What Trump Misunderstands About U.S. Interests and the UN

The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.

The January 7th Presidential memorandum is entitled “Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that are Contrary to the Interests of the United States.”  The problem with it starts right there with the Trump Administration’s narrow, short-term, and idiosyncratic understandings of U.S. interests.  Trump eschews any understanding of world politics as a longer-term game where questions of reputation, reliability, and common interests and purposes are at stake.

We live in a world with many global problems, but no global government.  The countries of the world try to handle their common problems through governance without government, or what we call global governance.  Trump may be the most powerful man in the world, but he cannot run the world or bully all of it into obedience.  The U.S. has historically constructed and participated in this governance and used our power, including the power of our ideas and our arguments, to gain the support of other countries for the positions we advocate.  This memorandum signals the U.S. backing off both symbolically and substantively from that long standing U.S. policy of both Democratic and Republican administrations. 

Trump eschews any understanding of world politics as a longer-term game where questions of reputation, reliability, and common interests and purposes are at stake.

Even a narrow but somewhat longer-term view of U.S. interests speaks against this withdrawal policy.  If the U.S. withdraws from all these organizations and treaties, the space we cede will be occupied by other countries, including our opponents like Russia and China.  Global governance will continue, but the U.S. voice will often be absent.  Nor is the argument solid that these withdrawals will save substantial money for U.S. taxpayers. It is difficult to estimate what the U.S. pays to each of the organizations on Trump’s list of organizations, treaties and conventions from which he is withdrawing the United States.  There is no doubt that there is considerable waste in the UN system, and the U.S. should continue to press for budget reform. But the entire UN core operating budget is 3.7 billion dollars, and the U.S. assessed share of that is about $820 million annually, about the same as a single year of the R&D for one advanced weapons program at the Pentagon.  

Approximately 16 of the organizations on the January 7th list are already covered by the UN core budget, so there are no savings for U.S. withdrawal from those organizations.  This includes the International Law Commission and the three Special Representatives of the Secretary General (on Children & Armed Conflict, Sexual Violence in Conflict, and Violence Against Children).  The withdrawals from these three key human rights initiatives are a gratuitous swipe at human rights, especially the protection of children. 

We have become accustomed to Trump’s attacks on domestic organizations committed to human rights, gender equality, environment and climate change, so it is no surprise that these issues are well represented on the withdrawal list.  The U.S. in the past has been a strong voice for human rights in the UN, and now that voice has gone silent, or joined the other side. 

The list is such a hodgepodge of organizations that it is hard to find any rationale for many decisions.  Thirty-one are UN related organizations, and 35 are not UN organizations.  The UN related organizations are treaty based on the UN Charter, but the U.S. is not proposing to withdraw from that treaty, as that would mean giving up our seat on the Security Council.  Of those 35 that are not UN organizations, only about 8 are clearly treaty or agreement based intergovernmental organizations.   About half of the 35 are what we call “multistakeholder” organizations that include states, international organizations and NGOs.  These groups shape standards and coordinate state and non-state actors.  This makes them cheap in budgetary terms but influential in agenda-setting.  Once again, it is hard to justify withdrawal in economic terms.  It would appear to be in U.S. interests to participate in agenda setting.  Even with the narrowest understanding of U.S. interests, what good could possibly come from withdrawing, for example, from the Global Counterterrorism Forum, or the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise, both voluntary organizations for policy coordination and capacity building?  The Trump administration also abandons key ideas of other Republican presidents, such as Ronald Reagan’s commitment to the promotion of democracy, by withdrawing from the UN Democracy Fund and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, which does election monitoring abroad.  Development and environmental organizations are well represented on the entire list, both inside the UN and outside of it.  Given that both underdevelopment and climate change are acknowledged root causes of the very international migration that Trump is trying to block, the shortsightedness of some of these withdrawals is breathtaking.  

