Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan on Wednesday announced that the U.S. will drop its contributions for the United Nations peacekeeping missions by 3 percent, The Hill reports.
Shanahan stressed that while the U.S. will now look to pay 25 percent of the roughly $8 billion it costs to run the missions annually, the country still pledges to bolster training and equip peacekeepers.
“The United States remains the largest financial contributor and capacity-builder for peacekeeping missions. We currently provide more than 28 percent of assessed costs and have spent more than $1 billion training peacekeepers over the last decade. We will continue to provide a quarter of all costs into the future,” Shanahan noted at the UN Peacekeeping Defense Ministerial conference in Vancouver.
The administration also said it wants to cut State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development funding by 28.5 percent, The Hill writes.
In 2016, the U.S. gave about $2.2 billion through the State Department to the UN to help run the 92,000-strong peacekeeping force. This amount is more than the combined dollars from the next top three contributors: China, Japan, and Germany. Previously, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has also said she’d consider cutting U.S. dollars for the peacekeeping missions, The Hill adds.
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