Trump Withdraws U.S. From UNESCO Over $550 Million In Unpaid Dues, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The United States Might Eventually Have To Pay Them

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration announced Thursday that the United States will withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, resolving a long-standing concern that the nation had helped found the body in 1945 and remained a member ever since.

In its statement, the State Department attributed the decision to "mounting arrears at UNESCO," "the need for fundamental reform in the organization," and "continuing anti-Israel bias." Officials clarified that the arrears in question, an unpaid balance that had grown to roughly 550 million dollars, would be addressed by ceasing to belong to the organization to which the money was owed, an approach the administration characterized as fiscally responsible.

The United States had stopped paying its UNESCO dues in 2011, after the organization admitted Palestine as a full member and triggered a U.S. funding law. This meant the bill cited as a reason for leaving had been quietly accumulating for six years before the administration identified it as intolerable. The withdrawal, set to take effect at the end of 2018, will end American participation in UNESCO programs for global literacy, Holocaust education, press freedom, and the designation of World Heritage Sites, a portfolio the administration determined the country could comfortably do without.

"The President believes America should not keep paying for something it is not using, and the most efficient way to stop using something is to first stop paying for it and then leave," said one source within the administration, who noted that the United States had previously withdrawn from UNESCO under President Reagan in 1984 and rejoined under President George W. Bush in 2003. The source described the on-and-off pattern less as instability than as a cherished bipartisan tradition.

Israel announced within hours that it, too, would withdraw, leaving the two nations to pursue cultural and scientific cooperation through channels yet to be specified. UNESCO officials confirmed that the United States would retain observer status, a designation that permits a country to watch the organization function without contributing to it, which several administration officials privately conceded had been the objective all along.

At press time, the administration confirmed that the 550 million dollars in unpaid dues remained unpaid, and that the matter was now, in a meaningful procedural sense, somebody else's problem.

Who Benefits

§Donald Trump, who converted a six-year-old unpaid bill into a decisive foreign policy action and a talking point about fiscal discipline, without paying the bill.
§The administration's "America First" messaging operation, which gained a clean, telegenic example of the United States exiting an international body, useful for demonstrating resolve to a domestic political base.
§The Israeli government, whose long-standing objections to UNESCO were validated at the highest level by a coordinated U.S. withdrawal announced the same day.
§Domestic critics of the United Nations, who gained fresh momentum for the broader project of reducing American participation in multilateral institutions.
§Future administrations seeking leverage, who inherited a tidy precedent that cultural and scientific bodies can be entered and exited as political circumstances warrant.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment