Since its 3 February 2025 Executive Order, the United States has engaged in a series of decisions to either pause or entirely remove funding for various international organizations and agencies within the United Nations system, including withdrawing from the World Health Organization, withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the 90-day pause in contributions to the World Food Programme, among others, while ordering the United States Secretary of State to conduct a mass review of the United States’ membership in “all international intergovernmental organizations of which the United States is a member and provides any type of funding or other support, and all conventions and treaties to which the United States is a party, to determine which organizations, conventions, and treaties are contrary to the interests of the United States and whether such organizations, conventions, or treaties can be reformed.” (Section 3(b) of 3 February 2025 Executive Order). As the largest sovereign donor to the United Nations (estimated at one-third of the total UN system budget, or approximately US$20 billion per year), the United States is in the middle of assessing and evaluating the terms of its engagement with, and the scale and scope of its financial and material contributions to, the United Nations system as a whole.
The ongoing uncertainty and abrupt changes to US foreign policy today vis-a-vis the United Nations should not be surprising, given the United States’ episodic history of strategic engagement with the Charter-based international system. Since the UN was created in 1945, there have been thus far seven Republican presidents of the United States of America that all had a wide range of views on the United Nations and its alleged utility or disutility to American national interests. US President Ronald Reagan had sharply critical views of the United Nations during his first presidential term (including withholding or deferring US funding contributions to various agencies, bodies, and other parts of the UN system), that later morphed in his second presidential term to his own admission of the ultimate value of the United Nations as a “constructive force” in a dangerous world rife with threats to international peace and stability. Other Republican US presidents have likewise oscillated in attitudes towards the United Nations. (Contrast, say, post-World War II Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who famously called for short-term and long-term international military and development assistance to African states, with Republican US President Richard Nixon and his Special Assistant for National Security Henry Kissinger who emphatically “were not proponents of using the United Nations in U.S. foreign policy“, putting it mildly.) President Gerald Ford heavily supported the work of the United Nations especially in fostering international cooperation on peace and development, while President George H.W. Bush (also former US Ambassador to the UN) was known as one of the greatest supporters of the United Nations. Scholar Stephen Schlesinger famously wrote that notwithstanding his unilateralist policies post- 9/11, President George W. Bush’s much touted effective multilateral “stealth policy” at the United Nations actually “attained more victories in that body than in any other forum or country”.
Admittedly, the creation of the United Nations through the Charter of the United Nations was forged under the leadership of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat). Would this fact of party affiliation alone be decisive in any change of course in this time of ongoing pause, reassessment, and re-evaluation of the nature and value of the United Nations under the second term of Republican President Donald Trump? An inevitable question that will always be asked in this time of reassessment — whether by American taxpayers or their elected government representatives — is why and to what purposes are American tax dollars used for today’s Charter-based international system. To this end, during this time of the United States’ strategic disengagement or modified engagement with the international system, it is well worth recalling the terms of the “Grand Bargain” struck in the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization that the United States led and hosted towards the adoption of the Charter of the United Nations and the Charter-based international system we know today. International legal history has some things left to remind us of the United States’ principles as well as its enduring international legal commitments, separately from the short-term vicissitudes of party-driven foreign policy choices.
Recalling the US Role in Creating the Modern International Legal System Outlawing the Use of Force, Abiding by Rule of Law, Defending Human Rights
The 1941 Atlantic Charter, signed by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, famously articulated “certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world”. These common principles included: 1) rejection of acquisition of territory through use of force; 2) respecting the right of all peoples to choose their form of government; 3) equal enjoyment by all States on equal terms to trade and access to natural resources, international collaboration to improve labor standards, economic advancement, and social security; 4) realizing peace through freedom from fear and want; 5) freedom of navigation in the high seas and oceans; and 6) disarmament and abandonment of the use of force to resolve disputes.
A year later, the United States led 26 other States in concluding the 1942 Declaration by the United Nations, stating that “complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world.” In 1943, the United States also led the Four-Nation Declaration with the United Kingdom, the then Soviet Union, and China, against the Axis Powers, noting that they “recognize the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security”. In 1943, the United States also led and hosted the signing of the Agreement creating the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, to which 44 countries became States Parties. The 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference (otherwise known as the Bretton Woods Conference) saw the United States leading 44 other states in formulating the agreements that created today’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund. The 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington DC convened various proposals for the architecture of the United Nations, including the proposals of the Government of the United States.
After the Yalta Conference, the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization (otherwise known as the San Francisco Conference), involved hundreds of delegates from various countries and an archive of around five thousand documents prepared leading up to the final version of the Charter of the United Nations. On 25 April 1945, US President Harry Truman declared to all States’ delegates of the San Francisco Conference:
“It is not the purpose of this Conference to draft a treaty of peace in the old sense of that term. It is not our assignment to settle specific questions of territories, boundaries, citizenship, and reparations. This Conference will devote its energies and its labors exclusively to the single problem of setting up the essential organization to keep the peace. You are to write the fundamental charter. Our sole objective, at this decisive gathering, is to create the structure. We must provide the machinery which will make future peace not only possible but certain. The construction of this delicate machine is far more complicated than drawing boundary lines upon a map, or estimating fair reparations, or placing reasonable limits on armaments. Your task must be completed first.” (Verbatim Minutes of the Opening Session, April 25, 1945, President Truman, speaking from Washington).
