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On February 4, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order with the potential to upend decades of American global engagement. The directive mandates a comprehensive review within 180 days of all current multilateral organizations of which the United States is a member and all international treaties to which it is party. The explicit purpose of this exercise is to determine whether such support should be withdrawn. The clock is thus ticking on a distinctive and momentous aspect of post-1945 American internationalism: the strategic decision by successive Republican and Democratic administrations to embed U.S. power in multilateral institutions designed to support a peaceful, prosperous, and just world and to facilitate cooperation on shared global problems.
The immediate targets are narrow and unsurprising. The order declares that the United States will withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council, as it did during Trump’s first term; reconsider membership in UNESCO, a long-standing target of Republicans; and cease all funding for the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees.
Of far greater import is the order’s decree that the secretary of state shall review “all international organizations” of which the United States is a member and “all conventions and treaties” to which it is party, to determine whether these “are contrary to the interests of the United States and whether [they] can be reformed.” The secretary will then recommend to the president “whether the United States should withdraw” from those commitments. In principle, the directive could lead to a U.S. abrogation of thousands of treaties and a departure from hundreds of multilateral organizations.
The Trump administration has of course already pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, announced its intent to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO), and effectively renounced U.S. legal commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The president also plans to dismantle international trade rules in favor of reciprocal bilateral tariffs, signaling the death knell of the ailing World Trade Organization.
This is only the beginning. Countless other international treaties and organizations could be on the chopping block—or in the wood chipper, if you will. It is even plausible that the Trump administration will conclude that an “America First” foreign policy requires pulling the United States out of the UN—and kicking the UN out of the United States. Both are long-standing objectives of conservative nationalists who contend, speciously, that the UN threatens American sovereignty. Such a momentous step would echo America’s 1919 repudiation of the Covenant of the League of Nations, but it would reverberate even more powerfully, given the UN’s centrality as the world’s foundational institution—by virtue of its universal membership, legally binding charter, unique responsibility (via the Security Council) to authorize armed force, and dozens of standing operational agencies. The White House could take similar steps to withdraw from international financial institutions—particularly the World Bank, as explicitly recommended by Project 2025—and eject them from Washington.
Among legal scholars, there is considerable debate and ambiguity over whether the president actually possesses the constitutional authority to leave the UN (which has no formal withdrawal provisions), much less to unilaterally abrogate thousands of treaties (particularly in the absence of a specific termination clause in the relevant instruments of ratification). That is cold comfort. As Trump’s first weeks in office have shown, this White House doesn’t do ambiguity—and there are many ways to wreck institutions without formally leaving them.
The World America Made
It is easy to take for granted America’s long-standing participation in multilateral organizations, alliances, and treaties—or to assume the nation has had no alternative. In fact, there was nothing inevitable about this particular U.S. approach to world order. Viewed in the light of history, the post-1945 decision by the world’s most powerful nation to champion and defend an open, rule-bound international order grounded in multilateral institutions was both anomalous and a choice of monumental importance.
Traditionally, globally dominant powers have been reluctant to accept significant constraints on their freedom of action, since they have so many unilateral and bilateral options available. Moreover, little in America’s experience between 1776 and 1945 suggested it would become the guarantor of an open world order. Through the nineteenth century, the United States pursued an insular, nationalist foreign policy, focusing on continental expansion, hemispheric dominance, and advancing its commercial interests.
That seemed poised to change under president Woodrow Wilson, who championed the League of Nations as a basis for international order after World War I. This episode proved a false dawn. The U.S. Senate ultimately rejected league membership and America retreated to a policy of detachment, failing to help stabilize a deteriorating global security and economic order in the 1920s and 1930s.
It was left to Franklin D. Roosevelt to complete the deal. On the heels of the Great Depression and in the midst of history’s most destructive war, his administration drafted blueprints for an open postwar world order based on Atlantic Charter principles, one realized during negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods. The U.S. scheme had three pillars. The United Nations, a new organization for peace and security grounded in international law, would replace traditional balances of power, spheres of influence, and secret alliances. A multilateral system of trade and payments, governed by international financial institutions and new trade rules, would replace patterns of autarky, imperial preference, economic nationalism, and beggar-thy-neighbor monetary policies. Finally, political self-determination would replace the era of empires with independent, self-governing, and ideally democratic nations.
To be sure, the post–World War II order that emerged diverged significantly from this blueprint. The Cold War’s rapid, unanticipated onset dashed America’s “One World” dreams, forcing the United States to adapt liberal internationalism to the perceived imperatives of containment and the defense of a narrower “Free World,” including through the NATO alliance. Likewise, abrupt decolonization transformed the UN’s composition and provided a platform for developing countries to reshape international rules, including for the world economy. Despite these adjustments, the contours of the U.S. multilateral world order vision persisted, and, with the end of the bipolar conflict, provided an institutional framework for deepening global cooperation.
