Americans have been largely pleased with President Donald Trump’s deluge of executive orders. But not all of them. Public support is weak for his order to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate treaty. This is curious. One is clearly a political organization, the other a useless and wasteful effort. The failure by a significant swath of our countrymen to recognize this is worrisome.

This is actually the second time Trump pulled the U.S. from the WHO. The first departure was in 2020. It pleased us then that no longer would this country “take part in its kleptocratic incompetence and its cozying up to dictators and tyrants, including its biggest influencer, China.” The WHO’s reckoning, we said at the time, “is long overdue.” 

Of course Joe Biden put the country back under the WHO’s thumb on his first day in office in 2021, even though it was clear that leaving had hurt no none. Despite this, our I&I/TIPP poll found that only 38% of Americans agree, either strongly (22%) or somewhat (16%) with quitting the WHO.

Critics point out that at one time, when it followed its original mission, the WHO had value.

“Unfortunately, the WHO has expanded its mission over the years to areas that only tangentially relate to public health, such as issuing alcohol consumption and dietary guidelines,” says Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey A. Singer. “Such issues are more aptly defined as private health, i.e., matters that don’t cause harm to others.”

Five years ago, the WHO was infamously deferential to China in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. It failed – or maybe declined? – “to confront China over its lack of transparency and cooperation during the outbreak,” says Brett Schaefer when he was a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

“Had China been more transparent and cooperative, many lives could have been saved and economic damage avoided in the U.S. and around the world,” says Schaefer, but the WHO played politics and “was too willing to take Chinese assurances at face value and too slow to respond to the initial COVID-19 outbreak.”

While no other country’s taxpayers fund the WHO the way America’s taxpayers do, it is yet another multilateral organization that behaves as if its job is to oppose and confound America and is embraced by the establishment as if it’s indispensable. Its director general is not a medical doctor but a member of “a Marxist-Leninist Ethiopian political party that analysts have listed as a perpetrator of terrorism,” Breitbart reported in 2020. It is a corrupt syndicate that pays lavish salaries and hands privileged perks to useless bureaucrats.

Is there a more inept, wasteful, perpetually failing organization in the world? Outside of the United Nations, of which the WHO is a part, the answer has to be “no.” That any American would want his or her country to be a part of it is breathtaking.

Support for walking away from the Paris Agreement is similar to that of removing ourselves from the morass of the WHO. Only 39% of Americans believe, either strongly (23%) or somewhat (16%), that we should drop the climate treaty. More than four in 10 – 41% – oppose Trump’s order to vacate either strongly (29%) or somewhat (12%). The next three paragraphs, which are repeated from a previous I&I editorial (because we can’t say it any better than we did then), are for the 20% who said they weren’t sure.

 The U.S. should have never been a part of the Paris Agreement. Committing our country to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which means reductions in fossil fuel use, is foolish. Reaching the made-from-thin-air global temperature target: requires government mandates, restrictions and increased spending on politically trendy but expensive and unreliable renewable energy; stunts economic growth; limits our choices, leaving many of them to be made by globalist elites; and is an abdication of our national sovereignty.

It is simultaneously meaningless and dishonest, a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

‘The Paris Agreement has always been an expensive farce, a symbolic gesture masquerading as a global solution,’ writes Charles Rotter in the Watts Up With That? blog. ‘Its main purpose? To transfer wealth from productive nations to the politically corrupt under the guise of “climate justice.” Of course, China — the world’s largest emitter — sits pretty with vague promises and no actual obligations. Trump’s exit from this scam is as much common sense as it is a necessity.’

There are far too many people in influential positions, from government to media, and too many everyday Americans who believe that without powerful government agencies, international non-governmental organizations, splashy multilateral agreements and bureaucracies filled with “experts,” the world will fall into chaos and misery.

It’s the guidance of the elites, they want the rest of us to believe, that keeps the world turning. How could we even exist without a federal Department of Education and Department of Energy, a United Nations, and reckless pacts that sell out our sovereignty?

Most frustrating is that our poll indicates that even some Republicans are unable to comprehend a smaller, less-intrusive state that declines to link with other governments and non-government organizations that are interested only in power and resources. One in five oppose Trump’s order to withdraw from the WHO, 16% are against his order to abandon the Paris deal.

Free men and free markets, not administrators, government programs, dreamy internationalists and skilled grifters have produced prosperity and health unlike any seen before in history. That so many Americans, many of them ostensibly in favor of smaller government and local rather than remote governance, don’t recognize this is a bit discouraging. Clearly there is still much educating to do.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board