Trumpism and Global Governance: Why Decline Is Not Inevitable, Say Researchers

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he did so with a speed and scale of institutional disruption that even seasoned observers of his first administration found startling. Within weeks, the United States had withdrawn from the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Agreement, the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, and the Global Minimum Tax Agreement. Funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency was terminated, and contributions to USAID were slashed by roughly ninety percent, with severe consequences for multilateral development programs run by the International Organization for Migration and the UN refugee agency. Steep tariffs were announced against all major trading partners in open violation of World Trade Organization principles. Yet a new analysis published in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance argues that none of this makes the death of global governance a foregone conclusion.

The study, authored by Benjamin Faude of the University of Glasgow and Tim Heinkelmann-Wild of the European University Institute and LMU Munich, takes aim at the prevailing pessimism in international relations scholarship. Some prominent theorists had warned that an American exit from hegemony would trigger a collapse of the liberal international order, while others had predicted that global institutions would prove resilient without U.S. leadership. The authors position themselves between these poles. They contend that although the challenge posed by Trump’s second term is more severe than his first, the continued decline of global governance and a resurgence of unrestrained great-power politics are not inevitable. Everything, they argue, depends on how the major powers that still support international institutions choose to respond.

To understand why the stakes are so high, the researchers dissect the Trumpian challenge along two dimensions: material and ideational. The material challenge is straightforwardly fiscal and organizational. American disengagement strips institutions of resources and, given the country’s predominant power, curtails their ability to influence international affairs, potentially rippling outward as other states follow Washington’s example. The first Trump administration had already stopped funding for UNRWA and the UN Population Fund and exited a long list of agreements and bodies, from the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the Arms Trade Treaty and the Iran nuclear deal. Rather than relying on multilateral arrangements, it favored bilateral negotiations and hub-and-spoke frameworks that placed the United States at the center, such as the Artemis Accords for space exploration and the Abraham Accords in the Middle East.

The ideational challenge, the authors suggest, is in some ways more corrosive. Trump has paired withdrawals with nationalist rhetoric and an ideological critique that questions the very legitimacy of international cooperation. He dismissed climate change as mythical and an expensive hoax, accused the WHO of being a puppet of China, and called the WTO broken and a disaster for the country. Such public attacks, the paper warns, can erode the perceived value of adhering to institutional norms and rules, potentially producing what scholars term compliance pessimism or even cascades of norm violations that spread skepticism across the international system.

Crucially, the researchers place Trumpism in historical context and find both continuity and rupture. The United States has always had an ambivalent relationship with the institutions it helped found. Before Trump, Washington had withdrawn material support from international organizations and agreements more than 140 times, making it the most frequent quitter of such bodies. Republican administrations have withheld funding from the UN Population Fund for decades, and the Reagan administration cut contributions to the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank while seeking greater influence over them. What distinguishes Trump is the peak of this pattern and the fundamental nature of the critique. Previous administrations justified nonparticipation by citing an asymmetrical distribution of costs, as George W. Bush did with the Kyoto Protocol. Trump’s allies, by contrast, attack the foundational mission itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared at his confirmation hearing that the post-war global order is not just obsolete but is now a weapon being used against the United States.

The paper then examines how defenders of global governance responded during the first Trump term, and the record is instructive. Western powers, often working in concert with international bureaucracies, deployed two broad strategies: appeasement and defense. NATO members increased defense spending toward two percent of GDP to address Trump’s complaints, while the World Bank tempered criticism through the creation of a fund for female entrepreneurs, reduced lending to China, and efforts to mobilize private capital. The Universal Postal Union even persuaded the administration to reverse its planned exit by allowing high-volume countries to set their own postal rates. Where appeasement was inappropriate, defenders reaffirmed the value of contested institutions publicly, shamed the United States, and mobilized alternative funding. When American contributions to the UN Population Fund stopped, other states increased theirs, and the European Union doubled down on climate commitments after the U.S. left the Paris Agreement, enlisting China as the largest emitter.

The failures are equally revealing. When the U.S. cut UNRWA funding in 2018, European states were divided and some followed the American example, forcing the agency to sharply reduce services for Palestinians. The Arms Trade Treaty came to be regarded as a failed initiative after the U.S. withdrawal, and European attempts to preserve the Iran nuclear deal proved half-hearted, with governments unwilling to shield their companies from secondary sanctions. The lesson, according to the authors, is that Trumpism can be effectively countered, but only when powerful states act decisively and in concert.

That condition is now in doubt. The response of Western governments to the second Trump administration has been noticeably weaker, with public defenses of the Paris Agreement, the WHO, and UNESCO more restrained, and the UN’s severe budget crisis left unaddressed. NATO members have agreed to raise defense spending to five percent of GDP by 2035 largely to keep the United States committed to the alliance, and the European Union concluded a tariff arrangement with Washington that openly contravenes key WTO rules. The authors attribute this timidity to the changed geopolitical context: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made European states far more dependent on American security guarantees, making them hesitant to provoke retaliation by openly defending contested institutions.

What future, then, awaits the rules-based order? The paper sketches two scenarios. In the darker one, global governance decays into a nineteenth-century-style concert of great powers, in which Washington, Beijing, and Moscow collude to divide the world into spheres of influence free from institutional constraint. The authors regard this as realistic, noting that international orders tend to expire through gradual deterioration rather than sudden collapse. But they also identify a more hopeful pathway: creative destruction, in which legacy institutions are transformed or supplemented by innovative forms of governance better suited to current conditions. They point to the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, adopted by 52 members as a workaround to the paralyzed WTO dispute settlement system, and to the proliferation of low-cost institutions such as informal intergovernmental organizations, transgovernmental networks, and public-private partnerships. These flexible bodies can be layered atop formal organizations, filling governance gaps while drawing on the resources and legitimacy of the older institutions, producing hybrid structures with both substantive and political fit for complex problems.

Which scenario materializes hinges on political choices that remain unresolved. If European states cannot overcome their geopolitical constraints and rising populist nationalism, non-Western powers will shape the future of global governance instead. China has announced its own Global Governance Initiative and has shown both reformist and revisionist tendencies, supporting Western defenses of the Paris Agreement, the WHO, and the WTO during Trump’s first term while promoting illiberal policies in the UN Human Rights Council and UNESCO. European reluctance, the authors caution, risks hollowed-out multilateralism. Their prescription is clear: liberal states must actively promote the innovative adaptation of global governance to a political, economic, and technological environment radically different from the one in which the post-war institutions were created. Decline, in their view, is a choice, and so is renewal.

Subject of Research: The impact of Trumpism on the material and ideational foundations of global governance institutions

Article Title: Destruction or renewal? Trumpism and the future of global governance

Article References: Faude, B., & Heinkelmann-Wild, T. (2025). Destruction or renewal? Trumpism and the future of global governance. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 305-315. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00130-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00130-y

Keywords: global governance, Trumpism, international organizations, liberal international order, great-power politics, World Trade Organization, Paris Agreement, World Health Organization, institutional resilience, low-cost institutions, China, European Union