Five Questions on America’s Withdrawal from International Organizations

Many Americans have heard about cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), U.S. withdrawals from international organizations, and debates over whether institutions like the United Nations or World Health Organization are worth supporting. In your new Journal of Democracy article, you argue that these decisions have consequences far beyond saving money. What do most people misunderstand about what the United States actually gains from participating in these institutions?

What many people misunderstand is that U.S. participation in international organizations that promote democracy and human rights has never been primarily about charity or liberal idealism. When the U.S. funds and staffs institutions such as the World Health Organization, UN Peacekeeping, or UNESCO, it is buying broader influence over the rules, agendas, and procedures that shape regional and global politics. Those international rules—whether with respect to trade, finance, internet governance, public health, or environmental standard-setting—affect Americans’ day-to-day lives in ways that many do not fully appreciate. They help determine, for example, whether U.S. firms can sell into foreign markets on predictable terms, whether disease outbreaks are detected before they reach American soil, and whether the world maintains an open internet rather than state-controlled networks. For decades, the U.S. benefited in economic and security terms from embedding American preferences over how to manage these issues into global governance.

By neglecting or withdrawing from so many international institutions, and by cutting foreign aid, the U.S. is not just creating an international environment that is more challenging for democracy and human rights. The U.S. is also abandoning deep investments in its formal and informal influence: investments that created structural advantages for the U.S., including economic leverage and more cohesive alliances.

One of the article’s most surprising arguments is that authoritarian governments aren’t trying to tear down international organizations—they’re increasingly trying to lead them. Can you explain how countries like China and Russia are using multilateral institutions to advance their own political goals, and why that strategy has become more successful in recent years?

China and other autocracies have learned what the U.S. government used to know: significant financial contributions, well-placed staff, and sustained diplomatic attention at international organizations buy governments invaluable influence over the rules of global politics. Providing money and leadership at the UN, China in particular helps UN institutions continue providing beneficial services and global public goods, from disease outbreak tracking to peacekeeping.

But China also uses its rising influence to undercut UN activities it opposes, particularly in areas of democracy and human rights. Autocrats want international organizations that convene governments, distribute resources, set standards and confer legitimacy—but with fewer constraints on state power and less “rights talk.”

This strategy has become more effective because the U.S. retreat from international organizations created openings. When Washington stops showing up at international organizations to build coalitions or place people in key leadership positions, other states with very different priorities see space for maneuvering and intensify their efforts to gain leverage. China increased its staffing footprint in the UN system while weighing in more forcefully in budgetary discussions to defund UN human rights mandates. Gulf monarchies have expanded earmarked funding for their priorities at the UN, and Russia has pursued its goals in technical bodies dealing with arms control and internet governance, all with declining pushback from the U.S.

The UN Convention against Cybercrime offers a concrete example of an authoritarian government successfully moving an issue onto the international agenda in an effort to reshape global governance. Russia began promoting a universal UN cybercrime treaty in 2017 as an alternative to the Council of Europe’s Budapest Convention, which Moscow had long opposed. With support from China and other governments, Russia secured the creation of a UN negotiating committee in 2019. In December 2024, the General Assembly adopted the resulting convention without a vote. The final treaty differs substantially from Russia’s original proposal and includes human-rights safeguards negotiated by other states. Nevertheless, Russia achieved an important strategic objective: it shifted global cybercrime rulemaking into a universal forum where it had greater influence and helped establish broad mechanisms for cross-border cooperation and the exchange of electronic evidence. Digital-rights organizations warn that governments may exploit those mechanisms to investigate critics, journalists, or dissidents when conduct protected in one country is criminalized in another.

You’ve written that the real contest isn’t simply between democracy and authoritarianism, but between two broader and competing visions of how the international system should work. If you had to explain this competition to someone who doesn’t study foreign policy, what are the two visions, and how do they produce different outcomes on issues like human rights, internet governance, or election monitoring?

Almost everyone wants some form of international cooperation. The deeper struggle is over what cooperation is supposed to do. One vision, associated with liberal multilateralism, treats international institutions not only as venues where governments cooperate to pursue economic and security gains, but also as places where governments can be held to standards related to governance. For example, the UN gives some standing to civil society groups, monitoring bodies, and individuals to participate in global governance. It also asserts that sovereignty should not be a shield for fundamental rights violations such as torture or disenfranchisement. To be sure, the democracy and rights-promotion elements of the U.S.-backed order have been applied imperfectly and frequently in hypocritical ways. However, many people benefited from international advocacy in favor of free and fair elections, robust civil and political rights, and dynamic civil societies.

