THE US will quit the United Nations’ culture and education agency UNESCO, the US state department has said. “UNESCO works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s sustainable development goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy,” a state department spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, said.
The move is a blow to the Parisbased global organisation, founded after the second world war to promote peace through international cooperation in education, science and culture. The decision is part of the president’s second-term drive to pull the US out of a series of global bodies, including leaving the World Health Organization (WHO), halting funding to the Palestinian relief agency UNRWA and withdrawing from the UN human rights council, as part of a review of US participation in UN agencies.
A US withdrawal, to take effect in December 2026, will be a blow to UNESCO’s work on education, culture and combating hate speech. But officials at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris had been braced for a potential US departure during Trump’s second term. The US provides about 8 per cent of the body’s total budget, making the financial impact of Washington’s departure less severe than for other organisations, such as the WHO, for which the US is by far the biggest financial backer.
The White House deputy spokesperson Anna Kelly told the New York Post: “President Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from UNESCO – which supports woke, divisive cultural and social causes that are totally out of step with the commonsense policies that Americans voted for in November.”
In February, the White House had announced a 90-day review of the US membership of UNESCO, saying in a statement that the global body had “demonstrated failure to reform itself, has continually demonstrated anti-Israel sentiment over the past decade, and has failed to address concerns over mounting arrears”.
