When President Donald Trump announced this week the United States’ withdrawal from 66 international organizations – including some of the world’s premier climate action bodies – his administration described the move as another step toward an “America First” foreign policy focused squarely on U.S. national interests.
“We will not continue expending resources, diplomatic capital, and the legitimizing weight of our participation in institutions that are irrelevant to or in conflict with our interests,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on the social platform X.
The organizations the U.S. is leaving, he went on, including many United Nations agencies, are “wasteful, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas … or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity.”
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from dozens of global organizations – many focused on climate issues and human rights – was swiftly condemned by U.S. allies. One power that increasingly has stepped into the leadership breach is China.
The action was swiftly condemned by U.S. allies, particularly in Europe, which for decades have counted on their partnership with the world’s preeminent power to advance goals of stability and prosperity underpinned by shared Western values.
Prominent nongovernmental organizations focused on climate issues, human rights, and development howled in protest.
But one global power was almost certainly smiling in approval of Mr. Trump’s continuing retreat from the world’s international governmental infrastructure: China.
As the U.S. has stepped back from its role as leader of the postwar international system, many experts say, China has stepped increasingly into the breach, with its own values and economic interests in tow.
“Power abhors a vacuum”
“Just because we leave the stage doesn’t mean other players won’t take our place. So we should not be surprised when other actors with different interests and values – emphasis here on China – take advantage of our withdrawal to move in,” says Stewart Patrick, director of the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
“The administration speaks of ‘peace through strength’ and the U.S. remaining the preeminent global power vis-à-vis China,” he adds. “But at the same time, its approach ignores that power abhors a vacuum, and that other powers like China will jump in to determine the direction the world will go in.”
Other critics chimed in with a shooting-oneself-in-the-foot interpretation of the international withdrawal.
“This decision … will cede our influence to foreign competitors and diminish our leadership in designing the rules that govern the global digital economy, raising costs for U.S. business,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a statement Thursday.
Not all the organizations the U.S. is leaving are considered critical players in global issues or key to U.S. interests. The list includes the International Lead and Zinc Study Group, the International Cotton Advisory Committee, and the Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories.
“At one level, this is an exercise in symbolic politics, allowing the president to satisfy at not much cost the anti-globalist and anti-woke tendencies of his base,” says Dr. Patrick. Moreover, he adds, the U.S. announcement encourages “a conversation everyone agrees we need to have” on U.N. reform.
That said, he and others say the global retreat also encompasses fields that are only growing in importance for human existence and the global economy.
First among those are climate, climate disaster remediation, and transition to a green economy. Most damaging, critics say, is the U.S. withdrawal from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the landmark 1992 treaty that is the basis for subsequent international climate action, including the Paris climate agreement.
The U.S. retreat from multilateral climate action reflects President Trump’s dismissal of climate change as a “hoax,” but it also leaves China the peerless leader in green technology and the booming global green economy. Many note, moreover, that the retreat from climate action follows closely on a year of intensifying and increasingly deadly natural disasters that most scientists attribute to global warming.
“A targeting of civil society”
More broadly, some see further evidence of Trump administration efforts to tear down and refashion the postwar international order in the latest announcement.
“There have been attempts before to rip away the polite veneer of the rules-based international order, but this is the first time it’s being led by the power that initially created that order,” says Waheguru Pal Sidhu, associate professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.
Implicit in the U.S. action is the Trump administration’s determination to radically transform the U.N. by a steep downsizing and by a refocusing of the preeminent international institution on core international security issues.
“We speak of the three pillars of U.N. activity, those being peace and security, development, and human rights, and clearly the U.S. aim is to weaken and even eliminate all but the peace and security pillar,” says Dr. Sidhu. He notes that of the 66 organizations the U.S. is leaving, 31 are U.N. agencies and forums – and of those 31, most are in the areas of development, social advancement, and human rights.
In addition to the numerous climate-related organizations, he notes, the U.S. chopping block includes the U.N. Democracy Fund, the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, and the U.N. Population Fund.
“What this comes down to is a targeting of civil society and especially the constellation of global advocacy groups in areas like gender equality and reproductive rights that, as we have seen, are now condemned as ‘woke’ by the U.S. and have no place in the direction Trump is moving,” Dr. Sidhu says.
And while the direction the U.S. is taking may be lamented by some Western allies, many other governments are no doubt finding great satisfaction in seeing the greatest global power turning away from pesky issues like democratization, human rights, and equitable development.
“There are going to be quite a few countries that will quietly celebrate and agree with the U.S. direction,” says Dr. Sidhu. “Across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, this will only strengthen the trend towards a curtailing of civil society.”
