The United States deals a fatal blow to the UN

This time, the current occupant of the White House did not mince words either. He ordered his Secretary of State to withdraw from 66 international organisations, almost half of which are United Nations agencies, commissions and advisory groups. The pretext, explained in a statement by the State Department itself, is that they no longer serve US interests.

‘The Trump Administration believes that these institutions are redundant, poorly managed, and unnecessary, costly, and ineffective, used by actors who pursue goals contrary to ours or who threaten the sovereignty, freedoms, and overall prosperity of our nation,’ according to the literal transcript from the AFP agency.

The main body that will no longer have US participation is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was the founding treaty of all other international climate agreements and was concluded in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Scientists, officials and volunteers dedicated to the fight against climate change are criticising the US withdrawal with varying degrees of vehemence.

The common thread in the criticism is that Trump's action will hamper global efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Among the most vocal critics is Jean Su, a lawyer for the Centre for Biological Diversity, who accuses Donald Trump of ‘taking an illegal action by unilaterally withdrawing from a treaty that requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate’.

It should be remembered that Trump already withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement during his first term, although his successor, Joe Biden, later reinstated the country's membership. In his second term, Trump already foreshadowed his obsession with abandoning the UN's postulates on climate change by proclaiming that ‘climate change is the greatest scam in our history.’ He did so from the podium and before the UN General Assembly last September, in a speech in which he described coal as ‘a clean and beautiful energy source.’

Consequently, the decree signed by the president establishes that the United States will also withdraw from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), considered the leading scientific authority on climate, and from other organisations linked to the protection of the planet, such as the International Renewable Energy Agency and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Other multilateral organisations responsible for improving the future of humanity will also lose the participation and, above all, the financial contribution of the United States. This is the case of the United Nations Population Fund, which specialises in maternal and child health, and UN Women, as well as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The latter is now headed by Costa Rican Rebeca Grynspan, who served for a decade as Secretary General of the Ibero-American Secretariat in Madrid and now aspires to succeed Portugal's António Guterres at the helm of the UN itself.

The person responsible for implementing Trump's decree, Marco Rubio, hammered home the point by stating in the communiqué that the organisations from which the United States is now withdrawing promote a progressive ideology, which, in American political language, is a semantic disguise for communism, an ideology he accuses of promoting social engineering campaigns such as gender equality and climate orthodoxy.

This new blow to the UN deepens the wound caused by the US's previous withdrawals from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the Human Rights Council and UNESCO.

It is impossible not to recall the crisis and disappearance of the League of Nations (1919-1946) in the face of this withdrawal from these UN bodies by the world's leading superpower and, therefore, its largest contributor. For the moment, the death of the UN has not been certified, but it is clear that it will have to drastically reduce both its programmes of action and the number of officials and advisers.

Trump has not only harshly criticised the existence of many of the organisations he is now abandoning, ‘for not being in line with US interests’, but he has also never shied away from pointing out that the enormous proliferation of so many international organisations only served to create a swarm of politicians of all stripes, very well paid and with enormous privileges.

Certainly, the UN's inability to act as an effective mediator and, ultimately, conflict preventer, which was its primary mission, shifted the focus to other universal causes, such as sustainability. The fact that under this umbrella, officials, advisers and collaborators of all kinds and conditions grew exponentially, thereby increasing budgetary requirements, is the pretext that has led Trump to deal this brutal blow to the very existence of the UN.

Separate but no less important is the withdrawal of the United States from the Alliance of Civilisations, the project conceived by the then Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, together with the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyep Erdogan, taking up the proposal made to the UN in 1998 by the then ‘moderate’ President of Iran, Mohammad Khatami. Trump has applied the same label to it as to the other organisations from which he has withdrawn: ‘ineffective and harmful’.