US ‘assault’ on UN has done ‘lasting damage’ former WHO chief says
by Nina Larson
US President Donald Trump’s all-out assault on the United Nations is doing “lasting damage” to international cooperation as the world faces a range of “existential threats”, a former WHO chief warned Friday.
Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former Norwegian prime minister who served as head of the UN health agency from 1998 to 2003, said she was deeply concerned about concerted efforts by populist leaders in the US and elsewhere to tear down vital multilateral systems.
She pointed to Trump’s recent decision to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization as it attempts to coordinate the response to the global coronavirus pandemic as “perhaps the most astonishingly and transparently counter-productive of all these moves.
“You cannot deal with a pandemic or to avoid or prepare against such a terrible situation without very extensive international collaboration,” she told a virtual briefing hosted by the UN press association in Geneva.
Brundtland, currently a member of The Elders, a group of statespeople co-founded by Kofi Annan to advise on global issues, slammed “wilful destructiveness of certain national leaders” who appeared determined to tear down UN agencies and other international institutions at a time when they are sorely needed.
“If we have learned anything from the last few months it is that existential threats like pandemics, climate change and nuclear weapons can only be countered by collective and concerted efforts,” she said.
In addition to announcing that the US, traditionally WHO’s largest donor, was leaving the UN health body, Trump has attacked a range of other international institutions since taking power in 2017.
He pulled the US out of the Paris climate accords, quit the UN Human Rights Council, basically shut down the World Trade Organization’s appeals body by blocking the appointment of judges, and has begun withdrawing from several major disarmament treaties. (AFP)
