WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration says the U.S. will rejoin the U.N.’s scientific and educational organization after a five-year absence that began while Donald Trump was president.
The State Department said late last week it had sent a letter requesting readmission to the Paris-based body, known as UNESCO. The June 8 letter from Under Secretary of State for Management Richard Verma proposed “a plan for the United States to rejoin the organization,” the department said.
“Any such action would require the approval of UNESCO’s current membership, and we understand that UNESCO leadership will convey our proposal to membership in the coming days,” the department said in a statement.
Details of the proposal were not immediately clear. The US owes the organization a significant amount of money due to arrears in quota payments. But earlier this year, the administration set aside $150 million in its current budget plan to pay back UNESCO.
The United States and UNESCO have had a turbulent relationship over the past four decades after arguing mostly over ideological issues during the Cold War and more recently the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Former President Ronald Reagan withdrew the US from UNESCO in 1983, but former President George W. Bush rejoined in 2002. Trump withdrew the US from the agency in 2017, citing its alleged anti- Israel Israel announced its withdrawal at the same time and the withdrawals took effect in January 2018.
The Biden administration said when it took office that it intended to rejoin UNESCO. And in March, when the budget for the next fiscal year was presented, Under Secretary of State for Management John Bass said that the administration believed that rejoining UNESCO would help the US in its global rivalry with China, which has invested large sums in UN organizations. .
Rejoining UNESCO “will help us address a key opportunity cost that our absence is creating in our global competition with China,” he said.
“If we are serious about the competition of the digital age with China, in my view, in a clear set of interests, we cannot afford to be absent any longer from one of the key forums in which the standards around education because science and technology are set,” Bass said.
“And there are a number of other examples in this space of UNESCO’s mission where our absence is noticeable and where it undermines our ability to be so effective in promoting our vision of a free world,” he said .
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Associated Press writer Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
