by WorldTribune Staff, March 17, 2025 Real World News

[From a recent LinkedIn exchange.]

Peter Mattis, leading open source research and analysis at The Jamestown Foundation

I want to agree with Mike Studeman here, but I think there are a few points that we need to realize. The first is that the old order and the organizations that underpinned it already were falling apart. This started years ago. Does anyone remember when the PRC disappeared the head of INTERPOL and suffered zero consequences for it? Does anyone remember when the World Bank funded concentration camps as part of a multi-year “vocational training” program in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region?

The second is that we chose to retreat a long time ago. By choosing only to fight out leadership selection from 2020 onward — at least we were doing that — we were ceding the management and running of these international organizations to others who did not necessarily share the values and interests that made them work.

Our approach to the World Health Organization (WHO) after its disastrous decision to postpone declaring COVID an international pandemic in early 2020 illustrates our ineffective, all-or-nothing approach. Then-President Trump withdrew the United States from the WHO, because of the CCP’s cooptation of key personnel. Democrats wanted to increase funding for the WHO, because it seemed to be struggling. Only then-Senator Marco Rubio and his colleagues suggested that we use our leverage to make the WHO perform more effectively. President Biden rejoined; President Trump withdrew. Now we are here.

These organizations deserve both the praise and criticism that they receive. For some reason, though, our entire conversation is focused on whether the United States should participate in these organizations or not. Yet, in some cases (but not all; there are extreme cases), the cause of these organizations’ dysfunction is HOW we engage and how like-minded countries engage. A more vigorous defense of the interests, values, and functions these organizations are intended to provide would be sufficient.

With the way we have operated, it is not good to stay; it is not good to leave. But to make things better — as with many things in this strategic rivalry with the People’s Republic of China — we need to think less about WHAT and WHETHER, and much more about WHY and HOW.

Missing INTERPOL Chief: https://lnkd.in/erxTfKKS
World Bank: https://lnkd.in/equNm9Nr
Rubio et al Letter on WHO: https://lnkd.in/eYQW2x4U

Mike Studeman, strategist, national security expert, author

Shockingly, U.S. leaders now appear not just to be losing faith, but potentially retreating from the rules-based system their predecessors established after WWII at great cost in blood and treasure to America and so many other nations.

The system on the left of this slide did more to elevate humankind into a higher standard of living with more stability and predictability than arguably any other world order in history. The system deserves mending and reform, to be sure, but not abandonment.

If Washington is truly shifting its focus to the right side, then we will stand for nothing better than our adversaries, who would be delighted to let Washington do their deconstructive handiwork for them. Beijing, Moscow, and their client states are poised to reconstruct a more pliant int’l system accommodating their preferences. Is this where American interests lie?

Ceding global leadership and contracting into sphere-of-influence behaviors (including “beggar thy neighbor” policies) risk taking us backward to a more volatile, Hobbesian world replete with more losers than winners. Worth more of a national dialogue about where we are going as a nation.

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