In June 1945, US President Truman delivered his Address on the completion of the UN Charter, declaring, among others, that:
“You had the single job of writing a constitution–a charter for peace. And you stayed on that job.
In spite of the many distractions which came to you in the form of daily problems and disputes about such matters as new boundaries, control of Germany, peace settlements, reparations, war criminals, the form of government of some of the European countries–in spite of all these, you continued in the task of framing this document…The United Nations have also had experience, even while the fighting was still going on, in reaching economic agreements for times of peace. What was done on the subject of relief at Atlantic City, food at Hot Springs, finance at Bretton Woods, aviation at Chicago, was a fair test of what can be done by nations determined to live cooperatively in a world where they cannot live peacefully any other way…
The Charter is dedicated to the achievement and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Unless we can attain those objectives for all men and women everywhere–without regard to race, language or religion-we cannot have permanent peace and security. With this Charter the world can begin to look forward to the time when all worthy human beings may be permitted to live decently as free people.”
The “Grand Bargain” in drafting the Charter of the United Nations, which purposely did not deal with, address, or resolve the pending reparations claims of so many groups, populations, and states around the world (especially newly independent and decolonizing States regaining their independence from colonial fetters and Western imperial rule) was struck through the new UN Charter that IS committed to the achievement and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all peoples around the world. Allied Powers agreed to waive all the reparations claims of their nationals in Article 14(b) of the 1951 Peace Treaty with Japan, with few exceptions indicated in the treaty itself Further colonial reparations claims were stayed or delayed, some even abandoned outright or no longer actively pursued by Global South states, for mass atrocities committed in the course of colonial or imperial rule, as part of all States’ collective commitments to abide by a new international system committed to human rights and fundamental freedoms, the prohibition against the threat or use of force especially against territorial integrity, the political independence of States, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the UN Charter, as well as for the shared work of Member States of the United Nations in advancing the pillars of development, peace, and justice under the UN Charter.
Unlike the Charter of the League of Nations, the Charter of the United Nations begins its Preamble with “We, the peoples of the United Nations…” as further affirmation of its emphasis on the dignity and worth of the human person, similar to the 1776 Constitution of the United States of America that begins with “We the People…”. Whatever the legal merits of innumerable individual, group, and collective reparations claims, post World War II States, led by the United States, chose to set them aside for the sake of the promise of peace, security, development, human rights and the rule of law in today’s modern Charter-based international legal system.
Pax Americana and the “Grand Bargain” of Waiving, Suspending, Mitigating, or Silencing Most Reparations Claims
However, before the UN Charter entered into force on 24 October 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan ultimately agreed to waive all its reparations claims against the United States for the devastation it experienced from the atomic bombings in the same 1951 Peace Treaty with Allied Powers. The famous case of Ryuichi Shimoda et al. v. The State, decided by Japan’s District Court of Tokyo on 7 December 1963, declared that Japan had waived all the reparations claims of its nationals — including victims of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — against the United States. The United States pushed for the deliberate mitigation of worldwide reparations claims against Germany in the Potsdam Conference, to avoid recreating the punitive scale of reparations exacted on Germany for its conduct in World War II. Uniquely, when German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer delivered his famous 1951 speech to the Bundestag admitting international responsibility for the actions of Nazi Germany and declaring negotiations for reparations programs for all affected by the Holocaust, landmark inter-State reparations agreements were created under the 1952 Luxembourg Agreements between Israel and Germany. No other reparations agreements would be reached for most of the rest of the world affected by the World War II, let alone for newly independent or decolonized States emerging from imperial or colonial rule of Allied Powers or Axis Powers.
Others affected by World War II did not have the benefit of international reparations agreements intentionally created by States under the new Charter-based international legal system. The price of the “Grand Bargain” to create the Charter-based modern international legal system was, thus, in many respects, to de-emphasize or suspend (if not silence outright), most non-Jewish reparations claims that affected individuals, groups, or populations had against foreign States arising from atrocities committed during World War II, as well as historic injustices such as colonization and slavery that occurred well before the prohibitions against the use of force and the commitments to human rights and fundamental freedoms in the UN Charter.
