President Donald Trump gave notice that the U.S. would quit the organization on the first day of his presidency in 2025, via an executive order.

According to a press release from the U.S. Health and State Departments, the U.S. will only work with the WHO in a limited fashion in order to effectuate the withdrawal.

“We have no plans to participate as an observer, and we have no plans of rejoining,” a senior government health official said. The U.S. said it plans to work directly with other countries – rather than through an international organization – on disease surveillance and other public health priorities.

DISPUTE OVER US-OWED FEES

Under U.S. law, it was supposed to give one-year notice and pay all outstanding fees – around $260 million – before departing.

But a U.S. State Department official disputed that the statute contains a condition that any payment needs to be made before withdrawal.

“The American people have paid more than enough,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email earlier on Thursday.

The Department of Health and Human Services said in a document released on Thursday that the government had ended its funding contributions to the agency. Trump had exercised his authority to pause the future transfer of any U.S. government resources to the WHO because the organization had cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, the HHS spokesperson said.

The U.S. flag had been removed from outside the WHO headquarters in Geneva on Thursday, according to witnesses.

In recent weeks, the U.S. has moved to exit a number of other United Nations organizations, and some fear that Trump’s recently launched Board of Peace could undermine the UN as a whole.

Several WHO critics have also proposed setting up a new agency to replace the organization, although a proposal document reviewed by the Trump administration last year instead suggested the U.S. push for reforms and American leadership at WHO.

QUICK RETURN UNLIKELY

Over the last year, many global health experts have urged a rethink, including most recently WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The WHO also said the U.S. has not yet paid the fees it owes for 2024 and 2025. Member states are set to discuss the U.S. departure and how it will be handled at the WHO’s executive board in February, a WHO spokesperson said.

“This is a clear violation of U.S. law,” said Lawrence Gostin, founding director of the O’Neill Institute for Global Health Law at Georgetown University in Washington, a close observer of the WHO. “But Trump is highly likely to get away with it.”

Bill Gates – chair of the Gates Foundation, a major funder of global health initiatives and some of the WHO’s work – told Reuters at Davos that he did not expect the U.S. to reconsider in the short term.

Gates said he would still advocate for the U.S. to rejoin. “The world needs the World Health Organization,” he said.

WHAT THE DEPARTURE MEANS

The U.S. departure has sparked a financial crisis that has seen the WHO cut its management team in half and scale back work, cutting budgets across the agency. Washington has traditionally been by far the U.N. health agency’s biggest financial backer, contributing around 18% of its overall funding. The WHO will also shed around a quarter of its staff by the middle of this year.

The agency said it has been working with the U.S. and sharing information in the last year. It was unclear how the collaboration will work going forward.

Global health experts said this posed risks for the U.S., the WHO and the world.

“The U.S. withdrawal from WHO could weaken the systems and collaborations the world relies on to detect, prevent, and respond to health threats,” said Kelly Henning, public health program lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies, a U.S.-based non-profit.

Reporting by Jennifer Rigby and Emma Farge, additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in Davos and Michael Erman in New York; Editing by David Gregorio and Bill Berkrot

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I bring that up today in response to the Trump administration’s 33-page National Security Strategy, released last week. It has been widely noted that at a time when our geopolitical rivalry with Russia and China is more heated than at any other time since the Cold War — and Moscow and Beijing are more and more closely aligned against America — the Trump 2025 national security doctrine barely mentions these two geopolitical challengers.

While the report surveys U.S. interests across the globe, what intrigues me most about it is how it talks about our European allies and the European Union. It cites activities by our sister European democracies that “undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

“Should present trends continue,” it goes on, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”

Indeed, the strategy paper warns, unless our European allies elect more “patriotic” nationalist parties, committed to stemming immigration, Europe will face “civilizational erasure.” Unstated but implied is that we will judge you not by the quality of your democracy but by the stringency by which you stem the migration flow from Muslim countries to Europe’s south.

That is a flying elephant no one should ignore. It is language unlike any previous U.S. national security survey, and to my mind it reveals a deep truth about this second Trump administration: how much it came to Washington to fight America’s third civil war, not to fight the West’s new cold war.

Yes, in my view, we are in a new civil war over a place called home.

