From reticence to retreat
Trump’s abandoning of agreements breaks promises made by earlier Administrations and cheapens the US.
At the end of next year, the US will pull out of Unesco, the 72-year-old UN agency tasked with promoting global peace and stability through education, science, and culture. Unesco is best known for its designations of cultural and natural world heritage sites, including Grand Canyon National Park and the Statue of Liberty.
Citing Unesco’s financial problems and what the federal government characterised as Unesco’s anti-Israel bias, the decision was taken, and received, with regret but perhaps not surprise. The US has had an onagain, off-again relationship with Unesco for decades. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan withdrew from the agency. President George W. Bush rejoined it in 2002.
In 2011, President Barack Obama was forced to cut funding due to a decision taken by the Clinton Administration to refuse to fund any UN agency that recognised Palestine as a full member.
At the time, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a warning to Unesco, citing the inconsistency of the agency accepting as an observer member a state that did not exist.
This week’s retreat from Unesco is a rare moment of singularity between the prior and present Administrations. However, the pace and scope of the Trump White House’s retreat from all manner of international pledges and commitments is on a scale not seen in modern American history, which is all the more significant considering America’s fraught historic relationship with being constrained by international agreements.
The US was a driving force in the creation of the United Nations. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in creating the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. Yet despite being a nation that has contributed energy and ideals to a multitude of global agreements since the end of World War II, the US has shown more reticence than any other developed democracy to be bound by them.
The US has not signed on to the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child, or the Convention on the Elimination of all
Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and Bush famously unsigned the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court. Why? Concerns about sovereignty, and the belief that the Constitution, not a global agreement, must be the ultimate arbiter of American behaviour.
That said, the Trump administration has turned American reticence into American retreat. Earlier this month, the US voted against a UN resolution condemning the death penalty for LGBTQ and other minority groups, citing concerns about broad condemnation of the death penalty, which is still legal in 31 states and under federal law.
Since taking office, Trump has unsigned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, allowing China to wade into the economic and geopolitical vacuum left behind, extricated America from the Paris Accord, threatened the survival of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signalled a withdrawal from a trade pact with South Korea, and just yesterday decertified the Iran nuclear deal, a rare multi-lateral agreement designed to slow Iran’s slow march towards becoming a nuclear state.
Trump is demonstrating a worrying willingness to escalate America’s retreat from the world. In doing so, our new leader goes back on the promises of prior Administrations.
From the inside, a sense of unpredictability grows by the day. And from the outside, America’s word is cheapened.
Taking a wrecking ball to international agreements is easy, rebuilding trust is hard. I can see a time – akin to the apology tour commenced by Secretary of State Clinton in the wake of two wars started with weak intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction – where an envoy from the post-Trump era will fly around the world mending fences and encouraging allies (and enemies) to take America at her word.
The pull and thrust of international affairs and the extent to which any nation gives up its sovereignty to be a part of a global organisation is something all nations wrestle with. But a liberal world order, with shared burdens and goals, organised to fight threats from extremism to climate change costs something.
And America must be willing to pay it. Eleanor Roosevelt put it this way: ‘‘We will have to want peace, want it enough to pay for it, pay for it in our own behaviour and in material ways. We will have to want it enough to overcome our lethargy and go out and find all those in other countries who want it as much as we do’’.