U.S. withdrawal from international cyber organizations weakens global cooperation against cyber threats

On Jan. 7, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a memorandum ordering the United States to withdraw from 66 international organizations. Many of these are various United Nations entities or organizations concerned with climate change or similar issues the Trump administration has criticized. Three organizations, however—the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise (GFCE), the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid Threat Centre)—deal with cybersecurity-related issues, which the administration asserts remains a priority at a time when cyber and disinformation threats are rising dramatically. The administration did not offer any individualized rationale for its decision on these organizations, instead stating that the listed entities are “redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity.” The administration further claimed that many organizations had been driven by “progressive” or globalist ideology.

The United States was a key player in each of these organizations. Its withdrawal will not only have a crippling effect on their work, but it damages the United States’ global reach and effectiveness in dealing with critical cybersecurity threats. If this is a prologue to a larger withdrawal from the many international cyber organizations to which the United States remains a member, it will be a serious blow to collective cooperation against cyber threats.

Determining why these three cybersecurity-related organizations made the list is somewhat speculative. The United States was a founding member of the FOC, an organization comprised of 42 governments created to champion Internet freedom and counter the attempts of repressive governments and other malign actors to censor or undermine free speech and expression online. The FOC has coordinated diplomatic responses to counter repressive actions—including Internet shutdowns and excessive government surveillance—and issued a set of recommendations to states on the human rights impacts of cybersecurity laws, practices and policies. The FOC actively works to counter disinformation online and, during the U.S. presidency of the FOC in 2023, its priorities included “building resilience to the rise of digital authoritarianism … advancing norms, principles, and safeguards for artificial intelligence based on human rights [and] elevating traditionally excluded voices, such as youth, women and girls.”

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