Notwithstanding Trump’s promise to leave, the U.S. still has a chance to remain in the organization — and reform it from within.
Notwithstanding Trump’s promise to leave, the U.S. still has a chance to remain in the organization — and reform it from within.
T he president’s statement on May 29 that he is “terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization” came as no surprise. For over two months, the U.N. agency faced criticism for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and accusations of covering for the Chinese government’s early failures to deal with the crisis.
But as former State Department lawyer Harold Koh and Georgetown law professor Lawrence Gostin noted in a Foreign Affairs essay last week, withdrawing from the WHO is more complex than just making a statement in the Rose Garden. Pulling the United States out of the organization, as required by the law approving U.S. membership in it, requires a year’s notice and payment of outstanding dues to the organization.
The upshot is that the United States has not truly left the WHO yet. The Trump administration could opt to pursue a clean break, as the president seemed to suggest. But there is still time to reverse course, or to withdraw while maintaining funding for some of the crucial programs that make the United States a global public-health leader.
In the days following the announcement, experts and lawmakers warned that halting U.S. funding to the organization — which, at around $893 million, ranked as the largest contribution of any member state — would hobble everything from coronavirus vaccine development to global influenza surveillance polio eradication. Although the United States has promised to divert funding from the WHO to other global public-health programs, Time reports that American public-health officials could lose access to irreplaceable global health communication channels.
Other observers cautioned that American attempts to push back against Chinese influence at the U.N. stands to lose out, too, in the event of a clean break. Hillel Neuer, the director of U.N. Watch, lamented the withdrawal announcement, worrying that the United States was ceding ground to Beijing.
“My job is to fight corruption at U.N. bodies like the W.H.O. and I don’t see how this withdrawal will help,” he wrote on Twitter. “The world needs a health organization. Dictators like China will try to subvert it. The only solution is for our democracies to work in concert to push back and fight them.”
The United States has criticized the WHO directorate’s apparent deference to China, which it says hurt the international coronavirus response. Recent reporting by the Associated Press supports some of these accusations, showing an organization ill-suited to handle a secretive authoritarian regime against the backdrop of an unfurling crisis. In public, the organization’s leaders heaped praise on Beijing for its efforts, even as health officials privately expressed increasing frustration with the government’s lack of transparency and as Taiwan warned that something was amiss. Still, there seems to be little evidence to suggest that the WHO is “controlled” by China. The problem, in other words, is one of skewed incentives for public-health officials who struggled to coax information out of China’s leaders at the start of the outbreak, making questionable decisions in the process.
But there have also been signs of progress at the WHO. The push by U.S. officials to re-admit Taiwan to the World Health Assembly as an observer in May was ultimately blocked by Beijing, but more than 20 countries voiced support for its inclusion. And while Chinese officials initially spoke out against calls for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, Chinese officials eventually signed on to such an inquiry in the face of international pressure. Finally, Chinese television host James Chau’s role as WHO Goodwill Ambassador has been placed under review following allegations that he aired the forced confession of a British businessman.
All of which suggests that increased pressure on the organization could yield results that are favorable to the United States and quite possibly embarrassing for China, especially if a truly independent inquiry into the virus’s origins takes place. And using international organizations to the advantage of American interests does not need to be inconsistent with President Trump’s long-held skepticism of such institutions. The White House’s own 2017 National Security Strategy views these organizations as important arenas in the strategic competition with revisionist powers:
Authoritarian actors have long recognized the power of multilateral bodies and have used them to advance their interests and limit the freedom of their own citizens. . . . If the United States cedes leadership of these bodies to adversaries, opportunities to shape developments that are positive for the United States will be lost.
Even as the Trump administration put international organizations in its crosshairs, it has combined that criticism with engagement. The U.S. has left some of these bodies, including two U.N. organizations, while actively working to counter Chinese influence, including through the appointment of a State Department special envoy on “malign influences.” This mixed approach has been successful in some important respects. In March, the U.S.-backed candidate to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization, beat Beijing’s preferred candidate. The United States, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said, was “doing all it can to pressure other countries to give up their support for the Chinese candidate.”
Other times, though, progress has eluded American diplomats, and in these instances withdrawing has been a more attractive option. Following a year-long effort to secure reforms to the U.N. Human Rights Council’s standing agenda and election processes, then-ambassador Nikki Haley chose to leave, weighing the benefits of involvement against legitimizing a forum dominated by authoritarian countries. Even after leaving the council, though, the United States has continued to participate in its Universal Periodic Review process, calling attention to international human rights abuses.
This raises the possibility of doing something similar with the WHO if withdrawal does eventually take place. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested what this could mean last month. In an interview on May 7, following Trump’s order to freeze U.S. funding for the WHO, he said, “Let’s see if there’s a piece of this which we ought to continue to participate in because it’s doing good work on polio or whatever it may be.” Continued participation could also include continued U.S. participation in international efforts to develop a vaccine and track the coronavirus, funded by voluntary contributions to programs designated by the United States, even if it halts assessed WHO contributions to the organization.
However, the outcome most conducive to American efforts to combat Chinese influence at the U.N. would be to maintain some kind of relationship, if diminished, with the global health body— and to double down on international organization reform. The WHO deferred to Beijing’s sensitivities at the outset of the pandemic, a failure that the United States must work to prevent from ever happening again.