Trump withdraws US from PM Modi's brainchild, 65 other international organisations

New Delhi: The International Solar Alliance, a brainchild of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is among the 66 international organisations that the United States has quit after President Donald Trump determined them to be “wasteful, ineffective, and harmful”.

The Trump administration has deemed the ISA and the 65 other institutions to be “redundant in scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, or captured by interests advancing their own agendas”, contrary to that of the US.

The organisations which the Trump administration quit included 31 United Nations entities, as well as 35 others, which were called a threat to sovereignty, freedoms and general prosperity by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The UN agencies that the US quit included the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The International Solar Alliance, or ISA, is an intergovernmental organisation with its headquarters in Gurgaon, India.

The US had joined the organisation as its 101st member on November 10, 2021.

Modi had proposed the ISA while addressing a rally at Wembley Stadium in London on November 13, 2025, about one and a half years after taking office as the Prime Minister of India.

He had referred to the ‘Sunshine Countries’, or the countries between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, and proposed an alliance of such countries, which received abundant sunshine almost throughout the year.

He had suggested that the Sunshine Countries could come together to mitigate climate change by implementing solar energy solutions.

The initiative had been launched by Modi at the India-Africa Summit, and a meeting of member countries had been held ahead of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in November 2015.

The framework agreement of the International Solar Alliance had been opened for signatures in Marrakesh, Morocco, in November 2016.

In January 2016, Modi and the then-French President François Hollande had jointly laid the foundation stone of the ISA Headquarters and inaugurated the interim Secretariat at the National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE) in Gwal Pahari, Gurugram, India.

The ISA’s mission is to unlock $1 trillion in solar investments by 2030 while bringing down technology and financing costs.

The ISA had later opened its doors to all UN members.

“This will be an important contribution to the more rapid deployment of solar globally. It will be particularly important for developing countries.” John Kerry, then American President Joe Biden’s envoy for climate change, had said after signing the framework agreement of the ISA to join the organisation as its 101st member on the sidelines of the UNFCCC COP26 on November 10, 2021.

“As this list (of the organisations the US quit) begins to demonstrate, what started as a pragmatic framework of international organisations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests,” Trump’s Secretary of State said, adding, From DEI mandates to “gender equity” campaigns to climate orthodoxy, many international organisations now serve a globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the 'End of History'.”

He alleged that these international organisations actively seek to constrain the sovereignty of the US. “Their work is advanced by the same elite networks—the multilateral “NGO-plex”— that we have begun dismantling through the closure of USAID.”

Trump had withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement during his first term in the White House. But, after he was succeeded by Joe Biden, the US rejoined the Paris Agreement on February 19, 2021.

But, after returning to the White House as the 47th US president on January 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the agreement for a second time.