Trump addresses the United Nations General Assembly in New York, September 2018 - Carlo Allegri / Reuters The United States Can’t Quit on the UN When America Withdraws, China Wins By Kristine Lee This week, the United Nations General Assembly is holding its first-ever virtual gathering of world leaders. The event has been a complicated one for Washington. In his recorded speech before the General Assembly on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump excoriated China for its failure to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus around the world. But the inadequacies of his own administration’s response overshadowed his message. The Trump administration has turned the United States inward and retreated from the UN, most recently by precipitously withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) during the pandemic. In June, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien explained that the United States terminated its relationship with the WHO because the agency’s “response to the pandemic showed that it is beholden to China.” The administration claims to face a binary choice between withdrawing from or cooperating with UN agencies that are cowed by authoritarian interests. But the dichotomy is a false one. U.S. retrenchment empowers only China. Beijing is eager to expand its influence on the world stage to serve its narrow interests, and U.S. withdrawal has pushed beleaguered UN agencies further into China’s orbit, ultimately making the world less hospitable to U.S. interests. Instead of withdrawing, the United States should use carefully calibrated economic incentives to promote reform toward an agenda more in line with its interests and values. Such an approach would allow Washington to blunt China’s growing influence where necessary and to shape the trajectory of UN agencies, beginning with the WHO. DIVIDED WE FALL The American public has a broadly favorable view of the UN, opinion polls suggest, and a 2020 study even showed that more than 70 percent of Americans support rejoining the WHO. But some policymakers have cast doubt on the utility of U.S. engagement. Even before the pandemic—and especially since the 2016 U.S. presidential election—scholars, including Stewart Patrick in these pages, have spilled barrels of ink debating the precise definitions, future direction, and coming dissolution of the liberal international order that the UN embodies. During the 2016 campaign, Trump memorably denounced the “false song of globalism,” vowing to reject the “international unions that . . . bring America down.” In keeping with this view, the Trump administration drafted an executive order at its very outset to slash U.S. payments to the UN by as much as 40 percent, claiming that such investments did not serve the interests of American taxpayers. The president’s supporters in the Senate echoed this view. According to Rob Portman, the Republican senator from Ohio, “When all of our taxpayers are paying roughly 22 percent of the UN budget, I think they do expect to see a more efficient organization that’s more objective and more in keeping with our values.” In 2016, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, similarly argued, “If you can’t show the American people that international organizations can be more responsible, there is going to be a break.” The Trump administration has set about translating this impulse into policy. But if the United States withdraws from UN agencies without clear alternatives in place, the world will ultimately grow more hostile to U.S. values and interests. That eventuality has unfolded in real time, perhaps nowhere more alarmingly than at the WHO. A CAUTIONARY TALE Compared with the United States, Beijing has made much smaller financial contributions to the United Nations and has far less diplomatic wherewithal. But China has shown that it knows how to use the leverage it possesses much more strategically and often more unscrupulously than the United States is willing to do. Consider the WHO.The United States has historically been the WHO’s largest patron, underwriting about 15.0 percent of the agency’s budget, in contrast with China’s mere 0.2 percent. But in 2017, Beijing-backed candidate Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was elected Director-General of the WHO. Upon assuming the position, Tedros parroted Beijing’s call for a “Health Silk Road,” which would bring Chinese-backed health care to developing countries. This past spring, the United States backed Taiwan’s bid for inclusion in the WHO’s World Health Assembly on the grounds that the island had mounted one of the world’s most successful responses to the COVID-19 pandemic—but the WHO bent to Chinese pressure to exclude Taipei from the meeting. The United States formally announced its withdrawal from the WHO in July 2020 and, by doing so, further empowered China and bolstered its authoritarian influence. China promptly announced that it would donate $2 billion to the UN to fight COVID-19, touting its role as a “defender of the international order.” Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, gloated that China had contributed to “global public health cooperation as a responsible major country” while the United States is “shirking its own responsibilities and undermining global solidarity in combating the virus.” Holding the organization’s purse strings and uncontested by U.S. leadership, China is now poised to exert undue influence over purportedly independent, WHO-led investigations into the origins of the virus. WHO experts conducting the probe have yet to travel to Wuhan, widely considered to be the original epicenter of the pandemic, fueling concerns about the investigation’s rigor and its possible deference to Chinese interests. As Beijing seizes this opportunity to lead multilateral health governance, it can also use the WHO to coerce UN member states into supporting its interests. In September, the WHO unveiled a global vaccine development and distribution plan—which neither China nor the United States has endorsed. Beijing could best the United States and its allies in the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. With disproportionate sway at the WHO, China could then use preferential access to its vaccine as a bargaining chip to win member countries’ support for its positions, such as isolating Taiwan or forestalling criticism of its policies in Hong Kong, Tibet, or Xinjiang. The WHO is far from the only UN agency that has bent toward Beijing—and the United States’ retreat has accelerated the trend. In 2017, Washington exited UNESCO. Beijing later used its newfound clout to gain the organization’s endorsement of its Belt and Road Initiative and to try to double the number of Chinese staff in the agency. In 2018, the United States withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council. China has since effectively silenced the council’s criticism of its rampant human rights abuses, including the mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang. As Beijing swallows up the UN, the United States’ approach to the organization has been fitful and reactive at best. Washington has dangled U.S. funding—and the threat of turning off the tap—over UN agencies that defy its interests. In October 2018, Washington threatened to sever ties with the Universal Postal Union, a UN body charged with regulating international mail service, for its practice of granting China lower shipping rates than the United States. The move, which was narrowly averted, would have set off a global postal crisis. The jarring turn of events at the WHO suggests that such tactics are growing increasingly counterproductive. The United States needs to find a way to engage with the UN that can advance its interests. STILL IN THE GAME In May, Trump gave the WHO 30 days to commit to “major substantive improvements” before the United States would withdraw its funding and walk away. But the United States did not define those improvements, let alone provide leadership or support to the cash-strapped agency tasked with implementing them. The United States needs to offer UN agencies a compelling alternative to authoritarian values and leadership if it wishes for them to be more effective and better aligned with its agenda. Positive financial incentives are likelier to encourage reform than are harsh ultimatums, especially given that Beijing stands ready to fill the coffers that the United States leaves empty. Washington could start by restoring a portion of its past funding to the WHO. Then the United States could commit to annually increasing this amount if the agency complies with certain conditions: restoring Taiwan’s observer status at the World Health Assembly, for instance, or hiring more Americans to fill the agency’s management positions. As the WHO meets these benchmarks, Washington should strengthen the United States’ clout at the UN by encouraging private-sector partnerships between the WHO and U.S. tech companies that pursue projects related to global public health. Washington could transparently negotiate such incentive structures with UN agencies and, in doing so, draw a sharp contrast to Beijing’s style of backroom deals and coercion. China doles out rewards and threatens retaliation to pressure governments to support its policies and its candidates for leadership posts. In contrast, the United States should work with like-minded countries and UN leaders to conduct specialized agency elections more openly and to codify standards of transparency in their operations. Notably, only after Australia, the EU, and other democracies publicly lobbied the WHO and mobilized broad-based support did the agency commit to conducting an independent investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus. The United States should make sure to fill the vacant positions within its own government that work with the UN, and it must continue to send high-profile officials and talented working-level diplomats to represent U.S. interests there. It should further collaborate with allies early on to promote U.S.-backed candidates to lead important specialized agencies. Such measures would not supply a silver bullet, but they would show that the United States is still in the game and can still lead. In so doing, they would give Washington a better shot at shaping outcomes than if it simply threw in the towel.
