Trump’s Mistaken Belief That What Happens Elsewhere Isn’t Washington’s Concern

Since World War II, U.S. presidents have believed that the interests and welfare of the United States and its citizens are linked with those of other nations and people. The United States has an abiding interest, as well as a moral obligation, to support international institutions that can advance collective security, promote shared prosperity, address common challenges, and further human dignity worldwide.

President Donald Trump and his supporters dismiss such interdependence as unpatriotic “globalism.” Repudiating any concept of U.S. international leadership of—much less responsibility for—world order, his administration has adopted a nationalist, transactional, and hyper-sovereigntist orientation.

This mindset accounts for two provocative administrative initiatives. The first was a sweeping executive order on February 4 directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to review all international treaties to which the United States is a party and international organizations of which it is a member and to report back within 180 days with recommendations for withdrawal. The second was the administration’s budget for the 2026 fiscal year, submitted to Congress on May 2. It would slash federal funding for international affairs by almost 84 percent—from $58.7 billion to just $9.6 billion. It does this through massive cuts to U.S. foreign aid and support for international organizations, the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the overhaul of the U.S. Department of State, and the recission of previously appropriated funds.

The thread weaving these twin initiatives together is a mistaken belief that what happens elsewhere is of little concern—and a misplaced confidence that the country has ample national tools and diplomatic leverage to address all transnational threats on its own, or bilaterally.

Cutting International Commitments

There is nothing inherently wrong with periodically taking stock of treaty commitments and organizational memberships. But this should be done in a thoughtful, sober-minded, and transparent manner, in partnership with Congress and consultation with stakeholders. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s chaotic first months do not bring the word “deliberative” to mind. The White House has set a tight timetable and lacks the requisite staff in place for such a complex review, and it has given no indication that it will welcome civil society input. This review is more likely to be a wrecking ball exercise with a predetermined outcome rather than a good-faith process.

For now, a full-scale UN withdrawal— a longtime goal of nationalists such as Utah Senator Mike Lee—seems unlikely. The United States has an abiding interest in retaining a permanent, veto-wielding seat on the UN Security Council, and Trump likely enjoys the pageantry of speaking to the annual opening of the UN General Assembly (UNGA). The same is true for the Bretton Woods financial institutions, which Project 2025 urged a U.S. departure from. At their recent spring meetings, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reassured World Bank and International Monetary Fund officials of continued U.S. membership, while decrying their “mission creep” into areas such as climate change.

This may be cold comfort, since Trump intends to dramatically curtail U.S. political and financial support for most multilateral bodies. The administration’s budget request would slash overall funding for the UN by 87 percent, cutting not only voluntary contributions to UN programs and agencies but also America’s legally binding, assessed contributions, including to the UN’s regular and peacekeeping budgets.

Beyond placing the world body under immense financial pressure, this U.S. decision to treat assessed contributions as discretionary violates U.S. legal obligations under the UN Charter. It will surely be replicated by other members, resulting in an even more unpredictable UN funding system dominated by cherry-picking. The result could be a massive arears crisis that cripples UN diplomacy for years—which may be the point.

Among the most misguided cuts is the administration’s proposal to zero out U.S. support for UN peacekeeping, citing “recent failures” and the United States having “pa[id] more than its fair share.” No doubt, some recent UN operations have struggled, in part because of the changing nature of warfare and because the UN Security Council often sets unrealistic mission mandates. But the fact remains that UN peacekeeping is the most cost-effective means ever devised to reduce death and human suffering in the world’s conflict zones—and its success has repeatedly been demonstrated empirically. Moreover, the financial burden it imposes on the United States is hardly onerous. The country covers about 25 percent of the cost of UN peacekeeping, which is proportional to its share of global GDP. This may sound like a lot, but it amounts to around $1.5 billion, less than the annual city budget of Orlando. It also means that for every quarter it spends, the United States leverages a dollar of global effort, without putting any U.S. boots on the ground.

The same is true for overall U.S. contributions to the UN. In 2023, total U.S. spending on the UN amounted to about $13 billion. This is equivalent to only 1.6 percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget that year ($816 billion)—or about two-thirds of what Americans spend on ice cream annually.

Cutting this already modest U.S. funding by 87 percent could cripple the ability of UN agencies to address pressing challenges of interdependence. These global priorities include combating transnational crime, countering biodiversity collapse, addressing global hunger, promoting the well-being of children, providing life-saving relief to refugees, managing migration flows, combating global poverty, addressing infectious disease, and so much more. If the United States follows through on these cuts, the world will fall even farther behind in meeting the already faltering Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Defunding Diplomacy and Development

The administration’s indifference to governing interdependence goes well beyond the UN. Among other lowlights, the White House’s budget request to Congress would also make deep cuts to numerous areas of international funding.

The administration’s slash-and-burn approach to the international affairs budget will have devastating impacts on global health security, cutting off and undermining essential institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO), UNAIDS, the Pandemic Fund, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. It will also hamstring global humanitarian efforts as the world strains to manage a historic surge in refugees and internally displaced people and save the lives of the world’s most desperate. And it will confirm global suspicions that U.S. support for democracy and human rights was always a smokescreen for more cynical calculations of national interest.

