The U.S. Heel Turn on International Cooperation

On Jan. 7, the White House announced the United States’s withdrawal from 66 multilateral organizations and treaties. The decision to abandon these global governance arenas is an abdication of the United States’s responsibility to uphold its commitment to human rights and inflicts injury upon the durability of the international system. As a result, the United States’s ability to advance human rights and civil liberties on and offline will greatly suffer. 

A New Strategy for Global Engagement

Included in the list of organizations the U.S. has chosen to leave are pro-democracy organizations (such as International IDEA), economic and development fora (such as various regional UN economic commissions), coordination bodies essential for digital security (such as the Global Counterterrorism Forum), and legal institutions (such as the UN’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals). Among this group are also organizations—such as Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) and the Venice Commission—dedicated to governance and protection of rights online. This is especially significant given that the United States actively shaped and led the development of these spaces. For example, the U.S. played a pivotal role in the development and construction of the FOC and served as its chair in 2023. With more than 40 member countries, the FOC is a crucial forum for collaboration and communication among countries seeking to protect free expression, privacy, and other human rights online with advice from an expert, global advisory network. Most recently, the FOC has worked to develop guidelines for the global governance of artificial intelligence by offering a detailed blueprint for regulation and diplomatic coordination. 

The Venice Commission, of which the U.S. is one of 61 member states, is the Council of Europe’s advisory body on democracy, rule of law, and human rights. The Commission has been a vocal leader on the human rights impacts of spyware, advocating for stricter rules to prevent abuse. The United States’s withdrawal signals a retreat from global leadership on spyware accountability precisely as the spyware market accelerates and existing safeguards fail. Therefore, it is more likely that Americans will bear the civil liberties cost of unregulated transnational surveillance. Spyware does not respect borders or nationality; Americans may be subject to intrusive surveillance when traveling, and opponents of foreign regimes (or their friends and families), journalists, and others may be targeted by spyware on U.S. soil.

The Trump administration’s choice to announce U.S. withdrawal from these international governance spaces might simply be symbolic, pending the government taking the procedural steps to officially leave each body. But as the U.S. acutely ramps up unilateral foreign engagement in Venezuela and threatens to do so elsewhere, even rhetorical retrenchment sends a clear message about the U.S. rejecting human rights and international, multistakeholder cooperation: Democracy and rule of law are not priorities for this administration. 

It has long been a U.S. interest, including during the first Trump administration, for the U.S. government to lead in human rights and internet governance spaces, with the goal of advancing freedom on the global stage. The very international fora from which the U.S. is now withdrawing have previously enabled the U.S. to effectively coordinate with global experts and industries when other governments have sought to control foundational internet infrastructure in ways that are damaging to users’ fundamental rights. Joint statements put out by the FOC, for instance, demonstrate the urgency of international coordination. Through the FOC, the U.S. and its partners have monitored potential human rights abuses and upheld users’ ability to access information online during elections, opposed anti-democratic efforts to shut down internet access, and protected journalists’ ability to do their jobs safely. For example, in 2022, the U.S. led a statement endorsed by all FOC member states condemning the Iranian authorities’ imposition of an internet shutdown amid the Women, Life, Freedom protests. Today, as protests erupt once again in Iran and blanket internet shutdowns jeopardize the safety and rights of Iranian residents and enable leaders to act with impunity, organizations such as the FOC are crucial in protecting these fundamental rights. The U.S. absence from the FOC and other global coordination bodies will be felt deeply.

To abandon such global governance efforts now is shortsighted. History serves as a guide here. It was the U.S., in 1998, that decided to remake the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from a government office to an independent, global, multistakeholder body tasked with distributing domain names, securing domains to mitigate malicious attacks, and enhancing multilingual access to the web, among other responsibilities. Try to imagine an internet without clear assignments for domains—a website relied on one day could be gone or otherwise unretrievable the next. It is nearly impossible to know what the internet would look like today had the U.S. not been committed to global coordination around the provision of internet services three decades ago. Access to an organized, standardized web presence was made possible because of American leadership and desire for global coordination. 

U.S. withdrawal broadly sends a signal that the U.S. is not a reliable partner—and is in some cases an adversary—in the global fight for rights. As demonstrated last year, the U.S. gutted crucial overseas funding at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL). Cuts to DRL included programs that supported crucial privacy and rights-enhancing technologies, such as virtual private networks , all over the world, including in Iran. And the Trump administration’s Dec. 23, 2025, decision to revoke the U.S. visas of several prominent Europeans for their work related to platform governance erodes trust among would-be partners and creates doubt that the U.S. would act in good faith. As the U.S. turns away from long-standing alliances with Europe and others and builds more friendly relations with autocrats, it loses some of its leverage to advocate for its interests. Allies will seek other ways to accomplish their goals, which will not necessarily align with U.S. interests or goals—and clears a path for authoritarian governments to play a more influential role. In some cases, that may mean Europe proceeds with domestic and foreign policy decisions with less consideration for the U.S.’s position. In others, governments that have productive relationships with the U.S. as well as its adversaries may rely more on the latter as the U.S. withdrawal from cooperative spaces undermines its influence in those strategic partnerships.

