Trump State Department Withdraws U.S. From UNESCO Over Anti-Israel Bias, Resolving Long-Standing American Concern About Belonging To Agency Devoted To Literacy, Heritage Preservation, And Holocaust Education

WASHINGTON. The U.S. State Department announced Thursday that the United States would withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, citing the body's continuing anti-Israel bias and resolving a long-standing American concern about belonging to a multilateral institution devoted to literacy programs, the preservation of world heritage sites, and the global promotion of education.

The withdrawal, communicated to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova in a formal letter from the State Department, will take effect December 31, 2018, at which point the United States will downgrade to nonvoting observer status, a position the country had already functionally occupied since 2011, when Congress cut off all dues following UNESCO's admission of Palestine as a member state. Officials clarified that the move would have no immediate financial impact, as the United States had not paid its dues in six years and currently owed the organization more than $500 million.

The decision, sources within the administration explained, reflected long-standing American concerns about an agency whose flagship programs include training rural women in developing countries to teach girls how to read, mapping the Mariana Trench, and certifying as protected world heritage sites such locations as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Independence Hall, and the Statue of Liberty. The State Department's formal letter cited the need for fundamental reform within an organization the President had not personally engaged with in any documented way.

Israel announced within hours that it would also withdraw, leaving the agency's remaining 193 member states alone to attend to global preservation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial, ongoing UNESCO-funded conservation of Jewish heritage sites in Cairo, Tunis, and Kraków, and the Holocaust education curricula the body distributes to ministries of education in seventy countries. State Department officials told reporters they were confident these programs would continue to function in some manner without American participation.

Officials emphasized that the President had been concerned for months about America's continued membership in an organization whose founding charter, drafted in the rubble of the Second World War, opens with the observation that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. Aides noted that the President had not personally encountered this language but had been informed that the agency was globalist.

At press time, administration staff had been instructed to identify any remaining multilateral bodies the United States had not yet quit, with particular emphasis on those whose acronyms began with the letters U and N.