The U.S. government’s announcement that it will seek to withdraw from more than 60 international organizations, many linked to the United Nations, will inflict lasting geopolitical self-harm and suggests the current administration is deeply insecure in the face of a rapidly changing world, political scientists said this week.
The new directive from the White House seems to undermine America’s own influence in global systems, said Federica Genovese, a political scientist at the University of Oxford.
“We are seeing a superpower confronted with the fact that its position may be threatened, and how superpowers react when they need to change,” she said. More fundamentally, she added, “the return of Trump is a symptom of Americans themselves being unsure how they want to position themselves in the world.”
Genovese said the global consequences of U.S. policy shifts are already taking shape. As the U.S. disengages, for example by pulling out of the Paris Agreement, climate cooperation is mutating.
“We are moving into a much more fragmented world,” she said, where cooperation becomes “more cynical, more hierarchical and more forceful,” increasingly driven by power and self-interest rather than shared responsibility.
In that world, she said, the European Union is becoming an institutional anchor for climate governance and data sharing, not because it is perfect, but because it continues to treat scientific coordination and rule-based cooperation as public goods, she added.
In a statement reacting to the new withdrawal decree, German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider said the U.S. exit from the United Nations climate framework was expected, but disappointing nonetheless.
“During the climate conference at the end of last year it became apparent the U.S. is alone with its stance on climate change,” he said. “A number of new alliances were forged in Belém to address international carbon markets, accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels and, most notably, combat fake news on climate issues.”
Some European leaders increasingly see the United States as a threat to global stability. In separate statements this week, French President Emmanuel Macron and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier both warned that U.S. actions and statements are hastening the disintegration of post-WWII rule-based governance.
As reported by The Guardian, Macron said multilateral institutions are becoming less effective in a world with great powers tempted to try dividing up the world.
Speaking in Berlin Wednesday, Steinmeier said global democracy is at risk, and that smaller states and entire regions could be “treated as the property of a few great powers.”
No Simple Answers to Complex Issues
By leaving the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U.S. forfeits having seats on any of the organization’s climate finance boards, losing any influence over how U.S. dollars already in the fund will be spent, which appears to be a “dereliction of the administration’s duty to American taxpayers,” according to a statement from Joe Thwaites, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international climate finance program.
The Jan. 7 memorandum from the White House instructs federal departments and agencies to take “immediate steps” to cease funding for, and participation in, organizations ranging from child-abuse prevention programs, online freedom coalitions and public-health working groups, to cyber-crime forums, human-rights commissions and cultural heritage bodies.
The list reads like it was compiled by grabbing documents from a filing cabinet that tumbled down a flight of stairs. But the loud clatter is not just accidental noise, especially in the context of other global events, including an apparent U.S. takeover of Venezuela’s fossil resources, said Marc Hudson, a visiting science policy research fellow at the University of Sussex who traces the history of climate policy on the All Our Yesterdays website.
The din distracts from a systematic effort to dismantle the administrative and scientific scaffolding of the post-WWII international order that has enabled at least some level of international cooperation and accountability on climate action and a wide range of other issues, Hudson said.
“What you’re seeing here is a refusal to engage with the irreducible complexity of the world,” he said. The people driving the efforts to further isolate the United States see many of the institutions on the list as “woke job-creation programs for liberal, hippie scum who can’t get a job in the real world,” he said.
One of the consequences, he added, is “that a whole bunch of clever people lose their jobs and their influence within the state, and the state becomes much more blind to various threats.”
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The White House memo says a Department of State review identified organizations whose work runs counter to U.S. interests. The White House did not respond to questions about the memorandum.
Some legal experts said it could take months or years to determine whether a series of executive actions can legally sever all these international ties.
The U.S. is connected to those international groups through various legal mechanisms, but the new memo seeks to nullify decades of layered international law with a single action, like a new homeowners’ association president trying to dissolve the group by posting a note on the front door. The intent is clear, but the authority is not.
More “Flooding the Zone” Tactics
Political analysts say the cascade of confusion isn’t purely chaotic. There’s a documented pattern of using information overload to overwhelm institutions and public attention. Torrents of proclamations, directives and policies that sometimes contradict each other are issued so rapidly that the media, civil society and legal systems can’t keep up.
This “flooding the zone” strategy, identified by political communications researchers, exploits the limited attention span of modern societies. Too much information makes it hard to process, verify or contest substantive changes before they take hold.
Analyses of authoritarian playbooks show that this is a deliberate governance tactic designed to exhaust opponents and weaken oversight by increasing the speed and volume of rulings, policies and decrees.
On top of the exhaustion and loss of institutional knowledge, confusing decrees generate uncertainty, all of which make it harder for societies to respond coherently to long-term threats like climate change, said Rachel Santarsiero, a National Security Archive researcher who studies the history of international climate governance.
With public attention constantly shifting to the new crisis of the day, long-term climate and environmental governance fade into the background, she added.
From Genovese’s perspective, the U.S. might have to confront the internal threat of rising authoritarianism before it degenerates into something even worse, as a prerequisite to reengaging with the world on climate action and other issues.
The latest steps to isolate the U.S. are part of an authoritarian far-right agenda that has been part of the American political spectrum for a “very, very long time,” she said. “What is new is that people are finally being forced to talk about fascism in America and about whether they know their own history, or want to know their past for what it is.”
She said she’s heard friends and colleagues in the U.S. argue that this is the moment to focus on restoring democracy in public institutions.
“Yes, climate change cannot wait, but you are not going to do anything about climate change if you have a petro-autocracy,” she said, referring to a national government that aligns its policies with fossil fuel interests. “There is a sequence to this,” she added. “Democracy has to come first.”
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Bob Berwyn is an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.
