The U.S. share has floated upward over time—a bone of contention for Congress, which has capped appropriations at twenty-five percent, accruing arrears again. Nikki Haley was an estimable U.S. envoy under Trump—speaking clearly about Russian intransigence, securing tough sanctions on North Korea, contributing to nuclear talks and addressing humanitarian issues like South Sudan. The UN’s regular and peacekeeping budget dues scales are renegotiated every three years, and were in December 2018. In the 2016–2018 scale, peacekeeping dues rates were 28.47 percent for the United States (compared to a twenty-four percent share of world GDP), followed by China and Japan at 10.25 and 9.68 percent respectively. Haley stressed the goal of a 25 percent U.S. rate for peacekeeping, yet the equivalent of the Holbrooke campaign in New York and world capitals was not launched.

Apart from the P-5 and rotating elected members of the UNSC, other nations receive no greater “say” on peacekeeping in return for agreeing to higher dues rates. Therefore, favors to countries provide honey to accompany the vinegar of demanding they pay more. The record of the Holbrooke campaign indicates that achieving outcomes close to your stated goals requires many months of leadership and carrot-and-stick diplomacy. In short, peacekeeping by nature offloads burdens from the United States, and can even reduce the U.S. share of the bill without losing its “say”—but only when the United States offers strong, clear, constructive leadership.  As such, the U.S. effort in Haley’s final weeks on the job yielded only modest fruit in a late December 2018 deal setting the 2019–2021 peacekeeping dues scale.  While China’s rate went up from 10.25 to 12 percent, largely just as a function of its economy’s size, the United States rate was lowered only a small amount, from 28.43 percent in 2018 to 27.89 percent (a good bit above the desired 25 percent).

Some fifteen years ago, the United States launched a bipartisan policy under George W. Bush to take on pandemic diseases, such as HIV—which was wiping out the most economically productive and reproductive generation in many Sub-Saharan African nations—and malaria. At the same time, as it stood up massive bilateral programs like the President’s Emergency Program For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), the United States supported the development of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The Global Fund is a public-private partnership financing projects to combat HIV, TB and malaria—to great effect. As of September 2018, a conservative estimate suggests it has saved twenty-seven million lives since it started operating in 2002.

The Global Fund extends the reach of the United States by coordinating closely with the bilateral programs; for instance, PMI has chosen to only work in countries the Global Fund supports in order to leverage impact. Moreover, in recent years, in a division of labor, the Global Fund has focused on buying commodities (e.g., drugs, diagnostic equipment or anti-malarial bed nets) at scale, facilitating the bilateral programs’ work on the operational plans of, and technical assistance to, implementing countries.

Other major donor nations have taken to funding “horizontal” health systems and women’s health as priorities rather than “vertical” programs on these three most devastating infectious diseases, but the Global Fund keeps these countries engaged on the latter. Because Congress limits the U.S. contribution to thirty-three percent of the Global Fund’s budget, the Global Fund propels burden-sharing. Other donors step up because they know that U.S. pledges will only be disbursed if matched at least twofold by them.

This leveraging mechanism was evident in September 2016 in donors’ commitments for a three-year replenishment period (2017–2019). Comparing pledges to those three years earlier, while the United States went up by seven percent, those of the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Norway, the European Commission and Canada rose in their own currencies by eighteen to forty-six percent, as did Japan and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in U.S. dollars.

In an era where U.S. executive and legislative branch leaders emphasize burden-sharing, as the next three-year replenishment approaches in October 2019—with France committing robustly itself as the pledging conference's host—the Global Fund is a tested vehicle to ensure other donors step up.

The Global Fund reveals not only how Washington can win substantial burden-sharing from others by stepping up and shouldering responsibilities, but also how shaping the agenda is crucial to achieving the content and qualities that the United States seeks. The Global Fund requires implementing countries employ a multi-stakeholder decisionmaking group of government, civil society and private sector actors. The board governance in which the United States partakes is also multi-stakeholder in nature. Delegations on the board include donor countries, private sector and foundation donors, Global North and Global South implementing NGOs, and representatives of disease-affected communities. Nonetheless, through the PEPFAR ambassador sitting on the board, the United States as the donor of some thirty-three percent of the Fund’s resources has a distinct influence on the Fund’s strategy and work. How the United States uses that influence has prioritized results-based work, transparency, an inspector general’s pronounced independence, the aggressive recovery of any misspent resources (working with Global North and private sector delegations) and also a prominent voice for civil society to hold implementing governments to account (working with the NGO and affected communities' delegations). Nor has the U.S. voice been diluted by other donors stepping up. South Korea shifted from being beneficiary to a significant donor. Yet a 2018 decision to provide a non-voting seat to donors pledging over $10 million, namely South Korea, did not entail diminishing U.S. weight on the board.