First, I need to make a quick detour to “home.” These days there is a tendency to reduce every crisis to the dry metrics of economics, to the chessboard machinations of political or military campaigns, or to ideological manifestoes. All, of course, have their relevance, but the longer I have worked as a journalist, the more I have found that the better starting place for unlocking a story is with the disciplines of psychology and anthropology. They are often much better at revealing the primal energies, anxieties and aspirations that animate our national politics — and global geopolitics — because they uncover and illuminate not just what people say they want, but also what they fear and what they privately pray for, and why.

I was not here for the Civil War of the 1860s, and I was still a boy during our second great civil struggle, the 1960s civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. But I am definitely on duty for America’s third civil war. This one, like the first two, is over the questions “Whose country is this anyway?” and “Who gets to feel at home in our national house?” This civil war has been less violent than the first two — but it is early.

Humans have an enduring, structural need for home, not only as a physical shelter, but as a psychological anchor and moral compass, too. That is why Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” (my favorite movie) got it exactly right: “There’s no place like home.” And when people lose that sense of home — whether by war, rapid economic change, cultural change, demographic change, climate change or technological change — they tend to lose their center of gravity. They may feel as though they are being hurtled around in a tornado, grabbing desperately for anything stable enough to hold onto — and that can include any leader who seems strong enough to reattach them to that place called home, however fraudulent that leader is or unrealistic the prospect.

With that as background, I cannot remember another time in the last 40 years when I have traveled around America, and the world, and found more people asking the same question: “Whose country is this anyway?” Or as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right nationalist Israeli minister, put it, in Hebrew, in his political banner ads during Israel’s 2022 election: “Who is the landlord here?”

And that is not an accident. Today, more people are living outside their country of birth than at any point in recorded history. There are approximately 304 million global migrants — some seeking work, some seeking education, some seeking safety from internal conflicts, some fleeing droughts and floods and deforestation. In our own hemisphere, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office reports that migrant encounters at our southern border hit historical highs in 2023, while estimates from the Pew Research Center suggest that the total unauthorized population in America grew to 14 million in the same year, breaking a decade-long period of relative stability.

But this is not just about immigrants. America’s third civil war is being fought on multiple fronts. On one front it is white, predominantly Christian Americans resisting the emergence of the minority-dominated America that is now baked into our future sometime in the 2040s, driven by lower birthrates among white Americans and growth in Hispanic, Asian and multiracial American populations.

On another front are Black Americans still struggling against those who would raise new walls to keep them from a place called home. Then there are Americans of every background trying to steady themselves amid cultural currents that seem to shift by the week: new expectations about issues like identity, bathrooms and even a typeface, as well as how we acknowledge one another in the public square.

On yet another front, the gale-force winds of technological change, propelled now by artificial intelligence, are sweeping through workplaces faster than people can plant their feet. And on a fifth front, young Americans of every race, creed and color are straining to afford even a modest home — the physical and psychological harbor that has long anchored the American dream.

My sense is that we now have millions of Americans waking up each morning unsure of the social script, the economic ladder or the cultural norms that are OK to practice in their home. They are psychologically homeless.

When Donald Trump made building a wall along the Mexican border the central motif of his first campaign, he instinctively chose a word that did double duty for millions of Americans. “Wall” meant a physical barrier against uncontrolled immigration that was accelerating our transition to a minority-majority-led America. But it also meant a wall against the pace and scope of change: the cultural, digital and generational whirlwinds reshaping daily life.

That, to me, is the deep backdrop to Trump’s National Security Strategy. He is not interested in refighting the Cold War to defend and expand the frontiers of democracy. He is, in my view, interested in fighting the civilizational war over what is the American “home” and what is the European “home,” with an emphasis on race and Christian-Judeo faith — and who is an ally in that war and who is not.

The economics writer Noah Smith argued in his Substack this week that this was the key reason the MAGA movement began to turn away from Western Europe and draw closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia — because Trump’s devotees saw Putin as more of a defender of white Christian nationalism and traditional values than the nations of the European Union.

Historically, “in the American mind,” Smith wrote, “Europe stood across the sea as a place of timeless homogeneity, where the native white population had always been and would always remain.” However, “in the 2010s, it dawned on those Americans that this hallowed image of Europe was no longer accurate. With their working population dwindling, European countries took in millions of Muslim refugees and other immigrants from the Middle East and Central and South Asia — many of whom didn’t assimilate nearly as well as their peers in the U.S. You’d hear people say things like ‘Paris isn’t Paris anymore.’”