The competing vision puts sovereignty first. In that view, governments are the central actors, and outside scrutiny is inappropriate interference. China and Russia have been especially active in promoting this approach, but they are not alone. Even democratic middle powers with histories of dealing with external meddling are often sympathetic to the sovereignty-focused vision for global governance that demotes international monitoring. The sovereignty-first model does not necessarily reject every liberal-sounding idea. Authoritarian governments may still like “good governance,” anti-corruption campaigns, technocratic policymaking, or rule of law when those ideas strengthen state capacity or protect contracts. They resist the parts of liberal multilateralism that empower independent actors: support for transnational civil society, individual political rights, democratic accountability, and external monitoring.

In human rights forums such as the Human Rights Council, IGCC research has shown how illiberal coalitions work to block investigations and restrict civil-society access, claiming these mechanisms violate state sovereignty. Russia and its partners have promoted alternative election observer missions that validate flawed elections and muddy public understanding of what credible international monitoring looks like. In internet governance, China and Russia advocate for a sovereignty-centered model that gives governments wide authority to censor content and restrict internet access; moreover, other research from IGCC affiliates shows that these conflicting norms are pushed through a variety of UN bodies and other international organizations.

There’s a common assumption that if one U.S. administration withdraws from international institutions, the next administration can simply rejoin and everything returns to normal. Your article suggests that’s no longer true. What has changed?

Rejoining institutions is easier than rebuilding trust and influence. It would be important for a future administration to reverse recent withdrawals, repay dues, and speak again in favor of democracy and human rights. But U.S. influence over global rules and agenda-setting power also depended on trust and predictability—rebuilding these foundations will be slower.

Earlier U.S. withdrawals from international organizations were more tactical. Washington sometimes would leave an international body or withhold support to try to force through reforms. An example is when the U.S. withdrew from UNESCO in 1984, while still signaling that it remained committed to the broader system. The current retreat looks different because it is more ideologically consistent—based on a hostile view of international organizations—and paired with the weakening of bureaucratic capacity inside the U.S. government. The Trump Administration has not just stepped back, but has also removed the foundations needed for reengagement: State Department staff have been cut, whole offices closed, and with those changes has come a loss of expertise, relationships, and credibility.

The article ends with a warning but also a challenge: that the United States may be ceding strategic influence rather than freeing itself from international constraints. Looking at today’s geopolitical landscape—including China’s growing diplomatic role, Europe’s efforts to assume greater leadership, and conflicts that require international cooperation—what will you be watching over the next five years to know whether your thesis is proving correct?

I will be watching to see which mandates are funded or defunded in international organizations ranging from the UN institutions to technical organizations and regional bodies. I anticipate more human rights mandates getting defunded and more civil society groups facing procedural barriers to participating in international organizations, unless the EU and like-minded democracies rally to draw a line in the sand around these issues.

In one hopeful, albeit small, example in June 2026, European governments, joined by states from Latin America and other regions, pushed back on China and Russia’s efforts to strip human rights positions out of UN peacekeeping. They organized to preserve a professional human-rights post in the newly established UN Support Office in Haiti that China, backed by Russia, pressed to eliminate.

On balance, however, the record of democracies pushing back against authoritarian co-optation at the UN has not been inspiring. In April 2026, when elections were held for the UN committee that controls civil society accreditation, the ECOSOC Committee on NGOs, regional slates for membership were largely uncontested. This once again produced a committee containing numerous governments with records of restricting independent organizations or obstructing their participation at the UN, including Cameroon, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Because the committee can repeatedly defer NGOs’ applications by demanding additional information, it does not need to reject an organization outright to keep it out of UN meetings. The U.S. was also re-elected to the Committee, but it is increasingly unclear whether the U.S. will devote much attention to its work there. The question now is essentially whether European governments organize to defend human rights mandates and civil society access, or allow procedural decisions in relatively obscure bodies like the Committee on NGOs to narrow both.

Another place to watch is the behavior of swing states. Many governments do not want to choose between Brussels and Beijing, and some find sovereignty-first arguments attractive for their own domestic reasons. In the article we point to a wide range of states—including authoritarian middle powers and countries experiencing democratic backsliding—that may favor liberal economic cooperation while resisting strong democracy and human-rights agendas. Their votes, abstentions, and procedural choices in international forums will tell us a great deal about where the center of gravity is moving.

The EU has begun to act more assertively in defense of liberal multilateralism in some respects, and that is one of the more hopeful notes in the article. Still, the EU does not have the financial or diplomatic capacity to fully replace the U.S., in part because it is squeezed to increase spending on defense. The more likely future is a patchier order: liberal cooperation among like-minded partners in some regions and issue areas, alongside a more sovereignty-centered multilateralism in other areas. That world would be governed by a different balance of power with fewer advantages for the U.S. and its democratic allies.

Christina Cottiero is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah and a former IGCC dissertation fellow (2020-2021). Her research interests include international cooperation, with an emphasis on regional organizations, African international relations, and cooperation among authoritarian regimes.

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