It is hard to know if Richard Gowan’s column over at World Politics Review is clickbait  a la Vox or Gowan is serious about Trump being the end of the United Nations if he is elected president.

It is clear that under a President Trump, the U.S. would be changing its relationship with the U.N. and other multilateral institutions. President Trump has promised to deemphasize international engagement. His foreign policy positions are best described as conservative non-interventionism. Animating this non-interventionism are the beliefs that United States interests are not served by multilateral regimes and institutions, they are a threat to the republic, and sovereignty is an absolute good. In some ways Trump’s position is a return to Herbert Hoover’s criticism of the Roosevelt administration: the American republic is fragile and being undermined from within and without.

Gowan gets hysterical about the damage to international institutions Trumps promise of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is:

This is in part because Trump has repeatedly signaled that he will give the institution short shrift if he takes office. He has already promised to “cancel” the Obama administration’s biggest multilateral achievement: The Paris climate change treaty.

While this might not be quite as simple as Trump claims, many countries could rethink their environmental commitments if they believe that the U.S. will renege on the deal. Unilaterally reversing years of negotiations would also inject a huge dose of distrust into U.N. diplomacy. If Washington trashes such a crucial treaty, it is hard to see why other governments should sign up to any major bargains in future.

First of all, the Paris Agreement does almost nothing over current law and treaties. If that is the Obama administration’s biggest multilateral achievement, the administration sure hasn’t achieved much in eight years when compared to the Clinton administration. The Paris Agreement merely reaffirmed existing articles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). For this reason, it was deemed an executive agreement and not a treaty under constitutional law requiring ratification. The Paris Agreement is “Green Theater” nothing more. The “crucial treaty,” is the original Framework ratified in 1992. The UNFCCC does provide a mechanism for withdrawal in Article 25. Would U.S. withdrawal from the UNFCCC pose an existential threat to the U.N.? It is unlikely. Since the United States never acceded to the Kyoto Protocol with binding emissions limits, the UNFCCC poses little threat to the U.S. economy.

The only thing that could break the United Nations is a concerted effort to create a parallel IGO with greater legitimacy with respect to liberal democratic norms. One such proposal has circulated on the Right for years: a concert or league of liberal democracies, or possibly an even more narrow concert of the Anglosphere. However, given the non-interventionism of Trump, such an IGO would never be considered. No, the likely outcome of a Trump presidency is withholding U.N dues, as previous Republican administrations had due to U.N. support for contraception, as a sign of defiance. It would make good theater, but once a Democrat came into office, the arrears would be repaid. Trump does not pose an existential threat to the United Nations.

What will suffer is the already creaky liberal international order that had been constructed after the Second World War. The relative power the United States has declined, and the American public is weary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These two things are contributing to a breakdown in the liberal international order. Dissatisfied revisionist powers—for example, North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia—are testing the limits of that order and even creating alternatives to that order. The United States appears poised to abandon maintenance of the liberal international order. In some ways, this is a return to type, where prior to WWII, the United States was content to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against European encroachment in the Western Hemisphere, but leave Europe to itself. Europe is no longer the bottle of scorpions it once was; the Middle East is that bottle of scorpions, but with the U.S. close to becoming energy independent thanks to technology and the post-industrial economy, the U.S. will likely pivot to its own period of “splendid isolation.”