Modern international law under the Charter-based system would also contain its own paradoxes for those who experienced wartime harms or historic injustices from routinized conquest, extraction, and aggression. The pervasive doctrine of sovereign immunity (absolute or restrictive) also contributed to ensuring that domestic courts around the world would not so easily or readily admit tort claims for compensation against foreign States, while legal doctrines of inter-temporal law would avert retroactive application of the UN Charter to lingering claims of historic injustices towards survivors of imperial and colonial rule, the global slave trade, among others. Pax Americana was thus ultimately premised on this “Grand Bargain” that created today’s modern international legal system through the Charter of the United Nations. For those favoring the undoing of this “Grand Bargain” through any allegedly deeper United States disengagement from or deliberate crippling of the United Nations and international law under the auspices of the Charter-based international system, one can expect at a minimum that 190 other States in the world will proceed to keep making international law, and potentially seek to enforce international law in myriad ways, including a wide range of possible countermeasures in the future.
The Modern International Legal System IS Central to US Economic Growth and Hegemonic Influence
It was not at all coincidental that the United States economy benefited superlatively from post World War II reconstruction under the Charter-based international system, with the Marshall Plan further opening new export markets in Europe, reconstruction in postwar Japan, and numerous bilateral trade treaties as well as comprehensive free trade agreements giving US manufacturing access to global consumer markets. The United States’ real GDP (adjusted for inflation) consistently (and massively) trended upwards every year from 1929 to the present, and even more so after 1945.
From 1945 to the present, the United States has also maintained its hegemonic dominance by continuing to possess the greatest military strength in the world. Pax Americana also benefited from longstanding military alliances with fellow democracies in Europe (through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), Asia (through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Japan), and Latin America (through the Organization of American States and other regional economic partnerships like the DR-CAFTA). The United States has a vast web of well over 18,000 treaties with States around the world to advance its national interests across economic, geopolitical, social, environmental, energy, and technological spheres of activity. Many of these bilateral, plurilateral, and multilateral treaties were concluded either under the auspices of the United Nations or the international cooperation built by the United States and fostered through the United Nations. (To imagine the scale of effort, time and resources needed to reform or renegotiate this volume of treaties for the United States, one only has to remember the difficult renegotiations the United Kingdom has been in since 2017 for at least 759 treaties impacted by Brexit.) The United States passport today is mostly visa-free anywhere in the world, and much fewer travel, business, commercial, security, or informational restrictions are placed against American nationals, American businesses, American activities and American transactions in most countries around the world. The United States has also driven its technological innovation from the many freedoms of scientific inquiry, education, and information flows across borders recognized by most of the 195 – plus States in the world.
Should the United States opt for a deeper unraveling of the “Grand Bargain” it purposely architectured since 1945, one can well question whether the United States’ Pax Americana of unprecedented economic growth and hegemonic influence could still continue if it relies on a policy of “disruption through moving fast and breaking things”, such as through more frequent or indiscriminate trade wars with friends as well as enemies, more expansive unilateral sanctions creating extraterritorial impacts of enforcement on third States, or explicit desires to normalize territorial expansion at will when “might makes right”. As States know all too well from the routine unilateralism and tribalism of the pre-Charter era of classical international law, the descent to world war and collapse of international security only requires the provocations of a few.
Conclusion
It appears reasonable for any government of a sovereign State to desire greater prosperity and continued security for its people through domestic decision-making (such as attempts at balancing budgets through fiscal austerity measures based on subjective or objective policy determinations of what constitutes “wasteful” spending, even if those determinations are domestically contested), on matters that are essentially within its domestic jurisdiction. However, the United States is now in the phase of reassessing and evaluating “which organizations, conventions, and treaties are contrary to the interests of the United States and whether such organizations, conventions, or treaties can be reformed” as required in the 3 February 2025 Executive Order. This exercise for the United States demands a sober assessment of the actual legal principles and historical premises of Pax Americana, and what is salient to the needs of its own population. At the same time, it is important to remember that this significant evaluation should also involve precisely and empirically estimating what the full and real costs are of short and long-term US non-compliance, deliberate breach, selective or strategic disengagement, or outright exit from the same Charter-based international law that largely underwrote and ensured Pax Americana since 1945.
International cooperation, once jettisoned, is not as easy to retrieve. A scorched earth foreign policy approach against Charter-based international law and the legitimate expectations of 195 plus other States in the global system will provoke its own corresponding and lasting consequences for a new kind of undefined Pax Americana that today’s White House prefers for the future of the United States.
As then President Truman rightly described it, the United Nations is a “delicate machine” that is imperfect and will always have to evolve, while remaining dedicated to the achievement and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Unraveling the “Grand Bargain” that enabled Pax Americana could potentially spark needed institutional and policy reforms to the United Nations, but it could also be the project that destroys it altogether. A foreign policy approach of “moving fast and breaking things” does not graft well onto the Charter-based international system that for three quarters of a century has at least entrenched reasonable baseline understandings of the rule of law, and the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all of humanity, and through which the United States benefited the most from 75 years to date of its Pax Americana. Entropic disruption in this case of the “Grand Bargain” will not necessarily lead to an era of Schumpeterian creative destruction that would be favorable to American interests, let alone the hard-fought stability brought by Charter-based international law.
