Murphy begins from a distinction that structures the entire argument. Some harms from American non-involvement are immediate and measurable, while others unfold over decades and may prove surprisingly modest in the long run. Averting the worst consequences of the climate crisis and preparing for the next pandemic fall squarely into the first category, where the absence of the United States government from global problem solving can have significant consequences. The United States remains one of the largest historical emitters of greenhouse gases and one of the most consequential funders of public health infrastructure, so its disengagement from these domains removes both material capacity and political weight from systems that depend on broad coordination. In these arenas, timing matters: delays in emissions reductions compound physically, and pandemic preparedness is only as strong as the weakest surveillance and response capacity in the chain.

The evidence for immediate, quantifiable harm comes in part from modelling studies published in the medical literature, which Murphy draws on to ground his argument. A mathematical modelling study of seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, published in EClinicalMedicine, examined the impact of the freeze in funding for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and projected increases in HIV deaths and infections as a direct result. A separate retrospective evaluation and forecasting analysis published in The Lancet assessed two decades of USAID interventions and projected the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030, finding that the programs slated for cuts had been associated with millions of averted deaths. These are not abstract governance questions. They are estimates of human lives, calculated with the standard tools of epidemiological modelling, and they illustrate precisely what Murphy means by dire immediate consequences even where the long-run architecture of global problem solving may endure.

Climate policy presents a parallel case with its own technical texture. Murphy cites the Rhodium Group’s Taking Stock 2025 analysis of United States energy and climate trends, which tracks how federal policy shifts alter the emissions trajectory of the world’s second-largest current emitter. When the American federal government relaxes domestic climate policy and steps back from international climate finance, the global emissions budget, a finite quantity of carbon that can be released before warming thresholds are crossed, absorbs the difference. Unlike some areas of governance, climate physics offers no institutional workaround: the atmosphere integrates emissions from all sources regardless of who is in office. This is why Murphy classifies climate among the domains where American non-involvement may have significant consequences rather than merely symbolic ones, and why parallel scholarship in the same journal examines whether global climate governance nonetheless remains resilient under the current administration.

Yet the article’s most counterintuitive claim concerns the domains where American withdrawal matters less than headlines suggest. Murphy argues that the long-run impact on global problem solving may be small in certain cases, even when immediate consequences are dire, and he offers economic inequality across countries as a likely example. Drawing on Branko Milanovic’s analysis of the three eras of global inequality from 1820 to 2020, Murphy situates present turbulence within long structural trends. The convergence of incomes between countries that defined the past three decades has been driven principally by economic growth in Asia, particularly China and India, rather than by American policy choices. A US government that turns inward may slow or complicate specific redistributive mechanisms, but it neither creates nor controls the deep forces reshaping the global income distribution. The immediate harms of cuts to development assistance are real, as the Lancet modelling demonstrates, but the underlying trajectory of between-country inequality is shaped by forces far larger than any single administration.

This leads to the article’s deeper historical claim, and the one Murphy identifies as the most important lesson for practitioners. Even if the US government becomes unimportant or an impediment to solving global and planetary problems for many years, the basic politics of their solution is likely to remain similar to what it has been since the mid-nineteenth century. Global governance, in Murphy’s telling, was never primarily the creature of great-power governments. From the international public unions of the 1800s through the technical standard-setting bodies documented in his earlier work on engineering rules since 1880, the machinery of global problem solving has been built and maintained by international epistemic communities, networks of scientists and experts, social movements, and civil servants at every level. Susan Strange’s famous critique of the Westfailure system, and the scholarship on non-hegemonic regimes collected under the title Cooperating Without America, both support the proposition that cooperation among other actors can proceed even when the hegemon abstains.

The historical record Murphy invokes is richer than the current moment might suggest. His references span the scholarship on how governments have repeatedly lost control over the proliferating structures of global governance, the role of emerging powers in disrupting and reshaping the World Trade Organization, and the work of what Thomas Weiss and colleagues have called the Third United Nations, the civil society organizations and advocacy networks that operate alongside and often in tension with member states. Recent historical scholarship on Pan-Africanism, including Howard French’s account of Kwame Nkrumah and the high tide of global Black solidarity, reminds readers that transformative global projects have often been driven by movements with no great-power sponsorship at all. Linda Gordon’s study of seven social movements that changed America makes the complementary domestic point: American politics itself has repeatedly been redirected from below rather than from the White House.

What does this mean concretely for the scientists, officials, and advocates now confronting an American government hostile to their work? Murphy’s answer, though framed in careful academic language, is essentially a call for persistence grounded in structural analysis. Members of international epistemic communities, social movements, and civil servants at all levels should remember that their work in global problem solving has always been just as important as that of the elected or self-appointed governments of even the most powerful countries. The technical standard-setters who keep the internet, aviation, and global trade interoperable do not require American federal participation to continue meeting. The epidemiologists who maintain disease surveillance networks, the climate scientists whose models inform every national assessment, and the statisticians who track global inequality all operate within institutions whose legitimacy and funding derive from far broader coalitions than Washington’s current disposition.

Murphy is careful not to minimize the danger. The article acknowledges commentary, including Paul Krugman’s argument that Trump is a symptom rather than the cause of declining American democracy, and it engages with assessments of how much damage a determined administration can inflict on institutions at home and abroad. The modelling studies on PEPFAR and USAID stand as evidence that the immediate human costs of withdrawal are severe and quantifiable. A widely discussed recent book on the collapse of large-scale societies, reviewed under the grim headline of a one-in-three chance of apocalypse, reflects the mood of existential concern that Murphy’s measured prose deliberately works against. His point is not that the situation is benign, but that despair is analytically unwarranted: the system of global problem solving has survived hostile hegemons, world wars, and the withdrawal of major powers before, and its resilience resides in actors that no single election can dismantle.

The article thus closes the loop between diagnosis and prescription. The differentiation of harms is the analytical core: climate and pandemic preparedness suffer significantly from American absence, inequality between countries follows its own long trajectory, and the politics of global problem solving remains fundamentally continuous with its nineteenth-century origins. For a readership of researchers and practitioners, the practical implication is to direct scarce attention toward the domains where American withdrawal does structural damage, while refusing the temptation to treat every global institution as hostage to Washington. The lesson Murphy draws from nearly two centuries of global governance is that the work has never depended on the goodwill of the powerful alone, and that the experts, movements, and public servants who built it retain, even now, the capacity to keep building.

Subject of Research: The impact of the Trump administration's policies on global governance and the resolution of planetary problems

Article Title: Global problems and Trump’s Republican Party government

Article References: Murphy, C. N. (2025). Global problems and Trump’s Republican Party government. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 393-400. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00127-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00127-7

Keywords: global governance, Trumpism, planetary crises, climate policy, pandemic preparedness, PEPFAR, USAID, economic inequality, epistemic communities, social movements, international institutions, US foreign policy