Bleak outlook for international organizations if Trump wins

WASHINGTON (AN) — From combating climate change to containing infectious diseases like Covid and ambitious despots like Vladimir Putin, the global community will face a chaotic, uncertain future if Americans return Donald Trump to the White House.

During his four years in office, the Republican former president promoted an aggressive “America First” policy characterized by skepticism of multilateralism along with an untrusting, adversarial approach to international organizations and their missions of global advancement.

In the years since American voters rejected Trump in favor of Democrat Joe Biden, there has been no indication that the ex-president’s positions have grown anything but more extreme.

The climate 'hoax'

On global climate change, Trump continues to reject science and tells his supporters that human-caused warming is a “hoax.” He promises to ramp up even further U.S. coal and petroleum production while denigrating wind and solar and minimizing the importance of renewables. He has said that windmills cause cancer and are driving whales “crazy.” Solar farms, he complains, “take 400, 500 acres of desert soil.” The petrochemical industry is a major Trump backer and his policies of opening up more federally protected land and waters to exploitation while rolling back hard-won health and environmental protections.

During his first administration, Trump pulled the United States, one of the largest producers of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, out of the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, saying the pact undermined America’s economy. On his first day in the White House, Biden brought the U.S. back to the table; but given the opportunity, Trump will likely quit the agreement again.

A threat to NATO, Putin in Kyiv

Trump dismisses NATO as largely outdated and useless and complains that the U.S. is burdened with carrying an unfair share of the load while portraying NATO allies as freeloaders. To the dismay of many world leaders, but to the delight of his base, Trump earlier this year said he would welcome a Russian attack on members of the alliance that fall short of their spending commitments to NATO. The Biden administration called Trump’s comments “appalling and unhinged.”

During Tuesday’s presidential debate against Democrat Kamala Harris, Trump doubled down: European NATO members “paid billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars when I said either you pay up or we're not going to protect you anymore.” Citing the war in Ukraine as an example, Trump complained the United States was spending significantly more than its NATO allies that have more at stake: “We're in for 250 to 275 billion. They're into 100 to 150. They should be forced to equalize.”

If Trump were president, Harris responded, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe. Starting with Poland.”

Trump, on his campaign website, says, “We have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” He maintains that “Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into another conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat.”

NATO members adopted a 2% of GDP spending target in 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. At that time, just three nations met the target. This year, NATO says 23 members are expected to meet or exceed the target. U.S. military spending is at 3.38% of GDP, behind only Estonia and Poland; the U.S. accounts for 70% of NATO's US$1 trillion in military spending.

Chasing 'monsters and phantoms'

For Trump and his isolationist cohorts, “globalists” who would “squander all of America’s strength, blood and treasure chasing monsters and phantoms overseas” are the real security threat, not foreign superpowers like Russia and China.

Says Steven Pifer, an analyst with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank: “Trump does not appear to share other presidents’ view that the United States has a vital national interest in a stable and secure Europe, which NATO helps to ensure.”

Trump “seems to have an affinity for autocrats, and for Russian President Vladimir Putin in particular. He has rarely criticized Putin, whose war on Ukraine has blown up Europe’s security,” Pifer says.

As a character witness to his stature as a world leader, in Tuesday’s debate Trump cited an endorsement by Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, “one of the most respected men. They call him a strong man. He's a tough person. Smart.”

Covid, China and WHO

In his first term in the White House with thousands of people dying each day during the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump downplayed the seriousness of the disease, blamed China for the outbreak and initiated the process of withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. Before that could take affect, Biden became the U.S. president and, in another of his first official actions, voided Trump’s effort.

In the former president’s opinion, WHO is biased towards China and he has said he might withdraw again from the agency. A key congressional ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right promoter of weird and paranoid QAnon conspiracy theories, told her congressional colleagues that it’s “very likely” the U.S. would quit WHO, should Trump win in November.

Trump, globalism and Project 2025

For Trump, his “America First” followers, far-right nationalists and conspiracy theorists, “globalism” – or considering the rest of the world in decision-making – is a pejorative that conveys a range of anxieties about the loss of national control and economic security, as well as cultural and racial identity. It’s also been co-opted by some extremists who employ the term in their antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The most globalist of all global organizations is, of course, the United Nations and, by all indications, a second Trump administration would mirror his cynical view of multilateral institutions and decided preference for nationalist policies. Trump views the world body as a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy biased against the United States, historically the U.N.’s largest financial contributor.

Project 2025, the conservative Republican playbook for a Trump revival, envisions a broad, radically conservative agenda that would push the United States far to the right, reshape the federal government, lessen Washington’s role on the global stage, end climate change programs and generally disparage international organizations. The blueprint, promoted as an attack on the so-called “Deep State,” would pull the United States inward, championing nationalism and national sovereignty, while redefining and limiting the way the U.S. interacts with the global community.

As Americans and the world at large learn more about Project 2025, a detailed, nearly 900-page treatise produced by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, Trump – a convicted felon and serial liar – has tried to distance himself from its radical ideology. However, some of the former president’s closest confidants, top advisers and veterans of his previous administration were key drivers of the Project 2025 scheme. Trump’s running mate JD Vance contributed a forward for a forthcoming book by Project 2025’s principal architect, Kevin D. Roberts, the president of Heritage.

Immigrants: threat or scapegoats?

Heritage came to prominence in the conservative movement during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The think tank churns out talking points, drafts legislation and pens policy papers for right-wing Republicans. It has become a major driver of one of Trump’s latest election lies: that the integrity of the November election is threatened by noncitizens organizing to vote.

For international organizations that the right perceives as infringing on American sovereignty or pursuing globalist agendas, a second go-round with Trump at the government’s helm would likely bring major cuts in U.S. support as Washington shifts to a more transactional approach to international relations. Immediate national interests would take priority over cooperation between nations, weakening initiatives where the United States has traditionally played a leading role – such as international peacekeeping, speaking out against human-rights abuses, and climate change. Such a shift would create a void on the international stage for other world powers like Russia and China to fill.

“The next Administration should direct the Secretary of State to initiate a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations,” says the Project 2025 playbook. The U.S., it concludes, “must return to treating international organizations as vehicles for promoting American interests – or take steps to extract itself from those organizations.”

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