Why did the State Department Formally Withdraw the Nation from the Framework Convention?
Marco Rubio serves the Trump II Administration as Secretary of State, acting National Security Advisor, and, increasingly,1 its principal defender of the unlawful and futile U.S.-Israel war against Iran.
It appears likely that the Secretary of State, in reflecting on his currently unmatched influence inside the Trump II regime, may have considered that acting unilaterally to formally withdraw the United States from the world climate treaty would go unchallenged. That is, unchallenged by the White House, whose water he’d be carrying, or by the U.S. Senate, on whose constitutionally-designated role in the making of treaties he would be trampling, or by the people. Regarding the latter of these see, for instance, our citizens petition demanding that the U.S. remain-in the treaty and strengthen, rather than abandon, the U.S. commitment to combat dangerous climate change.
On its face, indeed, that appears to be what Secretary Rubio, or some functionary under him, has gone and done, but why did he, or someone at his behest, do this? After all, the United States retains the largest historical carbon footprint — in terms of cumulative CO2 emissions. Accordingly, our withdrawal undermines the cornerstone of the international climate treaty system whose functioning in combatting dangerous climate change remains essential to U.S. national security.
That appears to be what Rubio, or some functionary under him, has gone and done, but why?
Strangely, no one else appears to have gotten to the bottom of this story — or even noticed at all that something is awry. To piece it all together, CPR Initiative recently issued a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department. For its details, see below.
As readers of this space will recall (see Illegality All Around, March 9), the White House’s Jan. 7, 2026 “presidential memorandum,” entitled “Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States,” specified that the term “withdrawal,” for purposes of that memorandum, only meant “ceasing participation in or funding to those entities to the extent permitted by law.”
With respect to the Framework Convention, then, Secretary Rubio could have carried out that directive simply by “ceasing participation in or funding” Treaty processes. On net, then, it appears that in formally withdrawing the U.S. from the Framework Convention, rather than, for instance, merely ceasing to send a US delegation to its annual Conference of the Parties, Rubio or his designee went considerably further than instructed to do by the White House.
In particular, we have a clear indication — in both footnote 9 of the UN Treaty Collection Framework Convention entry, here, and also a Secretary General notification of Framework Convention parties, here, that “[o]n 27 February 2026, the Government of the United States of America notified the Secretary-General of its decision to withdraw from the Convention, which will take effect on 27 February 2027 in accordance with article 25 (2) of the Convention.”
To learn all this, we dig — hence, our Freedom of Information Act request.
But who, in “the Government of the United States of America,” actually “notified the Secretary-General,” and under what authority? We have presumed that it was the Secretary of State, since the Jan. 7 , 2026, presidential memorandum explicitly designates State as the implementing and communicating agency.
And yet, we have found no State Department press release that itself reproduces or explicitly acknowledges the Article 25 notice for UNFCCC withdrawal. This is odd since the State Department churns our several releases each day (472 so far in 2026 alone). Thus, in formally withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement to the Framework Convention, in 2019, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a press release announcing his formal action. We might then have expected Secretary Rubio to have done the same as he, too, is no shrinking violet when it comes to grasping an opportunity either to further ingratiate himself with Trump, by furthering the latter’s fossil fuel agenda, or to further lay groundwork for his own probable subsequent run at the presidency.
Accordingly, we can ask: did Secretary Rubio intuit that he was perhaps going too far in taking action to formally withdraw the nation from the Framework Convention, and so he kept it quiet? Or else, did the Trump II White House chase its Jan. 7 presidential-memorandum with one that, perhaps, expressly targets the Framework Convention, and yet also does so quietly?
To learn all this, we dig — hence, our Freedom of Information Act request.
By law, incidentally, the State Department has just 20 working days to respond. We will have occasion soon enough to report back to you in this space.
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