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US President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from 66 international organisations, including the UN’s population agency and the UN treaty that establishes international climate negotiations. With this, Trump suspended the American support for 66 organisations, agencies and commissions.
The executive order came just days after he instructed his administration to review participation in and funding for all international organisations, including those affiliated with the UN. The news was confirmed by the White House on social media. It is pertinent to note that most of the targeted UN bodies focus on climate, labour and other issues that the Trump administration has categorised as catering to diversity and “woke” initiatives.
“The Trump administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity,” the US State Department said in a statement.
The Trump administration’s record with international bodies
It is pertinent to note that the Trump administration has previously suspended support for agencies like the World Health Organisation, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees known as Unrwa, the UN human rights council and the UN cultural agency Unesco.
Instead, it has taken a larger a la carte approach to paying its dues to the world body, picking which operations and agencies they believed align with Trump’s agenda and those which no longer serve ‘American interests’.
“I think what we’re seeing is the crystallisation of the US approach to multilateralism, which is ‘my way or the highway’,” Daniel Forti, senior UN analyst at the International Crisis Group, said. “It’s a very clear vision of wanting international cooperation on Washington’s own terms.”
This approach marked a major shift from how previous administrations – Republican and Democratic – have dealt with the UN, and it has forced the world body, already undergoing its own internal reckoning, to respond with a series of staffing and program cuts.
Quick Reads
View AllAs a result, many independent nongovernmental agencies – some that work with the United Nations – have cited many project closures because of the US administration’s decision last year to slash foreign assistance through the US Agency for International Development, or USAID.
With inputs from The Associated Press.
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