One of the dominant narratives about U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is that his hostility to the multilateral system is absolute and irreversible. Yet while Trump has indeed recoiled from international institutions with disdain, even relish, his administration’s actions don’t always match his words.
Consider Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s approach to Gavi, the global vaccine alliance that Washington withdrew funding from last year. In early June, Rubio appeared to sideline Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an avowed vaccine skeptic, by announcing that Washington would reengage with Gavi. The decision came amid a swelling Ebola outbreak in Africa and followed a letter sent to Rubio by a bipartisan group of senators, warning that $600 million in congressionally appropriated Gavi funding was sitting unused.
The senators’ case was pointed. Gavi, a United Nations-adjacent agency, has helped vaccinate more than 1.1 billion children, prevented over 20 million deaths, supported U.S. vaccine manufacturers, and hosted a U.S.-founded global vaccine stockpile. Releasing the money, they argued, would allow Washington to regain a seat on Gavi’s board and shape decisions affecting Americans’ health security. Investing in Gavi would also be a way for the United States, after retreating from its historic role as a global health guarantor, to deflect blame for the mounting Ebola crisis.
Rubio’s shift forms part of a broader trend in Washington, whereby—despite open enmity toward multilateral institutions—the Trump administration finds itself turning back to these bodies to handle crises, distribute funds, and shoulder burdens that it seeks to outsource.
The U.S. posture toward the U.N. and other global bodies may seem harsher than ever, but it is less sweeping than many feared. Although Washington has starved parts of the multilateral system, instrumentalized others, and broken rules, it has not abandoned the system wholesale. This pattern speaks to the innate value of multilateralism and the limits of Trump’s commitment to go it alone.
To be clear, Trump’s pullback has been substantial. On his first day back in office, he ordered the United States to exit the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement. The next month, he issued an executive order that cut off U.S. support for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), withdrew the country from the U.N. Human Rights Council, and reviewed its participation in UNESCO while accusing parts of the U.N. system of drift, hostility toward U.S. interests, and propagating antisemitism. This January, the White House announced its withdrawal from 66 international organizations, including 31 U.N. entities, on the grounds that they undermined U.S. sovereignty or wasted taxpayer dollars.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has shriveled the broader aid apparatus that long underwrote U.S. influence in the U.N. system. Early on, it dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development. Trump’s proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year sought deep cuts to foreign assistance, global health, refugee programs, and U.N. peacekeeping. Although the final budget approved by Congress maintained some of this funding, Trump’s message was clear: The United States no longer viewed the multilateral arena as a place for U.S. leadership.
The U.N. has been squeezed hard. Secretary-General António Guterres told ambassadors in January that it faced “imminent financial collapse,” driven largely by unpaid contributions. The United States, which was responsible for 22 percent of the U.N. regular budget in 2025, owes roughly $4 billion for unpaid dues and peacekeeping contributions. Human rights chief Volker Türk has said his office is in “survival mode.” Even with its dramatically reduced 2026 budget, U.N. officials have warned that, absent payments, the organization could run out of cash as soon as July.
Trump officials seem to enjoy seeing the U.N. squirm. Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., told the New York Post that the U.N. had accepted “actual real cuts for the first time in modern history” to become “more efficient,” reciting the Trumpian mantra that “they’ve never seen anything like it.” Yet Waltz has also defended the institution’s value as “one place in the world where everyone can talk.” His position encapsulates the administration’s stance: It wants the U.N. smaller, weaker, and more deferential, but it does not want it to disappear.
One surprising subplot of the Trump administration’s reengagement with the U.N. involves humanitarian funding. After reentering office, Trump drastically cut U.S. global humanitarian support, which fell from around $14 billion to $4 billion between 2024 and 2025. But funding has crept back upward. At the end of 2025, Washington signed a memorandum with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), pledging $2 billion to help crisis-affected countries. The State Department branded the arrangement a “Humanitarian Reset” and promised “more lives saved for fewer taxpayer dollars.” This May, it announced an additional $1.8 billion for OCHA, with a focus on addressing Ebola and supporting Ukraine.
The moves did not signal a reversion to old-style liberal internationalism. Washington has turned to OCHA to advance emergency relief funds tied to U.S. interests in specific countries, including Haiti and Venezuela, after gutting its own aid mechanisms, dismantling a system Rubio has derided as the “foreign aid industrial complex.” The administration called the OCHA aid “life-saving,” stressed that the body had agreed to reforms to reduce waste, and framed the funds as proof that Trump could be both ruthless about bureaucracy and generous in crisis. Ironically, a White House that derided the U.N. found it useful as an alternative to the aid bureaucracy obliterated at home.