In short, not only do U.S. investments and leadership in fighting infectious diseases through the Global Fund win partners to share the burden, but they shape the strategy, character and impact of programming the Global Fund underwrites. The approach and vehicle deserve replication. When done adroitly, U.S. diplomacy can expand the efforts of others without diminishing U.S. influence.

Looking to the Middle East, U.S. policy under the current and past administration shows the consequences of relinquishing a degree of strategic engagement to shape decisions and outcomes. That the United States sought to pull back its involvement in the Middle East in the last administration was no surprise. Barack Obama ran on ending the war in Iraq. Once in office, a “Rebalance to Asia” was intended to refocus American foreign policy. However, under both Presidents Obama and Trump, as the heat rose on the long-simmering Saudi-Iranian geopolitical rivalry and ISIS rocked the region, the United States found itself unable to look away. Instead, Washington turned to burden-sharing, shrinking its own direct involvement.

Given the leading U.S. role in the counter-ISIS coalition, the United States did not fully withdraw from the Middle East. At the end of the Obama administration, over four thousand U.S. troops remained in the fight against ISIS. Nonetheless, belief in America as a lasting regional actor waned. Jeffrey Goldberg captured Obama’s desire to turn away from a zone of “Hobbes’s ‘war of all against all.’” Trump has shown similar disinterest in active regional engagement. In the words of Martin Indyk in a piece for The Atlantic, Trump may “embrace America’s Middle East partners, autocrats and democrats alike… But it’s their job to assume the burdens of dealing with this troubled place, not his.”

With this shift, others are certainly doing more. From Saudi Arabia to Turkey, local players continue to increase their activities to fill the void left by Washington. Yet, whether these initiatives meet U.S. national interests is dubious. In Riyadh, a more activist foreign policy has had ramifications across the Gulf. Diplomatically, Saudi Arabia maintains its isolation campaign against neighboring Qatar. Militarily, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Saudi war in Yemen has come at the cost of over seventeen thousand civilian deaths and nearly three million displaced.

While increasingly recognized as a humanitarian and moral catastrophe, a distant blockade and civil war might seem remote from American interests. Yet, to focus on Yemen, as Andrew Exum notes, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) persists as a terrorist cell “with the demonstrated will and capability to strike the United States”; the Saudi campaign there “has distracted both the United States and its key partners—namely, the Emiratis—from the fight against AQAP.” Yemen’s continued spiral into what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” impacts assessments of the United States as a humane actor as Washington provides critical support for Riyadh’s military operations through airborne refueling, munitions and intelligence sharing.

Beyond the Gulf, similar dilemmas are unfolding in Syria. From Obama’s reluctance to engage to Trump’s reiterated intention to withdraw, America’s involvement in an effective resolution of that conflict remains tenuous. Even before Trump announced his decision to remove forces from Syria, neighboring Turkey had actively interceded militarily.

Yet, the interests of Turkey, an increasingly fraught partner under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, do not align with American priorities. Even based in a narrow view of U.S. interests in Syria—the lasting defeat of ISIS for counterterror aims—Turkish hostility toward Kurdish fighters, the best opponents of ISIS and a reliable partner of Washington, is troubling. Preventing the looming clash need not require an extensive or open-ended U.S. military commitment. It required consistent diplomacy to, as Joshua Geltzer has written, “manage Turkish fears and Syrian Kurdish ambitions.” This essential ingredient has been lacking in a burden-sharing method that suggests ever-decreasing U.S. involvement in the conflict’s resolution. Such a perception, as Trump and National Security Advisor John Bolton are discovering, affords little leverage to pursue American objectives as Erdogan flouts U.S. demands and Kurdish leaders look to Damascus.