Washington's walkout: Irresponsible snub to global needs

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US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday ending funding for 66 international organizations, conventions, and treaties that Washington sees "contrary" to American interests.

The scale of the withdrawal reveals its true character: it is not a targeted correction, but a deliberate act of self‑isolation that weakens global problem‑solving.

Many of the affected organizations are not grand forums of geopolitical theater but specialized bodies that coordinate standards, share data and quietly prevent crises before they explode. Nearly half of the 66 organizations are affiliated with the United Nations, including bodies dealing with climate, energy, migration, labor, gender, development, human rights, cybersecurity and counterterrorism.

Treating them all as suspect – from development agencies to climate panels and migration forums – broadcasts a simple message: Washington prefers the freedom to ignore problems over the responsibility to manage them with others.

Nowhere is this abdication starker than in the climate and energy realm, where the United States is choosing irrelevance over leadership. The retreat from key climate‑related bodies, including UN climate institutions and global energy and renewable organizations, severs channels through which states align science, policy and investment on the defining challenge of this century.

The US is leaving the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the twin pillars that organize global climate negotiations and scientific assessment. It is also stepping out of the International Solar Alliance, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the International Energy Forum and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

By walking away from panels that set reporting rules, shape carbon accounting and coordinate decarbonization pathways, the US as a country most responsible for historical emissions now insists on a veto over domestic criticism while abandoning the rooms where others are designing the rules on future cooperation.

The US is also turning its back on organizations that protect the most vulnerable. Exiting agencies concerned with population, women's rights, development, water and energy is not just an act of budgetary prudence; it is a moral retreat from the basic idea that prosperity and security are shared projects rather than zero‑sum spoils.

Bodies including UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, UN Population Fund, UN Energy and UN Water underpin maternal health programs, gender equality initiatives and efforts to expand access to clean water and energy. Severing ties and funding under the pretext of fighting "globalism" signals that whether children eat, refugees find shelter or women participate fully in economic life abroad is at the bottom or even no longer on Washington's agenda.
 

The US's irresponsibility is compounded by scale and speed. The country is not reassessing a handful of so-called "failing" bodies but severing ties en masse, collapsing the distinction between flawed institutions that need reform and essential ones that underpin basic cooperation. That sweeping gesture prioritizes ideological theatrics over the practical needs of states and societies that rely on these mechanisms to coordinate action.

For decades, the US sold the post‑1945 institutional order as a collective good, urging others to accept constraints in the name of stability, development, and peace. Walking away now, in a moment of overlapping crises, is not just a policy shift; it is a betrayal of that long‑standing promise that states co-shoulder responsibilities for addressing global crises.

That betrayal is the core of the irresponsibility: a state that benefited enormously from institutions, treaties, and norms is now helping to hollow them out when they are needed most. The costs will be measured not only in diminished US credibility, but in a more fractured, volatile world order in which cooperation becomes harder precisely because the country that once insisted on it now treats it with open disdain.

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