嗯，是滴。就像中国人民和中国执政党是两回事。
感觉好多带节奏的，临睡前尤其疯狂，原因你懂得。
五毛和极左疯狂要拉trump下台呗。我不是川粉，但看不惯极左这样搞烂美国，连警察都要defund，不是蠢就是坏！
华人票子不算数。川粉主要还是来自广大玉米地的红脖子们，乌泱泱的一大片。。华人这趟折腾来美国度新时代文革/排华。
郭文贵最近风声太紧 估计他们圈子打钱不给力 法轮功最近也很谨慎 就这样了 政治嘛 就这样了 认真你就输了
沉默的大多数，看看大法官的投票的结果就知道了，80%支持提名最高法官。 这是选举决定美国以后走社会主义，还是资本主义。如果拜登当选，美国向南非那样社会倒退，打砸抢盛行，好人是人人自危。 一看就是带风向的。
原来五毛都这么想的
＂随身携带川粉良民政，额头/全身刻字哪能自证清白啊?万一你是余则成呢？ 必须要改基因DNA,+漂白一身黄皮肤，才能证明从里到外都是川粉哇。＂ christina_SH
引用一下，这就是带风向的ID，一言不合就骂华人黄皮。他又是什么？既然在美国这么自卑，还不赶紧回去。 想在美国好好生活的华人，千万别掉坑里了。
哦对了，美华最多的就是在大学或者码农吧，如果工作aa了，嘿嘿，妙不可言
真正中产阶级上班带孩子，谁有时间成天发帖？原来点踩可以让大家看出沉默大多数的意见，现在只能点赞lz这种评论当然就看不出大家是不是支持了。不过你看一下昨天有人发起的选床铺还是拜登的投票就知道了。
我们这些美华普通人，也是从小在国内长大然后留学出来的。我觉得你们，既然为了生计，做这种翻墙发帖的活，想来在国内也不是人上人的阶层。跟我们美华普通人一样，不管是自己，还是家人亲戚，普通老百姓在那个社会，没有被人踩过吗，没有被人欺压过吗，没有被“社会主义的铁拳”痛揍过吗？那种让人无语的官本位，一点小事往死里刁难人，有权有势的横行无阻，无权无势的寸步难行，国内这么多年来从没有真正改变过这些，老百姓一直是屁民的地位。我们作为第一代移民，吃了这么多苦，终于到了一个比较民主的待人公平些的社会，一个把人当人的社会，这个国家远不完美，但是至少有个讲理的地方，不像国内老百姓有苦无处诉。你们为了生计我理解，但是讲真，你是希望美国变得像国内一样么，还是希望国内多一些平等，多一些对普通人的尊重？ 留一个文明的火种给世界吧，不要用你自己的手和文字，去拼命浇熄它，也是给你们自己留一个念想，如果全世界都变成大陆现在这样，那真是可悲了。你们身负任务，差不多就行了，赠人玫瑰手留余香。 想想你自己在国内的际遇，值不值得为那些人卖命的干。
能不能讲点人话啊？
美国搞中国，民主党一样搞。但不会现在这样盯着钱搞，把朋友都搞中立了。
本来美国是自由灯塔，带头大哥。结果现在被当作实用主义利益至上的霸凌模范。一边说这中国霸凌这霸凌那儿，转头自己的霸凌就变成arts of the deal了。
看看最近一年联合国的投票吧。你说非洲那些国家被共产党收买了没办法。但澳英欧加日韩呢？这些本来都不是鸡贼的国家，结果现在不仅都鸡贼的装中立，还假惺惺的劝中美冷静。
现在心甘情愿跟着美国后面的也就以色列了。
当然川粉会说，这个世界只有利益，不当灯塔也好，装着累。好像说的也对啊。
不过我定居美国是喜欢美国的 体面，诚实，理性，包容，正义，简单。如果以后都利益至上了，那目测以后方向就是中国的民主版了。也行。
美国人民的选择。随便吧。川粉川黑都不用喷我，你们选川普拜登我都没意见。
不是五毛，不是粉紅，不是極左，支持警察在這裡，但反對川普你來解釋一下？
上周路过马里兰农村很多插Trump 牌子的，话说选举这事自己高兴选谁就选谁，管好自己的选票得了，反感为此攻击别人的，你不能代表别人的利益
我见识少 知识浅薄 我知道的喜欢给人扣帽子的族群里 只有中共的红卫兵了
说得好！ 请海华警惕， 这里五毛太多， 别理他们， 让他们挣公分， 我们投川普！
川粉不是蠢就是坏！被叫kung flu 还在那边给抢劫你的那个人数钱