Trump Signals UNESCO Departure—But Will it Stick?

White House emphasizes Palestine link over the

usual objections to this meddlesome UN agency

By Mark Anderson
STOP THE PRESSES!
[Image source: Logos-world.net]

While controversial federal educational crusades such as the No Child Left Behind scheme and the more-recent Common Core curriculum represent attempts to, in effect, “globalize” education at the national level, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—a globalist school-curriculum leader, coordinator and facilitator based in Paris and founded chiefly by humanist-internationalist Julian Huxley—has been an enduring presence since 1946. It has received praise in international circles, as well as condemnation in many quarters.

In conservative-constitutional circles where parents and local schoolteachers are deemed to be the proper educators of youth, the idea of such a lofty educational entity is, at best, unrealistic, or even perilous. And when you add the “woke” ultra-liberal worldview that defines UNESCO’s credo to the equation—and the corrosive social policies which that worldview tends to engender—the question of whether to maintain U.S. membership and financial support of the UN affiliate naturally arises.

UNESCO WITHDRAWAL

President Trump backed out of UNESCO during his first term, which was reversed by Joe Biden. President Ronald Reagan in 1984 withdrew from UNESCO. That lasted until 2003—when “conservative” George W. Bush rejoined UNESCO. U.S. taxpayers’ financial support is currently 8 percent of total UNESCO budget of about $75 million annually. The U.S. used to pay 22 percent of the budget.

Amid President Trump’s current effort to withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which according to WHO rules cannot be finalized until January of 2026, UNESCO has become the second UN agency from which the Trump Administration apparently intends to withdraw. This move was announced via a brief July 26 U.S. State Department press release from staffer Tammy Bruce.

The release noted, in part:

Continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the [U.S.] national interest. UNESCO [advances] divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, a globalist, ideological agenda  . . . at odds with our America First foreign policy.

PALESTINE FACTOR

Although many conservative constitutionalists, traditionally skeptical of, or outright opposed to, meddlesome world bodies like the UN and its 30-plus agencies and affiliates covering a wide range of operations, would likely agree with the administration’s concerns about UNESCO embracing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—the 4th of the 17 SDGs is specifically about educational matters—another seemingly incongruent issue has crept into the equation: Palestine.

The State Department’s press release gives as much emphasis to Palestine as it does to UNESCO’s “woke” radicalism in terms of the reasons the Trump administration is intent on leaving UNESCO.

In fact, Israel’s concerns that UNESCO recognizes the existence of Palestine as a state, suggests the White House’s motives for leaving UNESCO are not necessarily 100 percent sound. Israel, while any nation has a basic right of self-defense, has laid waste to most of the Gaza Strip with blatantly disproportional force and lethality.

The press release noted:

UNESCO’s decision to admit the “State of Palestine” as a Member State is highly problematic, contrary to U.S. policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.

The release concluded:

Pursuant to Article II(6) of the UNESCO Constitution, U.S. withdrawal will take effect on December 31, 2026. The United States will remain a full member of UNESCO until that time.

Notably, however, UNESCO’s own website claims the agency is not biased against Israel. The website states, in part:

BACK AND FORTH WITHDRAWALS

During Trump’s first term, UNESCO was but one of several international bodies from which he withdrew. He tried to back out of the World Health Organization (WHO) at the time, but that effort failed due to not meeting the one-year extended deadline to finalize the move. So, Trump on January 2025 withdrew from the WHO a second time, with plenty of time to make the move official, as of January 2026.

The same back-and-forth applies to the Paris Climate Agreement. Trump initially announced a desire to withdraw in June of 2017, though it did not actually happen until Nov. 4, 2020 (a year after Trump formally notified the UN of the intention to withdraw). Biden, having won the 2020 Nov. 3 election under highly questionable results, soon re-entered the pact. Today, Trump again appears on track to leave the pact, though that, too, won’t be effective until 2026.

HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL

The U.S. also has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council—yet another repeat from Trump’s first term. The withdrawal was part of an executive order that halted funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, which aids the Palestinians. That aid, like UNESCO’s recognition of Palestine, angered Israel and raised concerns that the Trump administration’s moves to untangle the U.S. from UN entities is more about Israel than anything else.

So, while Trump’s U.N. envoy, Mike Waltz, said at his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill that the UN needs “reform”—even saying, quite bizarrely, that “we can make the U.N. great again”—the more traditional and justifiable reasons to depart UN agencies run the risk of getting overshadowed.

UN AGENCIES FOR ABORTION

When it comes to UNESCO, those reasons include its Health and Education Resource Center and its apparently unbounded support for widespread abortion, at a time when World O’ Meter data online show abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide—upwards of 73 million lives snuffed out—in 2024 alone. And the WHO, while it manipulatively acknowledges that so many induced abortions take place, does not even formally classify abortion as an actual cause of death. That speaks endless volumes about the largely dehumanizing worldview of UN agencies.

Moreover, UNESCO supports gender-bender surgeries, LGBTQ rights and so-called gender-equality measures that sound acceptable but actually undercut the traditional family. Moreover, UNESCO provides propagandistic resources for school curriculums on the UN’s SDGs.  UNESCO’s International Bureau Education provides various resources such as research papers, curriculum guides and teaching strategies that tout world governance under a secular humanist-socialist worldview with highly relative moral customs, far removed from Christian nation states with a solid moral code.

UNESCO also has disseminated school-instruction materials to combat “conspiracy theories,” with a special emphasis on “climate deniers,” “election deniers” and other incorrigibles. “The fight against conspiracy theories begins at school … yet teachers worldwide lack the adequate training [to fight them],” UNESCO Director Gen. Audrey Azoulay stated in 2022.