Will Trump Actually Withdraw from the WHO?

His decision will be a harbinger of things to come

A child is immunized in Utter Pradesh, India. February 2007. Credit: Global Polio Eradication Initiative

The Financial Times just published an eye-popping scoop that Trump transition team are drawing up plans to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization on day one of the Second Trump Administration.

From the FT:

Members of Trump’s team told the experts of their intention to announce a withdrawal from the global health body on the president-elect’s January 20 inauguration. The departure would remove the WHO’s biggest source of funds, damaging its ability to respond to public health crises such as the coronavirus pandemic.

The FT piece does not provide any definitive answer as to whether or not Trump will move forward with this plan, but it does show us that his team is very much actively considering a full American withdrawal from the World Health Organization.

We have, of course, seen this movie before.

In 2020, the Trump administration sought to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization. At the time, Trump was suffering from constant criticism for his own incompetent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, so months before the November election, he sought to scapegoat the WHO in a transparent attempt to deflect blame.

In September of that year, the White House pulled the trigger. A letter justifying its decision to leave the organization is three pages long and includes no fewer than 14 bullet points detailing the WHO’s supposed failings during COVID-19. What is so telling about this letter is that the very first sentence of the very first bullet point justifying America’s withdrawal from the WHO contains this outrageous lie: “The World Health Organization consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal.”

There were no reports from The Lancet about COVID-19 in December 2019! The Trump White House just made that up. In fact, The Lancet had to release a statement correcting the record, showing that the first published article about COVID-19 only appeared in late January 2020, around the time COVID-19 first came onto the global radar.

Trump’s decision to lie about the WHO two months before an election predicated on his handling of COVID-19 suggests to me that his opposition to the WHO was a consequence of the politics of the moment and not the result of some deep animosity toward the WHO as an institution. Indeed, during his first term in office, Trump’s approach to the UN more broadly did not reflect an ideological hostility toward the institution. His administration worked within the Security Council to ratchet up pressure on North Korea and Iran and even, in some instances, increased funding for humanitarian entities like the World Food Program. By all accounts, he rather enjoyed being feted around the UN General Assembly and delivering his annual address.

Unlike other UN entities like the Paris Agreement, the UN Population Fund, and the UN Compact on Migration — all of which Trump will definitely leave during his second term — American participation in the WHO these next four years was always an open question. Back in 2020, his decision to break from the WHO was a consequence of the politics of the moment, so it was never a foregone conclusion that he’d seek to withdraw from the WHO during his second term.

Trump is so capricious and volatile that it is hard to predict whether or not he’d actually follow through with his advisors’ plan to do so, on day one or beyond. However, if he decides to move forward with this plan, it will give us a deeper sense that he’s become ideologically tilted against the UN. And this, of course, will be an early indicator of how he plans to approach the very idea that global cooperation is required to solve global problems.

We Need to Defend Internationalism

The WHO has made the world a safer and healthier place. More broadly, the world has become a more peaceful and prosperous place because of international law, international cooperation, multilateral institutions and the idea that one country’s gain need not be another country’s loss.

If the WHO comes under sudden attack by the Trump administration, it will be a harbinger of things to come. We can likely expect a variety of international institutions — and even the premise of international cooperation to solve global problems — to come under fierce attack.

Those of us who care about international institutions and understand how and why they advance the global good will need to mount a strong defense from the outset. We will need to demonstrate the value and utility of these institutions to American security and prosperity, and argue that institutions benefiting the global good also advance American interests.

To a large extent, conveying the importance of international institutions and international law has been my life’s work. It stems from my core belief that international cooperation can nudge the world to a better place for everyone. It’s why I started Global Dispatches.

In the coming months, defending the basic tenets of internationalism will be more important than ever.