BEIJING, June 30 (silubaba) -- It will be the third time for the United States to join UNESCO if member states approve at its extraordinary UNESCO session running from Thursday to Friday.
Little wonder it is a typical way in which the United States treats international organizations: too much arrogance and too little respect.
Over the past decades, Washington has gratified its every caprice by joining world bodies and treaties and then quitting them.
The United States pulled out of UNESCO in 1984 and 2017, and announced its exit from the UN Human Rights Council in 2018. It helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Agreement on climate change, then walked away from them despite strong global oppositions. Now Washington has re-entered the climate pact and is working to resume the nuclear treaty.
It is as clear as a pikestaff that the United States, the world's sole superpower, presumes that it is exceptional, and therefore entitled to a privilege to put itself above all others worldwide. No international rules and norms are powerful enough to let Washington get serious about its global obligations as a major country.
The simple truth is that the United States always adopts international law or views its membership in multilateral groupings in a selective manner: upholding them if they dance to America's interests and rejecting them if otherwise; and if the changing circumstances demand that it make a comeback, it will do so without a least sense of shame.
As the United States applies to re-enter UNESCO this time, its long-held principle can help the world understand the logic behind such a decision. And U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's remarks offer some clues that America's possible comeback this time is about China.
Back in March, Blinken called on the U.S. Congress to grant 150 million U.S. dollars to rejoin the UN cultural agency, saying that the U.S. absence was letting China write rules on artificial intelligence.
"China right now is the single largest contributor to UNESCO. That carries a lot of weight. We're not even at the table," he said.
Blinken's unabashed statement worries the world: it is not coming back to the UN agency to make it better or help solve some world problems, but to dominate it.
International organizations, as Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning has put it, are platforms for international cooperation, not battlefields for geopolitical confrontations. "If the intention of the United States returning to UNESCO is to balance and limit China's influence, it will only raise suspicions that the U.S. is still putting 'America first' ahead of international public interest."
Once being admitted again this time, Washington should demonstrate its sincerity in abiding by international rules, undertake international responsibilities, fulfill international obligations including paying back the dues owed to UNESCO for many years, support true multilateralism and promote international cooperation.
Don't expect Washington to cut loose from the past and assume international obligations in earnest given its tragically poor records in history and its stated purposes of geopolitical calculations. ■
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