The emerging contours of UN policy under Trump 2.0
Reading the tea leaves
U.S. policy towards the UN under the second Trump administration is swimming into focus. Much was revealed in the decision earlier this week to withdraw from UNESCO as well as the confirmation hearings of several nominees to ambassadorial positions who will play an important role in the development and execution of U.S. policy towards the UN. The hearing for Michael Waltz, the nominee for U.S. representative to the UN, has been extensively reported on, but it was preceded by hearings held for Jennifer Locetta, a former executive director of the Florida Republican Party who worked in the White House during Trump’s first term, and Jeff Bartos, the unsuccessful Republican candidate for Pennsylvania lieutenant governor in 2024. Locetta and Bartos are the nominees for representative for special political affairs and representative for UN management and reform, respectively.
These developments shed light on how the views of the administration towards the UN are shaped by the interplay of nativist culture-war impulses and an approach to geopolitics that international relations scholars would describe as “offensive realism”. The Trump administration considers the UN as a useful platform that can be leveraged to maximize the power and influence of the United States, but it feels no obligation to follow international law and norms where these are seen to conflict with U.S. national interest. As a result, the United States is likely to remain in the UN but will engage with UN entities and intergovernmental bodies in a fundamentally opportunistic manner. It will seek to minimize the financial cost of this engagement while wielding the conditional payment of its assessed contributions as a blunt weapon to drive reform at the UN.
Staying in the UN but leaving UNESCO
Calls for the United States to withdraw from the UN are commonplace from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. But, in his prepared remarks, Michael Waltz presented a case for the United States remaining in the UN even as he castigated the Organization for what he described as bloat and anti-American sentiment. He argued that the UN is “one place in the world where everyone can talk”, that the UN has an important role in setting standards and that, in this regard, “U.S. leadership is essential and America should have a strong voice”. He also emphasized the importance of the UN as a platform from which the United States could counter China and to “challenge pervasive antisemitism”—i.e., defend Israel.
How can we square these arguments for staying in the UN with the decision earlier this week to withdraw from UNESCO? A likely explanation is the apparent prioritization of culture war considerations—including the suppression of Palestine—over geopolitical contestation in the determination of continued U.S. membership in international organizations. Indeed, culture war issues were prominent in the State Department press release on the UNESCO decision, which stated:
UNESCO works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy. UNESCO’s decision to admit the “State of Palestine” as a Member State is highly problematic, contrary to U.S. policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.
This is striking because the United States rejoined UNESCO in 2023 specifically to counter China.1 This was made possible due to a bipartisan agreement in Congress that allowed the United States to resume payment of its contributions to UNESCO if the President determined that “to do so would enable the United States to counter Chinese influence or to promote other national interests of the United States”.2 UNESCO is best known for its activities in areas such as education—including on Holocaust awareness—and the preservation of cultural heritage. However, it also has a growing role in artificial intelligence, particularly in the ethics of artificial intelligence. The withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO essentially cedes the field in these areas of geopolitical contestation to China, which has engaged in a concerted effort to increase its influence in UNESCO.
A limited role for the UN
The Trump administration believes that the UN should focus narrowly on peace and security. To justify this vision of the UN, all three nominees presented a narrative in which the UN was originally established to support the maintenance of international peace and security after the end of the Second World War, but that the organization has expanded its work as a result of bloat and mission creep in the intervening 80 years. This is, of course, a willful misreading of the UN Charter.
The maintenance of international peace and security is not the only purpose of the UN specified in Article 1. Other purposes enumerated include the development of “friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” as well as the achievement of “international cooperation in solving problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all”.
The administration has shifted beyond a position of lack of interest in the development agenda at the UN to active opposition, going so far as to repudiate the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals by asserting that these “advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and is adverse to the rights and interests of Americans”.3 The narrow conception of the role of the UN around peace and security will continue to put the United States at odds with other countries—particularly the Group of 77 and China—for whom development is a priority. These countries are alarmed by moves to de-prioritize development at the UN, including in the context of the UN80 initiative.
More broadly, the administration views development assistance not in moral terms, but in terms of national interest, narrowly defined.4 This was evident during the confirmation hearing of Lynda Blanchard, the nominee for U.S. representative to the Rome-based UN agencies, discussed food assistance provided by the United States primarily in terms of the benefits to American farmers. The following week, Waltz argued that the United States should link the provision of foreign aid to voting coincidence with the United States at the UN. Waltz asserted that the U.S. is outvoted in a majority of cases at the UN. This is highly misleading as the majority of resolutions in the UN General Assembly are adopted by consensus. As such, the African member states that Waltz asserted only side with the United States a third of the time actually agree with the United States on most resolutions. Regardless, voting patterns in contested votes provide a rationale that the administration can draw upon when convenient to justify further cuts in foreign aid to individual countries.
