Trump’s decision to pull out of WHO will benefit China

While the WHO is not without its faults, shrinking its funding will make the world, including the US, vulnerable to more diseases and deaths

Donald Trump took office for his second term as President of the United States with as much aggression as he had promised during his campaign.

While the world was bracing for punishing tariffs as the first decision of the Trump administration, US’ 47th president took off from where he left off during his first term. He swiftly signed orders that withdrew the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The move will make China appear more capable of leading the existing international order.

In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and towards the end of his first term, Trump wrote to the UN Secretary General stating the US’ intention to withdraw from WHO. However, the withdrawal did not happen at that time even though US funding stopped temporarily. 

Trump’s moves to withdraw the US from the WHO in his previous term had failed after he lost the 2020 elections. Joe Biden, on his first day in office, wrote back to the secretary general saying that the US would remain a WHO member. Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the WHO reflects finishing an unfinished agenda.

Trump’s reasons for withdrawing from WHO include the mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, (which in his first term he had called the China virus) and other international health crises.

His position was that the WHO failed to act independently from the “inappropriate political influence of WHO member states” and required “unfairly onerous payments” from the US that were disproportionate to the corpus provided by other countries with larger populations such as China. He added that ripping off the US was not going to happen anymore. 

The US is by far the WHO’s biggest financial backer, contributing about 18% of the overall funding. China is the second largest, and its contributions are roughly 15%. However, China’s population is at least four times that of the US and it is still classified as a ‘developing country’, and, therefore, benefits from lower rates.

The move will put several WHO programmes, notably in tackling tuberculosis as well as HIV-AIDS, at risk.

Healthcare programmes at risk

Diseases do not respect sovereign boundaries. Life-threatening diseases, in the absence of adequate WHO finances, will continue to grow in several quarters of the world, and will make their way to the US as well. In 2023, the US reported 9,633 tuberculosis cases, which represents an increase of 15.6%, compared to 2022 when there were 8,322 TB cases, and 8.3% compared with 2019 when there were 8,895 cases. 

As for HIV-AIDS, in 2022, an estimated 31,800 people had HIV in the US, and while new HIV infections have decreased by 12% from 36,300 in 2018 to 31,800 in 2022, this disease continues to affect Americans. The US does not experience the severity of many infectious diseases seen across the world as they are contained within the borders of the countries, often with the WHO’s support and co-ordination. 

In the absence of the WHO’s financial capabilities, a lot of these viruses will not be restricted to the countries of origin. The Covid-19 was one such deadly virus. Even if Trump’s allegations of the WHO’s “mishandling” of Covid-19 are true, the multilateral organisation played a positive role, co-ordinating on detecting the number of cases and scientific developments when the virus raged on.

At the same time, the directive to the Secretary of State to “cease negotiations” on the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the amendments to the International Health Regulations, which will have “no binding force” on the US, will serve to isolate the US and invite international opprobrium.

While the WHO is not without its faults, as is the case with all other international organisations, shrinking its funding will make the world, including the US, vulnerable to more diseases and deaths. Trump’s move will not make America great again. 

Indeed, soon after Trump’s decision was made public, the Chinese foreign ministry pledged to ‘support’ the WHO in fulfilling its responsibilities and ‘deepen’ international public health cooperation.

Emergence of China

In 2020, soon after Trump stopped US funding to the WHO, China pledged $30 million to the organisation. China may not be able to match the US’ funding clout, but it could emerge as a leader, particularly for the Global South. Clearly, an eroded leadership capacity would not make America great again. 

The presidential order that empowers a senior official in the US’ National Security Affairs to “establish directorates and coordinating mechanisms within the National Security Council apparatus” to safeguard public health and “fortify biosecurity” does not outline specific tasks that it would perform when faced with health emergencies, leaving several scopes for mishandling such critical situations.

It is also doubtful whether the Trump administration will be able to receive “credible and transparent” international partners with institutional and financial wherewithal to “assume necessary activities” that were previously undertaken by the WHO.

A more rational approach would have been to reform the WHO, call for reclassification of countries’ development statuses and ensure funding commitments from them, in accordance with their actual development status. 

(Sriparna Pathak is associate professor, Jindal School of International Affairs, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana.)

(This article was first published under Creative Commons by 360info.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.