The withdrawal of the US from 66 international organisations has not been noticed enough given the focus on President Donald Trump forcibly arresting the Venezuelan president, claiming to govern his country and then openly threatening to annex Greenland. In fact, the Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act bill has also been tabled. Nato members are struggling to find the right words to respond to the US and to President Trump who seems not to care even if Nato members ask him to remove bases and nuclear warheads from their territories. The intervention spree is spreading well beyond the Monroe Doctrine, although this doctrine should have been discarded after the 1945 UN Charter as it was contradicting politically what was being committed legally.
The direction where US policies were heading was correctly read by Russia and China a decade ago well before Trump’s first tenure when in a surprise move both the states in 2016 came out with a Joint Declaration on International Law against unilateralism.
More recently, the biggest operational signalling was made when the US Department of Defence was renamed the Department of War through Executive Order 14347. Anyone with an interest in international law would have rightly conjectured that the Trump administration’s legal team was preparing internally and externally for something unusual. The UN Charter had established a new norm against war, declaring it illegal, and replacing the word with the legal term ‘use of force’, which, too, is allowed only in self-defence. Thus the erstwhile Department of War became the Department of Defence in 1947 to comply with the Charter’s prohibition, also indicating that from then on, force would only be used in defence — even if anticipatory defence.
Thus the Trump administration’s decision to rename it last year was deliberate — a warning of sorts about what was to come in the days ahead — in open defiance of the Charter’s prohibition of acts of aggression or attempts to occupy a foreign land through a declared war. That has regrettably happened in the case of Venezuela, and is happening in the case of Greenland. It is likely to happen in Iran, and Canada has been threatened as well. Hence Greenlanders, Danes, Europeans and the rest of the leaders are at a loss and trying to figure out how they should respond to a violation of a norm that each of the 195 world states willingly and voluntarily agreed to, implemented, acted upon, relied upon and fully believed in for over seven decades. It had been so fundamental and central to global peace and security that no state dare construe it otherwise.
As if this weren’t enough, President Trump’s memorandum dated Jan 7, 2026, directs the executive branch to start taking steps to withdraw from 66 international bodies. Global governance institutions are not passive or symbolic arenas; they are places where deliberations take place, where norms are shaped, which are gradually transformed into binding frameworks. When the US withdraws, it does not remove itself from the effects of global rules; instead, it removes itself from the leadership of the process by which those rules are written and interpreted. The most immediate consequence of the US withdrawal is the creation of a strategic vacuum. China, Russia and other important developing countries have shown a sustained preference for remaining inside multilateral institutions.
When the US exits, it allows alternative visions of the global order to gain legitimacy.
From the perspective of US competitors then, the American withdrawal is not a setback but an opportunity. When the US exits, it effectively hands over agenda-setting power, reduces contestation, and allows alternative visions of the international order to gain legitimacy. Here, it opens up no less a serious opportunity for coordinated developing countries’ blocs, such as the G77 or the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, that can increase their influence when a major agenda-setter withdraws. These legal platforms offer opportunities to developing countries to come together and steer these bodies perhaps even better.
Those who keep a track of international politics and law recall how despite US reservations, developing countries negotiated the well-known 1982 Law of the Sea Convention that regulated the traditional freedom of the high seas. Mining control over minerals, platinum, rare earths, and other material in the deep seabed, despite objections from the US, was conferred on the International Seabed Authority by the developing countries.
Another example where developing states found their way was the establishment of the International Criminal Court through the Rome Statute. It is still openly opposed by the US. Yet it is established, has handed down 11 convictions after lengthy trials, issued around 60 arrest warrants, and there are 12 investigations ongoing. Apart from that, there are numerous examples of how several international treaties and frameworks have been finalised and continue to function despite reservations from the US.
The long-term costs of withdrawal from international bodies are cumulative and may be invisible in the short term to the Trump administration. By withdrawing, the US does not shield itself from these developments; it merely loses the ability to shape them at an early stage. Historically, American influence has rested not only on material power but also on its capacity to convene allies, bridge divides between developed and developing states, and steer multilateral outcomes. Re-entry, when it occurs, rarely restores previous influence automatically; it often requires concessions and a rebuilding of credibility.
Speaking to the BBC last week, I had stated that the norm of non-intervention is actually being solidified even more despite its breach by the Trump administration at present. Notice how the entire world, all regions, all states representing diverse civilisations have stood up in protest. The norm against war, against non-intervention is not merely a law laid down in 1945; it represents a multi-civilisational maturity achieved after thousands of years of bloodshed and infighting for territorial gains. It’s not regional hegemony at stake only but a civilisational loss that every state raising voice against the Trump administration’s actions is trying to prevent.
The writer Ahmer Bilal Soofi is a former caretaker federal law minister