Cost-cutting and reform
The opening statement delivered by Jeff Bartos included the usual calls for accountability and transparency and the usual amorphous references to alleged waste, fraud, and abuse at the UN—evergreen justifications for cost cutting at the UN.
Peacekeeping operations—which, despite their decade-long decline, remain the largest source of expenditure of the UN under assessed contributions—are in the crosshairs. Waltz stated in his opening remarks that “we must press the Security Council on length, cost, and clear end states, focusing on peacekeeping, not nation-building”. Later in the hearing, he added that the annual mandate reviews of peacekeeping operations provided an opportunity to question the results of missions, taking into account how long they had been deployed and how much they cost. This recalls the push early during the first Trump administration for a mission-by-mission review of peacekeeping operations to determine whether each mission remained “fit for purpose”, which helped drive the drawdown and closure of UN peacekeeping from Haiti. There will likely be a similar push for the drawdown or closure of peacekeeping missions during the second term. Missions deployed for an extended period of time and without a clear and credible exit strategy are likely to face the greatest scrutiny.
What is different from the first term, however, is the overt willingness of the Trump administration to condition the payment of assessed contributions on alignment of the UN with U.S. policy priorities. During the question-and-answer portion of his confirmation hearing, Michael Waltz said,
I understand that there is concern about the President's budget request.5 But I see it as moment of opportunity. If you look at when reform has actually happened happened—not just talked about, not the rhetoric—it is when the United States has said you know what, we need to actually see things before the U.S. taxpayer continues to write checks.
This was a reference to the practice, dating back to the 1980s, of conditional withholding—usually initiated by Republicans in Congress—that made the payment of U.S. assessed contributions contingent upon the adoption of specific reforms. The examples cited by Waltz were the establishment of the Office of Internal Oversight Services in 1994 and the change to the scales of assessment that resulted from the Helms-Biden legislation adopted in 1999.
Waltz asserted that this funding pressure had already yielded dividends, arguing that he did not think that Secretary-General Guterres would have launched the UN80 initiative if he did not take the statements of President Trump and Secretary Rubio seriously. The United States is likely to use funding pressure in an attempt to increase U.S. representation in the UN, to eliminate or scale down programs or entities whose activities are opposed by the United States, and to reduce the U.S. share of assessed budgets under the scales of assessments.
However, the extent to which the United States can successfully weaponize its contributions to achieve these objectives is tempered significantly by the fact that the baseline scenario—the status quo—is U.S. nonpayment. Furthermore, it is difficult to argue that the United States is overpaying, given that its assessment rates—22% for the regular budget and nearly 26.2% for peacekeeping budgets—are broadly in line with its approximately 25.0% share of gross national income.
If the United States continues to be delinquent in meeting its financial obligations to the UN, it will have to take a decision in 2026 on whether to make the minimum payment required to avoid losing its vote in the General Assembly under Article 19 of the Charter (its vote—and veto—in the Security Council is not affected). The administration would have to weigh whether the loss of voting privileges in the General Assembly is worth whatever leverage the United States can exert by maintaining financial pressure on the UN.
Last dregs
The Trump administration is supposed to complete the 180-day review of all international intergovernmental organizations of which the United States is a member early next month. The results of the UNESCO 90-day review and the confirmation hearings that have already taken place suggest that the United States is likely to remain a member of the UN, but that the United States will push for the UN—and the broader UN system—to be significantly reduced in the breadth of issues addressed. As a result of the review, the administration is likely to push for the symbolic withdrawal from some organizations with limited obvious linkages to U.S. national security interests, narrowly defined. For those organizations that it remains a member of, the administration is likely to use criticism and obstruction—including selective payment of assessed contributions—to maximize its ability to coerce those organizations into alignment with U.S. policy positions.
© 2025 Eugene Chen under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The U.S. withdrawal of UNESCO at the start of the first Trump administration was primarily a symbolic measure. This is because the United States had already lost its vote in the UNESCO General Conference on account of its arrears following the suspension of payment of its assessed contributions, as required by U.S. legislation, as a result of the admission of Palestine as a UNESCO member state in 2011.
Section 7070 of Division K of P.L. 117-328.
Heartney, E. (2025, March 4). Remarks at the General Assembly: 58th plenary meeting, 79th session. U.S. Mission to the United Nations. https://usun.usmission.gov/remarks-at-the-general-assembly-58th-plenary-meeting-79th-session/.
Marco Rubio stated in January that foreign policy decisions must be justified on three criteria: whether they make America safer, whether they make America stronger, and whether they make America more prosperous.
Although the fiscal year 2026 budget request includes no funds for assessed contributions to the UN, the possibility of paying some contributions to the UN, at the discretion of the President, is retained in the proposed America First Opportunity Fund.