US announces withdrawal from dozens of international treaties

The United States is withdrawing from dozens of international organizations, conventions and agreements under a White House directive announced on Wednesday citing the country’s sovereignty and national interest.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said 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.”

Although the list does not include what are perceived to be the more consequential multilateral bodies shaping global cyber governance and state behaviour in cyberspace, some of the organizations play a role in shaping international law broadly.

Federal agencies are instructed to end U.S. participation in all of the entities on the list, marking one of the broadest pullbacks from multilateral institutions in years.

“President Trump is clear: It is no longer acceptable to be sending these institutions the blood, sweat, and treasure of the American people, with little to nothing to show for it. The days of billions of dollars in taxpayer money flowing to foreign interests at the expense of our people are over,” Rubio stated.

The list does not reference military alliances or intelligence alliances such as NATO or the Five Eyes, but instead identifies more than 60 expert commissions, policy forums and treaty-based frameworks, around half of them based at the United Nations.

“For United Nations entities, withdrawal means ceasing participation in or funding to those entities to the extent permitted by law,” states the memorandum.

It targets bodies focused on what Rubio described as “DEI mandates to ‘gender equity’ campaigns to climate orthodoxy” intended to “serve a globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the ‘End of History’,” referencing the 1989 essay about liberal democracy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama.

Among the unmentioned multilateral bodies are the UN Open Ended Working Group on ICT Security, where the U.S. and allies have been campaigning against Russian and Chinese proposals over internet governance. The UN’s International Telecommunication Union, currently headed by an American, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, was also not included.

However the directive does name the International Law Commission, a UN panel of independent legal experts that plays a central role in shaping modern international law.

While the commission has no enforcement authority, its work has a lasting influence on how states interpret treaty obligations, attribute responsibility for wrongful acts and justify countermeasures.

Also mentioned are the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and specialist offices tackling sexual violence and harms to children in armed conflict, as well as the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats.

“As this list begins to demonstrate, what started as a pragmatic framework of international organizations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests,” stated Rubio.

“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. We reject inertia and ideology in favor of prudence and purpose. We seek cooperation where it serves our people and will stand firm where it does not.”