The world America made was unlike anything that had come before. It was based not simply on U.S. hegemony but on America’s strategic decision to embed its might in an expanding framework of institutions and law open in principle to all countries. This order-building project was an act not of charity but of enlightened self-interest. American officials believed that institutional arrangements that cushioned U.S. dominance, gave lesser players some voice, and permitted all nations to advance common purposes would be regarded as more legitimate and thus less vulnerable to challenge. To understand the significance of this U.S. approach, one need only imagine how different the post-1945 world would have been had a different great power—say, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, or even the British empire—emerged from World War II as the most powerful nation and set about on its own world-building project.
To be sure, the U.S. commitment to multilateralism has always been ambivalent and selective. The United States has often chafed at restraints on its freedom of action, particularly when these are said to collide with America’s unique responsibilities as the ultimate guarantor of world order. Moreover, the tradition of American exceptionalism underpins the widespread but mistaken belief that U.S. entry into international organizations and treaties invariably threatens its national sovereignty. Finally, the U.S. Constitution erects significant legislative hurdles to U.S. multilateral obligations, most notably in the two-thirds supermajority needed to approve treaties. The cumulative result is a pattern of American “exemptionalism,” whereby the United States sometimes holds itself apart from international treaties—such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea or the Convention on Biological Diversity—even when it spearheaded their negotiation and painstakingly obtained caveats limiting or tempering its obligations.
Notwithstanding these qualifications, the United States has been the most important champion, sustainer, and defender of an open, rule-bound international system grounded in multilateral institutions and international law. Thanks in large part to U.S. efforts, the eight decades since World War II have witnessed the emergence and accretion of a thickening latticework of multilateral institutions, including international treaties, formal organizations, and informal frameworks, to manage global interdependence and provide governance over a mind-boggling array of spheres, including the control of weapons of mass destruction, the allocation of orbital slots in space, the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and global responses to pandemic disease.
Present at the Destruction
This is the world that Donald Trump seeks to destroy. His ambition is to replace the international rule of law with the law of the jungle. Rather than a global order that constrains great power privilege, he envisions a regionalized one in which powerful nations pursue spheres of influence and throw their weight around, browbeating lesser actors (like Denmark and Panama, say). In this purely transactional vision, substantive multilateralism yields to bullying bilateralism. There is no ambition to invest in world order or standing international institutions, or any desire to nurture “diffuse reciprocity”—or expectations that the benefits of cooperation will balance out in the long run. Instead, every interaction is an opportunity for one-sided bargaining to improve America’s relative position against all others.
This is a dark vision of the future. Trump’s America First policies will accelerate the fragmentation of a tottering world order already beset by centrifugal forces—rising geopolitical competition, surging populist nationalism, stalled development, destabilizing technologies, and a deepening climate emergency. Well before Trump’s election, UN Secretary-General António Guterres lamented a multilateral system “gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.”
This moment of peril cries out for far-sighted leadership to update multilateral institutions to address new threats and accommodate rising powers. Instead, the Trump administration seems intent on delivering a coup de grâce to existing bodies, without any positive vision of what comes next. This “stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off” mindset is based on the fantastical assumption that the United States can replicate the capacities of multilateral organizations and the global public goods they provide through its own efforts or new, ad hoc arrangements. Trump’s WHO executive order, for instance, instructs his administration to “identify credible and transparent United States and international partners to assume necessary activities previously undertaken by the WHO.” This ignores the practical impossibility of recreating the WHO’s global capabilities—including surveillance functions and genomic data on which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention depend–and overlooks the broader risks of a fragmented system of global health security.
In the end, the Trump administration’s critique of multilateralism boils down to three main complaints: international organizations and treaties infringe on American sovereignty, unduly restrict U.S. freedom of action, and simply cost too much. None are persuasive. First, the voluntary decision to join an international organization or become party to a treaty, undertaken consistently with the Constitution, is not a violation but in fact an exercise of U.S. sovereignty. Second, all parties that join treaties and international organizations accept reciprocal obligations, forswearing some options to obtain the benefits of predictability and collective effort. That is in fact the entire purpose of multilateralism. This does not mean all multilateral treaties and bodies merit U.S. support, but some reduced freedom of action is inevitable.
Third, the costs of international organizations and treaties are hardly onerous. In 2022, total U.S. support for the UN amounted to $18 billion. This is equivalent to 2 percent of the $820 billion the United States spends annually on its military—and about half of what Americans spend each year on ice cream. Beyond supporting the UN’s regular and peacekeeping budgets, U.S. funding goes to dozens of agencies and programs, ranging from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the Food and Agriculture Organization to the UN Children’s Fund.
“A cynic,” one of playwright Oscar Wilde’s characters observes, is “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” In his accelerating efforts to dismantle the multilateral system, Donald Trump certainly fits that description.
To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with periodically reviewing U.S. global commitments. But any such process should be done thoughtfully and judiciously, and in close consultation with Congress. Little in the Trump administration’s early flurry of norm- and institution-busting suggests this will be its modus operandi.
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