The Future of Illiberal Global Governance

The U.S.’s absence from multilateral fora invites authoritarian governments to step in and co-opt international institutions and governance processes. This risk is highly likely. Influence in these spaces is an important strategic goal for autocrats seeking to evade accountability or restrictions in place under a rights-based order, as established following World War II by the UN Charter, the first article of which promises to “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” and to promote “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all.” The Russian and Chinese governments, in particular, have sought to bend international organizations to their own ends for years by contorting accepted international norms and definitions pertaining to human rights. These efforts seek to make censorship and surveillance, among other repressive practices, not just free of accountability, but implicitly condoned and facilitated by international institutions. 

Take the UN Cybercrime Convention, adopted in December 2024, as an example. A global cybercrime treaty was initially proposed by the Russian government in 2017 and supported by a group of authoritarian states, including China, Iran, and Venezuela. As previously articulated in Lawfare, the final version of the convention can be understood as an unhappy compromise among three groups: authoritarian states led by Russia and China; Europe and its allies; and a wide-ranging group of countries, including several Caribbean states, South Africa, and India, focused on priorities including development and the digital divide. Civil society groups, including the Center for Democracy & Technology, criticized the convention throughout the process, raising concerns that the convention lacked adequate human rights safeguards and could be used to suppress dissent and broadly criminalize online activity. Other groups collaborated to develop detailed recommendations for how signatories could implement domestic protections to make up for the convention’s shortcomings. Crucially, multistakeholder spaces such as the FOC were successful in serving as arenas to pressure and encourage the United States to fight for a more rights-respecting treaty. FOC member states publicly committed to protecting human rights in the treaty negotiations, and the organization’s advisory network provided a venue for civil society and other experts to advocate directly to government representatives—which would not necessarily be possible otherwise.

That the outcome of negotiations was a disappointing compromise is altogether better than if there hadn’t been such intensive negotiation and Russia had been able to push its vision forward in full. The authoritarian bloc behind the treaty was constrained, with the U.S. and its allies acting as a counterweight. In cases like this, international cooperative spaces enable governments to ally with one another based on mutual support and interests, and strengthen their positions in important negotiations as a result. The FOC and many of the other legal and policy institutions listed in Trump’s recent executive order are necessary tools to assist governments’ coordination and efficacy in similar future fights with significant risks for human rights. If the U.S. follows through on Trump’s order and leaves these spaces, the balance of power within multilateral organizations—and therefore during future negotiations—might very well shift into the hands of authoritarian regimes with adverse interests. 

U.S. Strategic Interests on the Global Stage

Even if the Trump administration isn’t concerned about this change in the power balance, leaving these international organizations, treaties, and conventions jeopardizes U.S. interests. Participation in these spaces has long enabled the U.S. to advance its own political and economic priorities. Global governance arenas serve as venues to shape global standards in ways that facilitate and benefit global commerce in rights-respecting ways. In fact, the U.S. has long used them to give companies access to global and emerging markets, and put out its own vision for the global exchange of information and services. OpenAI’s efforts to deliver on “Democratic AI,” for example, rests on the U.S.’s ability to ensure that governments around the world have the capacity, appetite, and standards necessary to procure and deploy U.S. tools. 

The U.S. can create the conditions required to let American companies sell their goods overseas in many ways, and participation and partnership in the global arena can facilitate that. Without these spaces, the U.S. loses the ability to shape the market and thwart efforts by other countries to put forth standards or regulations that threaten American industry. The steady drumbeat of proposals and orders seeking to block U.S. tech companies’ offerings worldwide makes relying solely on bilateral engagements inefficient. U.S. participation in global spaces can be critical to push back on efforts such as Russian telecom regulator Roskomnadzor’s attempts to block WhatsApp locally for its 100 million Russian users, or India’s continued efforts to weaken the provision of encrypted services, including those offered by U.S. companies such as Meta and Signal. By leaving these spaces, the U.S. forfeits visibility and relationships that are indispensable to enabling its industries to provide globally connected internet infrastructure and maintain their advantage worldwide.

At stake is ensuring the free flow of information worldwide and upholding users’ fundamental rights. The U.S.’s public exit from dozens of multilateral spaces is more than a snub directed at collaboration on the basis of shared values. It is an abandonment of 80-year commitment to building global cooperation. Even though the extent to which the U.S. will follow through on this directive is unclear and withdrawal takes time in practice, the announcement sends an alarming message to the world that its traditional principles of protecting rights at home and abroad are no longer priorities. The U.S. is creating a vacuum of leadership that non-allied partners are more than happy to fill. And without pro-democracy and rights-focused international cooperation, the global, open, interoperable internet may cease to exist.