Washington (EFE).- The US recognizes that its return to UNESCO “fills a void” in the country’s multilateral leadership, which senior officials from the Joe Biden Administration said this Saturday has been taken advantage of by its competitors to erode common values.
The flag-raising ceremony will take place on Tuesday at the agency’s headquarters in Paris and will feature the first lady of the United States, Jill Biden, who will arrive in the French capital on Monday morning.
A recovered link
The UN Organization for Education, Science and Culture (Unesco) approved on June 30 at an extraordinary conference in Paris the immediate re-entry plan proposed by Washington, which included the payment of a million-dollar debt dating from 2011.
The United States announced that it was leaving UNESCO at the end of 2017, during the term of Donald Trump (2017-2021), who accused the institution of repeatedly adopting anti-Israeli positions.
His return is in line with Joe Biden’s defense of multilateralism, who came to power in January 2021.
“We recognize that if we are not present in the organizations, other countries will fill the void in an era of increasing geopolitical competition. Those countries are working hard at the UN to shape the global agenda and they want to impose their vision,” said a senior US presidential official in a phone call with journalists.
If the United States does not participate, he added, it cannot defend “from unjust attacks” neither the American population nor allied countries.
“In recent years it became clear that the absence of the United States in UNESCO was harming our interests. And in this time the organization has undertaken much-needed reforms,” the official said.
The return to UNESCO, a show of leadership
The Biden Administration, in his words, is positioned “on offense rather than defense” on the international stage and wants to play a leading role on issues such as artificial intelligence (AI).
UNESCO said this Friday that the flag-raising ceremony will pay tribute to the reaffirmation of the US commitment to collaborate on a global scale in sectors such as education, culture and science.
In addition to participating in it, Jill Biden will hold a meeting in Paris with her French counterpart, Brigitte Macron. The Bidens received the Macrons in Washington in December 2022 on a state visit, the first under the mandate of the US Democratic president.
Joe Biden’s wife will go before her return to the Mont Saint-Michel abbey, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and will go to the American cemetery in Brittany, also located in the Normandy region and where she will remember the soldiers who lost their lives in the north of France during World War II (1939-1945).