with the UN. Yes, the contours of that engagement are likely to sometimes be adversarial. But this move suggests that he is more inclined to engage with the UN than seek to withdraw from it. This would align with his approach to the UN in his first administration, which included many examples of productive engagement with the United Nations, such as working at the Security Council to ratchet up sanctions on North Korea and Iran and increasing funding for humanitarian agencies like the World Food Program.

On the other hand, due to Trump’s personal volatility and transactional nature, there is always the possibility that he could seek to withdraw from the UN altogether. That prospect now becomes more remote, given that one of his closest allies will serve as his representative there.

Why? Because…

2. Bureaucracy Matters

Democrats always elevate the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations to a cabinet-level position. Republicans sometimes do. During Nikki Haley’s tenure as Trump’s ambassador, she was in the Cabinet. Her replacement, Kelly Craft, was not. It was during Craft’s time as UN Ambassador that U.S.-UN relations began to go off the rails. The Trump administration took a far more adversarial position on the UN as an institution during those later months. Among other things, this included a move to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization.

With such a close Trump ally as UN ambassador, the relevance and role of the UN in American foreign policy will be elevated in a few important ways.

Stefanik, who is by all accounts whip-smart, will get to know the nuances of the UN and some of the more subtle ways it advances American interests. “Institutional capture” is probably too strong a term, but she will come to see the value of the UN, and in the process, make the case for its relevance, which not-so-tangentially increases her own standing in national security and foreign policy decision-making.

This latter point is significant because, no matter the administration, whenever the U.S. Ambassador to the UN is in a cabinet-level position, there is some baked-in bureaucratic tension between the UN Ambassador and the Secretary of State, who has his or her own Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. This can lead to disputes between the Secretary of State and the UN Ambassador over who gets to set UN policy. We don’t know whom Trump will pick as his Secretary of State, but with such a strong ally as UN ambassador, we can probably expect Stefanik to have the upper hand in these policy debates.

3. Congress Matters

The United States is the largest funder of the UN, and for the UN, it is the most important member state. It is Congress that determines America’s financial relationship to the UN—how much to fund it and what to fund.

As Peter Yeo explained in this week’s episode of Global Dispatches, one of the key domestic political dynamics going forward as it relates to the United Nations will be inter-cameral—that is, between the Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. On the Senate side, the dyed-in-the-wool moderate Susan Collins will chair the key committee in charge of appropriations. On the House side, that committee will be chaired by the far more conservative Tom Cole.

For the last two years, the GOP-controlled House passed a bill to completely defund the UN’s regular budget, but this provision did not move forward in the Senate. Having a (soon-to-be former) top House leader ensconced in Turtle Bay may help to put the brakes on this attempt to defund the UN or other similar extremist policies that may emanate from the House of Representatives. Again, this is because diminishing the role of the UN in US foreign policy serves to diminish Stefanik’s own standing in the Trump administration.

Trump’s approach to the UN—and multilateralism more generally — will probably be vastly different than anything we’ve seen in the UN’s 79 years of existence. But this pick suggests that Trump may not carry out any massive disengagement from the UN. That, in itself, should provide a degree of relief around Turtle Bay.

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