U.S. President Donald Trump’s swipes at the United Nations and international cooperation since retaking office have critics declaring that the U.S. risks ceding influence to China. Trump’s decision to quit the World Health Organization “just makes it much easier for China to assert itself,” former U.K. ambassador to the U.N. and intelligence chief John Sawers told CNN. After the Trump administration froze U.S. foreign aid funding, InterAction, an umbrella group for aid organizations, warned that it was creating “dangerous vacuums that China and our adversaries will quickly fill.”
Warnings such as these are designed to play on the suspicion of China that pervades much of the U.S. political establishment. Advocates for international aid and the U.N. know that it is hard to sell multilateralism on its own merits in Washington these days. But there is a bipartisan consensus that Beijing is gaining too much power in international institutions. At the Senate confirmation hearing for Elise Stefanik—Trump’s U.N. ambassador-nominee—senators were far keener to talk about the China challenge than the details of U.N. activities.
Yet while the Trump administration’s stance toward the U.N. does create openings for China to boost its influence in New York and Geneva, it also creates headaches for Beijing. Despite disowning parts of the multilateral system, the U.S. is still likely to use the U.N. as a platform to criticize China in public. And it is not clear that China actually wants to invest the political and financial resources necessary to take a leadership role in those U.N. agencies the U.S. rejects.