After Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, Washington set off a wave of withdrawals from international bodies that has unsettled allies and accelerated conversations about a world without an American steward. The administration formally opened the process to leave the World Health Organization on 20 January 2025 and, a year later, issued a memorandum on 7 January 2026 announcing exits from 66 international organisations — 31 UN agencies and 35 non‑UN institutions spanning environment, security, development, human rights and science.
The administration framed the campaign as a cost‑benefit purge. A February 2025 executive order (No. 14199) directed a year‑long review of all intergovernmental organisations the United States belongs to; Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the moves as a clean‑up of “redundancy, mismanagement, waste and poor performance.” Domestic politics sharpened the rationale: with congressional majorities that are reluctant to confront the president, and ahead of a difficult midterm cycle, “withdrawal” was packaged as a quick, populist demonstration of sovereignty and fiscal prudence.
Yet the pattern is selective, not wholesale. The 2026 budget request keeps funding for bodies crucial to security, transport, nuclear regulation and communications — the International Atomic Energy Agency, ICAO, ITU, IMO, NATO and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly are explicitly preserved. At the same time the White House seeks a historic boost in hard power: a January 2026 post on Trump’s social platform pledged to raise the defence budget to $1.5 trillion in 2027, a plan that the Congressional Budget Office estimates would add $5.8 trillion to the national debt over ten years once interest is included.
The tactical mix — large‑scale exits from soft multilateral mechanisms while shoring up military and critical technical institutions — points to a strategic logic rather than ad hoc instability. US leaders appear to view soft multilateralism as slow and costly, and thus dispensable, even as they double down on instruments that project coercive power and secure narrow interstate interests. The administration is simultaneously pursuing alternative architectures: at the Davos WEF in January 2026 Mr Trump announced a new “Peace Commission”, an attempt to create a US‑led parallel governance track that can attract sympathetic states and bypass perceived obstacles in existing institutions.
The international reaction has been pronounced. The 2026 Munich Security Report, headlined “Being Destroyed”, identified the United States as the most conspicuous source of disruption to the postwar order. Allies report a loss of trust that is visible in both formal diplomacy and private councils; the psychological impact on partners has been as damaging as the material consequences of specific withdrawals. Practical cooperation on transnational problems — pandemics, climate change, cross‑border crime — becomes harder when foundational mechanisms are hollowed out and replaced with competing, selective arrangements.
Domestically, the retreat is linked to an American polity under strain. Rising inequality, violent crime, migration controversies, and the political fallout from high‑profile scandals have deepened polarization and weakened the internal consensus that once underpinned global leadership. That fragmentation exports itself: a country riven by domestic distrust is less capable of underwriting collective action abroad, and its unpredictability raises the political and economic costs for partners who must now hedge against sudden policy reversals.
For states that benefit from US‑led multilateralism, the calculus is stark. Europe and longstanding allies must choose between trying to repair the system, seeking new umbrellas under which consensus can be rebuilt, or further decoupling. Emerging powers and regional actors may see opportunities to fill governance gaps, but their capacity to provide public goods at global scale is limited. The result is likely to be a more fragmented governance landscape, where overlapping, competing institutions complicate global responses to common threats.
The era of American primacy was sustained not just by military and economic leverage but by an architecture of rules, norms and institutions that multiplied US influence. A deliberate withdrawal from that architecture does not erase American power; it repackages it. The United States is moving towards a model that privileges unilateral tools and bespoke coalitions over universal institutions, a shift that will shape the international system’s incentives, alignments and fault lines for years to come.