President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered the United States to withdraw from major global agreements, arguing they no longer “serve American interests.”
“We seek cooperation where it serves our people and will stand firm where it does not,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in defense of the president’s memorandum, which cut ties with 66 international organizations and agreements centered on myriad policy areas, including climate, human rights, and economic cooperation.
Among the most notable is the decades-old United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which counts all of the other nations of the world as members and is heralded by proponents as “the world’s primary international treaty to combat climate change.”
The UNFCCC undergirds sweeping climate frameworks heavily criticized by the Trump administration, including the Paris Agreement. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on the first day of his second term, similar to his actions as president in 2017. The exit, which marks the Trump administration’s efforts to thwart European-pushed climate regulations deemed excessive by Washington, becomes official on Jan. 20.
AMERICA FIRST
Today, President Donald J. Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum directing the withdrawal of the United States from 66 international organizations that no longer serve American interests including:
35-non UN organizations
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 7, 2026
Climate advocates criticized Trump for pulling out of the UNFCCC, arguing that doing so “will only isolate the United States further, undermine our global stature with allies around the globe, and cede the field to China.”
“The administration says that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and other multilateral organizations ‘no longer serve American interests.’ But the UNFCCC has not changed. American interests have not changed. The only thing that has changed is the cheapened and narrowed way that this administration misconstrues those interests,” Nathaniel Keohane, the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said.
Free market groups supportive of rolling back extensive climate regulations lauded the Trump administration for pulling the U.S. from the agreement.
“Affordable and reliable energy is vital to growth and prosperity, as is removing harmful governmental policies that increase energy poverty,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s director of energy and environment, Daren Bakst, said.
“Unfortunately, misguided global climate policies, launched with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change … make our most important and abundant sources of energy more expensive. They also fail to properly account for the harm associated with reducing economic prosperity and human flourishing,” he added. “In recent years, efforts to eliminate the use of fossil fuels – our most affordable and reliable energy sources – have been gaining traction at the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC. This is just a sample of how extreme things have become.”
Rubio said the frameworks, while holding admirable origins, had exchanged the pursuit of “peace and cooperation” for “progressive ideology” that seeks to “constrain American sovereignty.”
“What started as a pragmatic framework of international organizations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests,” the secretary said.
“From [diversity, equity, and inclusion] mandates to ‘gender equity’ campaigns to climate orthodoxy, many international organizations now serve a globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the ‘End of History,’” he added. “We will not continue expending resources, diplomatic capital, and the legitimizing weight of our participation in institutions that are irrelevant to or in conflict with our interests. We reject inertia and ideology in favor of prudence and purpose.”
Aside from the UNFCCC, Trump on Wednesday also withdrew the U.S. from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that, given the president’s memo, he would “immediately” pull the country out of the Green Climate Fund, saying that its “goals run contrary to the fact that affordable, reliable energy is fundamental to economic growth and poverty reduction.”
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Trump’s memo followed his publicly skeptical position on climate change.
Climate change is the world’s “greatest con job,” Trump said during remarks at the U.N. General Assembly in September 2025.