A longer term understanding not just of U.S. values but also our interests is absent.  For example, the U.S. participated actively in negotiating and drafting the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) between 1973 and 1982 but did not ratify the Convention. More than one third of the Senate signaled it would not support the treaty and UNCLOS was never brought to a vote.   The main issue leading to opposition was the provision that the deep seabed was the “common heritage of mankind” and the mining of the seabed would be governed by an International Seabed Authority, which would grant licenses to private corporations sponsored by State Parties.  But today, because the United States is not a party to UNCLOS, U.S. investors cannot be sponsored by the United States to obtain International Seabed Authority mining contracts. The U.S. Navy is also very anxious to have the U.S. ratify this treaty because so much of their work depends on rights of free passage through the sea, something UNCLOS protects, but that China is seeking to undermine in the South China Sea.  This illustrates the problem with the U.S. thinking only of short-term interests in a way that harms the-long terms interests of U.S. corporations and the U.S. Navy.  We stayed out but the world went ahead and organized the system without us.

By withdrawing from these organizations, treaties, and conventions, we also signal to the world that we are an unreliable partner and that others can’t trust us. Averell Schmidt, Former Carr Center fellow and current Assistant Professor in the Government Department at Cornell University has conducted path breaking research showing that after a country withdraws from a treaty, all the other members of that treaty are less likely to join agreements with it in the future. The next time the U.S. wants to sign a new treaty it may find it difficult to find partners.  

The U.S. in the past has been a strong voice for human rights in the UN, and now that voice has gone silent, or joined the other side. 

But the problem is even sharper, because once the U.S. withdraws from treaties, it is virtually impossible for U.S. to rejoin them.  The U.S. has one of the most difficult rules in the world for ratification of treaties: a 2/3rd vote of the Senate.  Most democratic countries in the world ratify treaties with a majority vote in their Parliament.  This means that if we withdraw from a treaty, it may be almost impossible to join it again in the future, since it is impossible to get 67 U.S. Senators to agree to anything.  In other words, Trump is not just implementing his own narrow minded counterproductive strategy, but for the handful of these organizations that are clearly treaty based, he is effectively tying the hands of future administrations about any of the treaties on the list that require Senate ratification. 

Even in terms of short-term interests, the U.S. is shooting itself in the foot and excluding itself from the places where crucial international decisions are being taken.  The absence of the U.S. will not stop these organizations from making decisions, but the U.S. voice will be absent. China, Russia, and other opponents of the U.S. will not follow the U.S. lead and withdraw.  They must be congratulating themselves on their good fortune to be able to occupy the space vacated by the U.S. to promote their own agendas.   

In some cases, it is not even clear what it means to withdraw from some of the organizations on the Trump Memorandum list.  The International Law Commission, for example, is the UN’s expert body responsible for developing and clarifying international law.  But since it is made up of expert members, not state delegates, we don’t know exactly what it means for the U.S. to withdraw.  Presumably it means that the U.S. will stop proposing U.S. experts to be elected to the ILC?  How any of this benefits U.S. interest is completely opaque.  Will the ILC be better without U.S. experts? No.  Other countries will continue to propose experts, and the voice of highly qualitied U.S. legal scholars and diplomats will be absent.  The ILC proposes new legal rules in areas where law is uncertain, evolving, or incomplete that states may later turn into treaties.  The ILS doesn’t make new international law, but its texts are highly influential and frequently cited by international and national courts, as well as states making legal arguments.  The development and clarification of law won’t stop.  All U.S. withdrawal means is that we are ceding the field of law drafting to a group without U.S. experts. 

Former HKS Professor and Dean, Joseph Nye, who died last year, was known worldwide for his concepts of soft power.  Nye defined soft power as the ability to influence others to want what you want, achieving desired outcomes through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment (hard power). This influence stems from a country's culture, political values, and foreign policies, making them appealing to others. Nye was invited all over the world to share his understanding of soft power.  The Chinese were particularly interested in Nye’s ideas because they understood that the U.S. often had more soft power than China did, and China was interested in expanding its soft power.  Scholars later coined a related term – that of smart power.  Smart power is a foreign policy strategy that combines hard power (military and economic coercion) with attention also to soft power. Virtually every scholar and practitioner of foreign policy recognizes that narrow, short term hard power approach to foreign policy cannot be sufficient to advance the interests of any country, much less the well-being of the world.   What a tragedy to see the Trump Administration so hell bent on destroying U.S. soft power built up over many decades, even centuries.