Today’s MAGA-led American right, Smith added, does “not care intrinsically about democracy, or about allyship, or about NATO, or about the European project. They care about ‘Western civilization.’ Unless Europe expels Muslim immigrants en masse and starts talking about its Christian heritage, the Republican Party is unlikely to lift a hand to help Europe with any of its problems.”

In other words, when protecting “Western civilization” — with a focus on race and faith — become the centerpiece of U.S. national security, the biggest threat becomes uncontrolled immigration into America and Western Europe — not Russia or China. And “protecting American culture, ‘spiritual health’ and ‘traditional families’ are framed as core national security requirements,” as the defense analyst Rick Landgraf pointed out on the defense website “War on the Rocks.”

And that’s why the Trump National Security Strategy paper is no accident or the work of a few low-level ideologues. It is, in fact, the Rosetta Stone explaining what really animates this administration at home and abroad.

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Truckers believe that California’s decision to drop a mandate for zero-emissions big rigs is the start of a broader rollback of emissions regulations under the incoming Trump administration.

California’s air regulator on Tuesday dropped a request to the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver that would have allowed it to force truckers to buy battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell trucks. The head of the California Air Resources Board said the agency withdrew the request because of concerns the Trump administration would deny it.

California is the leader among states implementing regulations to reduce the number of diesel-powered trucks on the road. Truck manufacturers and carriers believe the Trump administration could slow state campaigns as well as federal regulations due to take effect in the coming years.

“We’re looking to the incoming administration to get in there and put in some guidelines that make sense for reducing emissions and for setting standards that are actually achievable,” said Lisa Yakomin, president of the Association of Bi-State Motor Carriers, which represents truckers that haul containers to and from the Port of New York and New Jersey.

Heavy-duty trucks are one of the biggest sources of pollution on U.S. roads, contributing to climate change as well as respiratory problems and other health issues, especially in low-income areas close to ports and other freight hubs. Trucking industry officials say they support moves toward cleaner fuels, but they say regulations such as California’s strict mandate aren’t workable because the technology and infrastructure for zero-emissions heavy-duty trucks aren’t sufficiently developed.

States like California have said the mandates would stimulate demand and the build-out of needed infrastructure for zero-emission trucking.  

California a few years ago introduced regulations that require manufacturers to sell an increasing number of zero-emissions trucks starting with the 2024 model year. Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey have since enacted similar rules, and other states are introducing similar legislation. 

The requirement that California abandoned was designed to create demand for those zero-emissions big rigs by requiring that truckers who call at California seaports or who operate fleets in the state increasingly buy alternative-fuel trucks.

Truckers say those trucks aren’t ready for widespread use in operations. 

Battery-electric big rigs cost about three times as much as diesel trucks. Truckers say the vehicles are less efficient than diesel trucks because they have limited driving range, require extended down time for charging and can only haul lighter loads due to the weight of their battery. 

Many truckers don’t have access to chargers and they say that regional and national charging networks for heavy-duty big rigs don’t yet exist.

Hydrogen fuel-cell technology, which has some advantages over batteries in terms of its weight and driving range, is years behind development of battery technology. 

Regulators have continued to press on with their zero-emission mandates. The Biden administration developed a federal rule that requires a growing proportion of heavy-duty truck sales to be zero-emissions rigs starting in 2027, so that 25% of long-haul truck sales and 40% of short-haul truck sales are compliant by 2032.

Trump is planning to press for a rollback of tailpipe emissions rules for passenger vehicles, according to oil industry lobbyists, part of an effort to unwind President Biden’s push for the U.S. to adopt electric vehicles. 

“I think the administration is going to do a review of everything that happened under the Biden administration coming out of the EPA and determine what is the right approach,” said Jacqueline Gelb, president of the industry group American Truck Dealers. “We need achievable regulations and the path that we’re currently on right now is not achievable.”

Gelb said the group “has engaged with the Trump transition team” to get the incoming administration to revoke waivers the Biden administration has granted California for some state emissions restrictions.

California regulators say they will continue their efforts to reduce emissions under existing local regulations. These include rules that impose new emissions restrictions on diesel engines and that force warehouses to reduce pollution caused by their operations, including trucking.

Matt Schrap, chief executive of the Harbor Trucking Association, a California industry group, said the state’s withdrawal of its broad mandate won’t “stop localized rules from being promulgated.”

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