US quits UNESCO. Will the ITU, WIPO be next?

As required by a 1990s law, the US has cut off funds to UNESCO after the latter voted to accept Palestine as a full member.

Although the US provides 22% of the UNESCO budget, most of that money goes to UNESCO programs rather than the organization itself. UNESCO provides support services for humanitarian programs funded by the member governments. Setting up an education program in a country like Afghanistan takes a lot of specialized knowledge and infrastructure. Having a ready-made bureaucracy that can be tasked with such programs helps the donors meet their objectives.

Attempting to hold such programs hostage does nothing to improve the image of the US abroad. The US spends $700 billion a year on the military and only $11 billion in foreign aid, 0.19% of GDP compared to a donor nation average of 0.30%. The largest slice, $3 billion goes to Israel and $1.5 billion to Egypt for signing the Camp David accord. $4 billion of the remainder goes to Afghanistan and Pakistan. This leaves less than $2.5 billion for the rest of the developing world put together and only a portion of that is humanitarian aid. The sad fact is that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation spends more on humanitarian aid each year (over $1.5 billion) than the US Federal government.

The threat to withdraw from UNESCO did nothing to discourage countries voting for full Palestinian membership. In the end the US and Israel lost the vote by 107 votes to 14 with 52 abstentions.

Withdrawing from UNESCO will certainly not help the US but the damage to US interests will be relatively slight. It will mean that the State department has fewer carrots when it needs to rally international support for future US diplomatic initiatives. Withdrawal from some of the other US agencies is likely to have a much bigger effect and cause real damage to US interests.

And of course neither the Israeli government nor the US Israel lobby will offer a word of thanks for the sacrifice the US makes on Israel's behalf.

In effect a stick that was intended to control the Palestinians has become leverage that the Palestinians can use against the US. Abbas can force the US to leave any UN agency he chooses just by applying for Palestinian statehood. These include the ITU, the organization that establishes standards for the international telephone system and WIPO the organization behind international trademark, copyright and patent law.

First the positive news: US withdrawal from WIPO would probably be a good thing. Over the years the US has been the driving force behind a series of moves to appropriate Intellectual Property from the public domain and make it into private property. Republican and Democratic administrations have both been in the pockets of narrow vested interests against the public interest.

But US withdrawal from the ITU would be very damaging for US interests and could end up threatening the core of the Internet infrastructure. The ITU did not create the Internet but there are many governments that would much prefer that the ITU took over running it. The type of government that uses the term 'information terrorism' for freedom of speech.

The possibility that the Internet might power something like the Arab Spring was understood by Russia and China for at least a decade. The US currently holds a uniquely privileged role in Internet governance. Russia, China, Iran and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) have been maneuvering to replace bodies such as ICANN, IANA and the IETF with ITU committees where it would be easier to enact proposals to make the Internet more censorship friendly. Participation in the ITU is critical to US efforts to thwart such moves.

It gets worse. The International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) is at the center of US efforts to stop nuclear proliferation. Anyone feel safer if the US seat is empty there? As MJ Rosenberg points out, the US is putting real US national interests on the line in a futile attempt to block a purely symbolic move against Israel.

Participation in the UN agencies is the principal mechanism that allows the US to protect US interests. Giving that up for the sake of some trite point-scoring is ridiculous. There are many governments that would rather like to see less US influence at the UN for a while. For them, threatening to withdraw if Palestine is recognized is not so much a threat as a promise.