Last night, the Trump administration finally announced the long-awaited results of its 180-day review of US membership in international organizations, conventions, and treaties. It announced that it will withdraw from 35 non-UN organizations and cease participation in or funding to 31 UN entities, having concluded that continued engagement with these organizations and entities was “contrary to the interests of the United States.” The administration asserted, without providing clear evidence, that these organizations are “redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity.”

The eye-catching number of entities and organizations making the headlines obscures the fact that the only UN system organization that the US will actually be withdrawing from is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).[1] The other UN entities listed in the memorandum are part of the UN and are not international organizations in their own right.[2] The Trump administration has not signaled that it is considering withdrawing from the UN itself; it simply announced that the United States will no longer participate in or fund the specific parts of the UN listed in the memorandum.

There are few surprises in the list of UN entities. Only a handful are intergovernmental bodies that the United States is currently a member of, such as the Peacebuilding Commission, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. But these aren’t bodies that the United States can easily leave. Its membership in the Peacebuilding Commission, for example, is tied to its status as a permanent member of the Security Council. As such, the United States will simply stop participating in their work.

The majority of UN entities listed in the memorandum are departments and offices, trust funds, and internal UN coordination mechanisms. Most of these cover issues that the administration has shown disdain for, such as development, gender, and the environment. The administration has also targeted entities focused on trade, as well as democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.  The biggest head-scratcher is the inclusion of the UN Chief Executives Board for Coordination, which is a forum for improving coherence across the UN system.  

These are not entities that the United States can participate in (at least in the traditional sense), and so the effect of the memorandum is to cease US funding to them, whether from assessed contributions under the UN regular budget or from voluntary contributions. But the decision to cease funding to these entities has little practical effect given that they have not received US funding since Trump took office almost a year ago. The US did not make any payments toward its outstanding assessed contributions to the regular budget in 2025, it eliminated the account used to fund core voluntary contributions to UN system organizations, and it did not include funding for any of these activities in its fiscal year 2026 budget.

The United States has, since the start of the second Trump term, engaged in historical revisionism, arguing that the purpose of the UN is to maintain international peace and security. This is, of course, a willful misreading of the UN Charter, but it aligns with the administration’s view that the primary value of the UN to US foreign policy is as a platform that the United States can leverage to maximize its hard power and coercive influence. At the same time, the administration feels no obligation to follow international law and norms where it sees these as conflicting with its interests.

It’s therefore no surprise that, as a result of the review, the United States has decided to withdraw from just one non-peace and security–oriented UN organization—the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—while remaining in the UN and the UN system more broadly. The Trump administration has evidently concluded that continued membership in other specialized agencies and related organizations is useful to counter a rising China. That said, the memorandum leaves the door open for potential further withdrawals in the future.

For the next year at least, we should expect the United States to double down on its fundamentally opportunistic approach towards the UN system, seeking to minimize the cost of its engagement while still wielding conditional payment of assessed contributions to coerce the organization to align with the views of the Trump administration. This may change, however, when the mounting level of U.S. arrears triggers the suspension of voting rights in the General Assembly under Article 19 of the Charter. This is a crisis that the next Secretary-General must be prepared to confront.

At the end of the day, this decision makes little difference in practical terms to the functioning of the UN itself, compared to the disruption the Trump administration has already caused to the multilateral system and the self-sabotaging response from the secretary-general. Given all of the turmoil in just the first week of the new year and with the dust still settling from the marathon Fifth Committee deliberations last month, we should take solace in the fact that the 180-day review ended up being a damp squib.

This article was originally published in Eugene Chen’s weekly column on Substack, “Blue Helmets, Red Tape.” It has been edited and expanded from the original version.

[1] The International Trade Centre technically has the status of related organization, but I’m treating it as part of the UN for the purposes of this analysis because it is a joint agency of the UN (through the UN Conference on Trade and Development) and the World Trade Organization, which receives funding from the UN regular budget and is administered using UN regulations and rules.

[2] The UN is an international organization consisting of six main organs—the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat—and their subsidiary bodies, including the funds and programs. The specialized agencies and related organizations are international organizations in their own right; they are separate from the UN but are part of the broader UN system.