Foreign Policy Articles
Archives: https://foreignpolicy.com/author/matthew-m-kavanagh/
Matthew M. Kavanagh. WHO Withdrawal Could Be a Disaster—or an Opportunity Foreign Policy. (Jan 2025)
U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), renewing an effort begun in 2020 but blocked after the election of Joe Biden. Trump’s decision invites two questions: First, has the United States actually, legally quit WHO? And second, are other actors powerless to prevent the country’s withdrawal or, if it occurs, shape how it affects global cooperation on health? On both fronts, the answer is no. Trump’s executive order is only the beginning of a complex legal and geopolitical struggle that could have unanticipated global effects.
The United States helped create WHO in 1948, not out of altruism but because it understood the overwhelming benefit WHO could provide to the country….
Matthew M. Kavanagh and Luis Gil Abinader. Abolishing USAID Is Both Unconstitutional and Disastrous. Foreign Policy. (Feb 2025)
On Jan. 20, as U.S. President Donald Trump was being inaugurated in Washington, D.C., some 8,000 miles away in Dar es Salaam, the government of Tanzania was reversing prior denials and declaring that there was, in fact, an outbreak of Marburg virus. Marburg, a highly contagious hemorrhagic virus, is a cousin to Ebola with a case fatality rate as high as 88 percent, and it could bring the kind of global attention the Tanzanian government has long tried to avoid…
Now, Trump has ordered an ill-considered scheme that contravenes U.S. law, could tear apart the international aid infrastructure built with bipartisan support over decades, and which would mean many more outbreaks and other disasters worldwide…