President Trump’s announcement that America will withdraw from a Paris-based agency of the UN reminds us of a tale told by George Shultz. President Reagan’s state secretary would summon new ambassadors to his office, where a globe was displayed. He’d give it a spin, asking his guest to stop it when it came to his or her country. “Every single one of them failed,” Shultz said. They pointed to the country of their destination, rather than America.

Mr. Trump’s announcement in respect of leaving the UN Educational, Science, and Culture Organization would pass that test. In 1984, during Shultz’s tenure, America shocked the world by leaving Unesco for similar reasons to those Washington is citing now. Even beyond that agency, “continued U.S. participation in international organizations will focus on advancing American interests,” the Department of State’s spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, said today. 

Our presidents have long disagreed over the depth of America’s participation in UN activities. George W. Bush concluded that Unesco had sufficiently reformed. He returned to its fold. Yet he declined to join the then-new UN human rights council, which was formed in 2006 from the ashes of the human rights commission. Geneva’s much-ballyhooed “reforms” were minuscule. Rights violators are now more prominent than ever before. 

President Obama, though, decided to join the rights council, arguing that America could reform it from within. Go ahead, kid me. Washington’s influence turned out to be minuscule in an organization that can see only one human rights violator: Israel. Other UN agencies suffer, to one degree or another, from that malady, too. Unesco admitted “Palestine” as a member in 2011, leading to “proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric,” Ms. Bruce says. 

Between 2009 and 2017, Unesco adopted 60 resolutions against Israel, six on Crimea, four on Iraq, two against Syria, and none on everywhere else, according to UN Watch. Sudan, Iran, North Korea, slavery-plagued Mauritania, Communist China — all were spared. Mr. Trump left the rights council and Unesco in his first term. President Biden returned to both. Mr. Trump withdrew again. That pattern applies to other UN agencies as well. 

Mr. Trump has withdrawn America’s participation from the World Health Organization and defunded the Palestinian-centered UN Relief and Works Agency, raising fears in Turtle Bay of additional withdrawals. The UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, is telling staffers that “uncomfortable and difficult decisions lie ahead.” An internal UN memo recommends $3.7 billion in budget cuts. In reality, those cuts seem as thin as the paper they’re written on. 

Mr. Guterres’s annual base salary of $418,348 — larger than that of the American president — is reportedly not on the chopping block. As yet, Washington’s much-feared reduction in UN funding has been mostly targeted to specific parts of the world body, rather than the entire institution. America remains the UN’s largest donor, responsible for 22 percent of its regular budget and a quarter of the UN’s peacekeeping operations.   

A congressionally mandated cap on UN peacekeeping financing has forced some redundant missions to shut down. More are needed. A former American envoy to the world body, John Bolton, has long argued that Washington needs to decide the rate of its UN funding, rather than rely on the UN’s assessments. It all comes back to the Shultz test: Do we need to reform and finance global institutions because they are there, or put a priority on our interests?