A small but telling example is the administration’s elimination of the modest but nimble USAID Office of Transition Initiatives, created to support democratic openings abroad. The White House dismisses it in language reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 indifference to the fate of Czechoslovakia, as an office seeking “to shape political outcomes in distant countries with no practical impact on U.S. security.”

But the administration’s rejection of global interdependence extends far beyond traditional foreign affairs agencies. Consider climate change. The budget request cancels more than $15 billion in what it calls “Green New Scam” funding at the Department of Energy, ends the climate activities of the Environmental Protection Agency, and terminates more than $1.3 billion in “climate-dominated research, data and grant programs” at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which the administration alleges has “radicalize[d] students against markets and spread environmental alarm.”

Undercutting Global Public Goods

The administration is also undermining the provision of global public goods, in part by curtailing the international sharing of scientific information and technical data. In dismantling USAID, the administration shuttered its Famine Early Warning Emergency Response System Network, the global gold standard for anticipating and alerting governments and civil society to impending food emergencies, especially in crisis-prone areas such as the Horn of Africa. The administration has similarly enjoined NOAA and other U.S. agencies not to share atmospheric, climate, and other Earth observations data with UN agencies, including the World Meteorological Organization. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meanwhile, has been told to stop communicating with WHO.

These cuts and restrictions are partly ideological, reflecting a far-right skepticism of expert authority (reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic) and the president’s own dismissal of inconvenient scientific truths, including climate change. But they also reflect a misplaced confidence that the United States can address transnational challenges on its own and thus draws little benefit from investing in, much less providing, global public goods.

Trump’s executive order on withdrawing from WHO is instructive. While citing WHO’s shortcomings, the president directs U.S. agencies to replicate its functions through domestic efforts and ad hoc foreign partnerships. In any future pandemic, such a makeshift approach to health security could be deadly.

The administration’s aversion to collectively managing interdependence is even more apparent when it comes to transformative technologies. The administration of former president Joe Biden, sensitive to the risks as well as rewards of artificial intelligence, issued an executive order on AI with a strong safety focus, sponsored the first UNGA resolution on AI safety, and supported the G7’s Hiroshima AI Process on the topic. The Trump administration has dismissed such concerns as needlessly “risk-averse.” As Vice President JD Vance made clear at February’s AI summit in Paris, the United States’ objective is dominance, pure and simple. The White House shows little interest in working with China to develop guardrails against potentially catastrophic AI dangers.

America Unbound—and Alone

In the Trumpian worldview, multilateralism should be avoided when possible. This instinct is rooted not simply in cost-benefit calculations or the belief that some treaties and organizations have gotten off track or outlived their utility. More fundamentally, it reflects the conviction that multilateral conventions and bodies by definition infringe on U.S. sovereignty—an unacceptable imposition on U.S. political independence and an intolerable constraint on U.S. freedom of action. The most ludicrous recent expression of this viewpoint was a March 4 declaration by America’s UN delegation that it would vote against any resolution referencing the SDGs, on the grounds that they “advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans.”

This Trumpian perspective on sovereignty is wildly distorted, since any international obligations that the United States assumes are always voluntary and intergovernmental in nature and undertaken in a manner consistent with the U.S. Constitution. As such, they do not create hierarchical relationships of dominance and subordination. Far from an abrogation or infringement of sovereignty, they indeed are expressions of it, reflecting a calculation by the nation’s elected leaders that the United States can more effectively advance its interests and shape its fate through collective action than on its own.

This was once well-understood by mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike. Although the United States has always been ambivalent about multilateralism—and has stayed apart from some treaties such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—postwar presidents and most members of Congress have generally recognized the value of international institutions and the importance of shared rules of the road to manage global interdependence. Multilateralism certainly requires give and take, but as the most powerful nation, the United States exerts greater sway over outcomes than other countries. This general commitment to cooperation also helps legitimate U.S. power, whereas a blustering, my-way-or-the-highway orientation never could.

In rejecting the logic of interdependence, Trump is falling prey to the illusion of interwar isolationists such as senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Michigan Republican who took refuge in America’s geographic position. “True, we do live in a foreshortened world in which, compared with Washington’s day, time and space are relatively annihilated. But I still thank God for the two insulating oceans,” he declared in February 1939. Within three years, Pearl Harbor would shake him from his complacency.

Unfortunately, Trump remains under the same illusion. Shortly before his catastrophic February Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the U.S. president echoed Vandenberg’s language on social media. “This War is far more important to Europe than it is for us,” he posted. “We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”

Global interdependence, however, is even greater today than in Vandenberg’s age—as is U.S. vulnerability. We inhabit a world not merely of armies and navies but also of transnational threats and borderless challenges, from weapons of mass destruction to virulent pathogens, greenhouse gases, financial contagions, and transformative technologies. There is no moat or Maginot Line that can protect us—only cooperation.