Not a year into his administration Donald Trump has raced to tear down the structures than might inhibit his imperial mission to expand American territory, take the natural resources of other countries at gunpoint and shatter the framework of international law.
This is not the biggening of a New Rogue Order, it is the manifestation. America’s long-standing enemies will rejoice and its friends shudder.
In his latest move, the U.S. president has withdrawn from 35 United Nations bodies and programmes and another 32 international bodies.
This is the start of America’s complete withdrawal from the U.N. itself. Trump’s “America First” slogan is sincerely felt and is driving his advance towards a world in which America is alone – unhindered by friend or foe.
Among the U.N. bodies and treaties abandoned is the framework Convention on Climate Change - described by many as the ’bedrock’ climate treaty. It gave birth to the 2015 Paris climate deal which Trump has already said he will abandon.
Trump and his cabinet Washington has abandoned the concept of ever making the world a better, safer, more prosperous place for Americans in favour of short term opportunism.
His team has extracted a mineral deal with Ukraine that was essentially forced on Kyiv by the Kremlin’s invading forces like a protection racket.
In Venezuela Trump has said that the U.S. will take all of its oil, after deposing Nicolas Maduro last weekend. Income from the sale of Venezuela’s vast resources he has said, will be banked in America and controlled by him.
That kind of international robbery would normally be condemned by the U.N. and its members organize against it.
But that’s hard to do when the U.S. has set about dismantling the international organization established to prevent the might is right doctrine that caused World War II.
The U.S. does not recognize the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes alleged war criminals like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump has gone further over the last year and imposed crippling personal U.S. sanctions on at least eight ICC judges and two prosecutors.
Trump’s massive cuts to Washington’s USAID budget has left millions facing a collapse of their health care across the global south especially in Africa.
The latest attack on the U.N. drives home the administration’s indifference to humanitarian principles that underpinned its foundation.
The U.S. will also quit U.N. Women, which works for gender equality and the empowerment of women, and the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the international body's agency focused on family planning as well as maternal and child health in more than 150 countries. The U.S. cut its funding for the UNFPA last year.
“For U.N. entities, withdrawal means ceasing participation in or funding to those entities to the extent permitted by law," the U.S. memo that announced the withdrawals read.
Trump cut support for Palestinians through the UNWRA which Israel accused, without providing credible evidence, of supporting militants in Gaza.
And since his invasion of Venezuela, threats against Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and his outright demand that Greenland become part of America, his withdrawal from U.N. bodies looks insignificant and bureaucratic.
But they are part of a process of dismantling the international norms that were integral to maintaining a semblance of world order and kept the idea of big power spheres of influence at bay.
“These withdrawals will end American taxpayer funding and involvement in entities that advance globalist agendas over US priorities,” a White House said in a statement.
America’s allies have long relied on the U.S. to support them in advancing liberal democratic principles around the world. They have often violated their own moral and political codes. In 2001 with the multilateral invasion of Iraq – but that catastrophe was done, importantly, without U.N. backing.
These days it would not occur to the U.S. to even seek U.N. support for any of its actions.
That level of isolationism may suit rogue states like Russia, it may enhance Chinese power, and it will certainly give a green light to the unhinged agendas of extremist governments around the world.
And it will make all of us in the West a lot less safe.
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