U.S. President Donald Trump is often described as unpredictable, but his administration’s early moves regarding the United Nations this week were easy to guess in advance. On his first day in office, Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the U.N.-brokered Paris climate change agreement, as he did in 2017. He also pledged to pull out of the World Health Organization, which he initially threatened to quit in 2020, alleging that it had covered up China’s purported role in the spread of COVID-19.
Officials and diplomats at the United Nations were saddened but not surprised by these maneuvers. They are still wondering how much further the U.S. will go in disengaging from the U.N. and other multilateral bodies. The administration has ordered a 90-day review of foreign development aid spending and will almost certainly cut aid to U.N. agencies, especially those that it believes promote abortion or that it deems are biased against Israel.
Nonetheless, the administration has also signaled that it will not zero out support for the U.N. across the board, as some inside the organization had feared. At her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the U.N., Rep. Elise Stefanik, repeatedly pledged to ensure that U.S. taxpayers’ dollars are not misused by U.N. entities. But she also singled out some, including the World Food Programme and children’s agency UNICEF, for praise. This is squarely in line with traditional Republican thinking about the value of these aid agencies, which are traditionally led by U.S. appointees and primarily rely on voluntary funding from Washington and its allies to support their operations.