Opinion America is walking away from the system it created
This week, Trump, through a series of Executive Orders, may now have undermined the global political order even further through his decision to withdraw from 66 global organisations dealing with issues from gender rights to migration to climate change
The adverse impact of prior American bilateral aid cuts under this administration is already being felt across many parts of the Global South. Even before Allied armies swept across Europe and were joined by their Soviet counterparts from the Eastern Front, the US had taken the lead to forge a set of global institutions both political and economic to structure the post-war global order. To that end, it had convened a meeting in San Francisco in June 1945 to create a new international organisation, the United Nations.
Earlier in July 1944, it had convened a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to create a set of global monetary institutions. These institutions, most notably the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, would prevent the adoption of the “beggar-thy-neighbour” policies of the late 1920s, which had contributed to the Great Depression.
The UN, as well as the many organisations under its aegis, has not lived up to the promise that it held when it was founded. However, on balance, it is hard to argue that it has not been a force for the betterment of humanity. And even though Richard Nixon in 1971 unilaterally undermined some of the key tenets of the Bretton Woods system, including the pegging of the dollar to gold, many of its key features nevertheless remained intact. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies chose not to be part of this global system. Nevertheless, the Bretton Woods system, warts and all, did contribute to a large degree of global prosperity.
The US did not always adhere to the key principles of these two systems that it had created. Examples of American deviance from the core premises of these two global institutional and normative arrangements were indeed legion. However, apart from periodic withdrawals from specific organisations such as UNESCO under Ronald Reagan in 1984, the US, albeit grudgingly, helped undergird both these two overarching global entities. Several US administrations, mostly Republican, often complained about many of the shortcomings of the UN system and, on occasion, briefly withheld dues that the country had been assessed.
Both those architectonic structures are now at risk of unravelling thanks to the policy choices of the Donald Trump administration. The global trading system, of course, had been under assault since Trump assumed office for a second, non-consecutive term in January 2024. As is altogether well-known, his feckless use of tariffs to extract concessions from friends and foes alike has wreaked havoc across the global trading system. This week, Trump, through a series of executive orders, may now have undermined the global political order even further through his decision to withdraw from 66 global organisations dealing with issues from gender rights to migration to climate change. His stated rationale for doing so was that in his judgement, American support for these organisations ill-served the country’s national interests. This decision came, of course, in the wake of the blatant violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty, when US forces abducted the sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, to stand trial on drug-running charges in New York. It is obviously possible to argue that Maduro’s legitimacy as the country’s president was questionable given his dubious path to high office. Nevertheless, the manner of his removal violated entire swaths of international law.
The adverse impact of prior American bilateral aid cuts under this administration is already being felt across many parts of the Global South. The US withdrawal from these various organisations will, in considerable measure, undermine their efficacy. No other major power has either the will or the capacity to step into the breach. China, which has surplus resources, for wholly self-serving reasons, may partially address the gaps that will now emerge. However, it does not have either the normative or institutional commitments to sustain the functioning of these organisations. Trump’s abrupt, callous decision to walk away from longstanding American commitments will only lead to a harsher and more unjust world.
The writer directs the Huntington Programme on strengthening US-India relations at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
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