In June, Washington doubled down by announcing more than $1 billion in funding for the World Food Program and UNICEF, trumpeting what it described as “historic reforms” and calling the agencies as “trusted and vetted.” While the administration may claim that its demands made the U.N. dramatically more efficient, it is more likely that Washington is coming to appreciate the organization’s capabilities—and the lack of realistic alternatives.
The bargains have angered some of Trump’s ideological allies. Brett Schaefer and Danielle Pletka, both senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, urged his administration to scrap the OCHA agreement, calling it an “almost strings-free two-billion-dollar gift to the United Nations.” They argued that the arrangement shifted too much authority to OCHA, left U.S. funds vulnerable to U.N. discretion, and failed to secure conditions related to oversight, audit rights, and restrictions on transferring funds to UNRWA that conservatives had sought.
Infectious disease is another arena where Trump picks and chooses where to engage. Even as his administration has derided international health bureaucracy, it has maintained substantial (though reduced) support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, pledging $4.6 billion last November and preserving a traditional $1-for-$2 matching structure with other donors. The Gavi reengagement now applies a similar logic to vaccines.
The administration has also made constructive use of technical bodies where U.S. commercial, technological, and security interests are implicated. The list of 66 institutions that Washington exited this year notably excluded many influential U.N. regulatory organizations.
Washington has sought reelection to the International Telecommunication Union’s governing council and backed the reelection of Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, an American originally put forward by the Biden administration. In the International Civil Aviation Organization, the State Department is pushing for global adoption of U.S. aviation safety and security standards. In May, Washington credited the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with supporting a U.S.-led mission to remove highly enriched uranium from a shuttered Venezuelan civilian nuclear reactor. On Iran, too, Washington continues to invoke the IAEA’s safeguards system.
Trump has even engaged the U.N. on migration. At Washington’s request, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has played a role in Trump’s “Project Homecoming,” helping migrants who choose to return to their countries voluntarily to avoid the risk of deportation. For a White House that wants to incentivize departures without having to build a return-and-reintegration apparatus itself, the IOM offers capacity, cost savings, and—for better or worse—a more humane vocabulary for an unforgiving policy.
The U.N. Security Council has also proved hard to dispense with fully. On Haiti, the United States and Panama advanced a resolution last September to create a U.N. support office and transform a Kenya-led security support mission into a multinational Gang Suppression Force. This offered an alternative to U.S. intervention that would mobilize partners, logistics capabilities, and cash.
Before seemingly losing interest in the territory’s fate, the administration turned to the Security Council on Gaza, drafting a resolution to implement Trump’s 20-point cease-fire plan. The resolution, adopted in November, endorsed the plan; welcomed the proposed Board of Peace; and authorized an International Stabilization Force. Assuming the Iran cease-fire deal does not fall apart and culminates in a fuller agreement, the memorandum of understanding specifies that this, too, will be ratified by a binding Security Council resolution.
Overall, this pattern reveals a few key insights. First, withdrawal is easier to announce than execute. If the United States wants to contain Ebola, police intellectual property, stabilize Haiti, or build support for a Gaza cease-fire, it needs global forums. Even an ardently nationalist administration has discovered that certain problems are unavoidably international. The sputtering desuetude of Trump’s Board of Peace attests to the difficulty of mustering sustained multilateral engagement in a new body that lacks a clear mandate or the vast operational capabilities of the U.N.
Second, Trump’s approach may produce the worst of all worlds. The United States continues to pay and engage in selected areas of the U.N., but it has alienated the organization, forfeiting sway. Agencies and diplomatic missions now plan around Washington’s absence. U.N. officials treat U.S. support as a weaponized instrument rather than an organizing pillar.
Third, the next U.N. secretary-general, who will take office in January, may have a narrow opening. A new leader will not flatter Washington back into old habits. But one who demonstrates discipline, transparency, and a commitment to address the administration’s concerns over antisemitism, fund diversion, and mandate creep may persuade Washington to realign its rhetoric with its conduct. Trump officials have shown that they will use the U.N. when needed. The opportunity lies in making U.S. participation more stable, lawful, and in service of shared interests.
The danger for the U.N. is that it accepts a purely transactional future in which its agencies survive by proving their utility to the strongest member states. The risk for the United States is conflating episodic coercion for durable influence.
Rubio’s turn back toward Gavi and renewed humanitarian funding reflect the reality that global problems wash up on local shores. The Trump administration can denounce multilateralism and withhold dues all it wants. It can also discover, amid an Ebola outbreak, that a vaccine alliance it had spurned is the best available vehicle to safeguard U.S. health security, industry, and diplomatic influence. That is not a return to the old order. It is proof that even this administration confronts limits to the politics of exit.
