White House Terminates Membership in ICCROM

SOIMA – Sounds and Image Collections Conservation recognizes that sounds and images play an important part in heritage, and ICCROM works to bring conservation skills to institutions that care for them. Source ICCROM.

A January 7, 2026 White House memorandum ordering U.S. withdrawal from dozens of international bodies has reduced America’s role as a cultural and arts policymaker and ended long-standing support for global heritage protection through ICCROM. The result is a self-defeating retreat that can be corrected only by separating legitimate reforms from the needless dismantling of technical conservation capacity.

US participation as an international policymaker in culture and the arts – as well as significant funding for heritage work – was dealt a blow by a White House memorandum ordering withdrawal from dozens of international bodies. According to the memorandum, the sixty-six listed organizations were deemed to be “contrary to the interests of the United States.”  Among the ‘contrary’ interests were peacebuilding, democracy, oceans and water, geography and history, technology and the environment, even children in armed conflict were on the chopping block.

Among culturally related organizations whose relationship was terminated were the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA) headquartered in Australia. IFACCA is a network of arts councils, ministries of culture, and government agencies spanning the globe and representing over seventy countries. Its active partners include the Commonwealth Foundation, the British Council, the European Cultural Foundation, Arts Network Asia, the Pacific Community (SPC) and UNESCO.

The “International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property” (ICCROM) was also named among the non-UN organizations the United States would exit. That decision effectively ends U.S. support for ICCROM—a Rome-based intergovernmental center best known not for culture-war politics, but for the unglamorous infrastructure of conservation: training conservators, improving documentation systems, and coordinating technical assistance and emergency response after conflict or disaster.

The administration’s stated rationale for the broader retreat: waste, mismanagement, redundancy, and what Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed as institutions “dominated by progressive ideology” bundled ICCROM into a sweeping critique aimed largely at multilateralism itself.

Why ICCROM?

ICCROM training in Riga Castle in Latvia culminated in a full-scale, multi-hazard simulation at the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia, where participants confront a fictional emergency involving armed conflict and wildfire. Source ICCROM.

Yet ICCROM is an awkward fit for that indictment. Its mandate is technical capacity building rather than norm-setting or sanctions; it runs courses, guidance, and field programs that often complement U.S. priorities in stabilizing war-damaged heritage and countering looting. Our coverage has previously noted ICCROM’s partnership with the U.S. State Department to help safeguard Ukrainian cultural sites threatened by Russian attacks.

ICCROM’s own response was restrained but unambiguous about consequences. It emphasized that the United States had been a member since 1971 and a “critical…financial and technical partner,” adding: “Regrettably, this withdrawal will have a direct impact on ICCROM’s core capacities.” That is not just bureaucracy speaking; in a field where expertise and rapid deployment matter, “core capacities” means fewer training cycles, fewer emergency missions, fewer networks held together when earthquakes, fires, floods, or war make heritage loss irreversible.

A well-reasoned article in the Heritage Report by preservation architect Sandro Kenkadze recognized the U.S. withdrawal from ICCROM as a major institutional shift, but described the potential consequences as “manageable.” Kenkadze noted that U.S. professional participation would continue and ICCROM programs would remain accessible to conservation practitioners from both member and non-member countries. There will be less certainty about consistent funding for its programs: ICCROM’s budget was EU 16.9 million in the last fiscal year, split between assessed contributions and voluntary/project funding. He suggested that there would be a a “modest reduction” that would impact but not destabilize core operations, but which would certainly increase pressure on fundraising. Finally, he pointed out the member states have left and come back again before, and that ICCROM’s technical rather than political mandate made rejoining easier.

Heritage funding is not contrary to any acknowledged U.S. interest.

On 25 July 2025, ICCROM’s Director-General, Aruna Francesca Maria Gujral and Italian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Edmondo Cirielli, signed a landmark Agreement to jointly implement a transformative new Programme in 4 African countries. Source ICCROM.

Even if some criticism of international organizations is well-founded – UNESCO’s cozy relationships with authoritarian regimes that destroy inconvenient heritage and its insistence on falsely associating the legitimate art trade with terrorism cannot be ignored – the categorical stripping of support from heritage bodies is wrong on principle and self-defeating in practice.

First, cultural heritage protection is a public good: it reduces incentives for illicit trafficking, helps communities recover after conflict, and supports historical research and public education that cannot be rebuilt once destroyed. Second, it is a relatively low-cost tool of diplomacy that builds credibility without coercion. Pulling out does not end global conservation; it simply reduces the United States’ voice in the forums where standards, methods, and professional relationships are formed. And third, it cedes space to states that are perfectly happy to treat heritage as propaganda while investing selectively in the kinds of cultural influence the U.S. is abandoning.

European heritage advocates made the same strategic point in sharper terms. Europa Nostra condemned the decision, warning it signals a “troubling misunderstanding” of culture’s role in “peace, mutual respect, resilience… and shared prosperity.” Critics also noted that ICCROM’s loss is part of a pattern that shrinks U.S. standing in precisely the arenas where influence is accumulated slowly and lost quickly.

U.S. policy errors in ‘protecting’ heritage lie elsewhere.

Weaver in GUatemala. ICCROM’s historical photographic collection holds some 20,000 photographs and photo albums from the 1930s to the 2000s. Source ICCROM.

There is a complication that defenders of ICCROM should not dodge: for more than a decade, the United States has entangled legitimate preservation goals with hard-nosed cultural diplomacy in ways that invite cynicism. Heritage policy has often been treated as a soft-power bargaining chip, particularly through bilateral cultural property agreements and import restrictions that encourage foreign “national ownership” claims and narrow lawful access to art and data in exchange for unrelated State Department priorities. The U.S. State Department has encouraged cultural property agreements that go far beyond the reasonable limits of the Cultural Property Implementation Act. For the State Department, such agreements are useful “soft power” instruments that can serve diplomatic objectives – while ignoring the damage that overbroad restrictions inflict on U.S. museums, researchers, collectors, and legitimate businesses.

ICCROM, for its part, has been quick to embrace claims that lack any supporting evidence – namely, that there is a vast illicit international market in newly looted antiquities, worth hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars each year, and linked to the worst forms of terrorist activity.

In fact, the United States could do far more to protect archaeological sites and curb opportunistic looting by holding the worst offenders—governments like those of Turkey, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China – accountable for corruption and in some cases, for the deliberate destruction of heritage and history, rather than signing cultural property agreements with them.

A better solution.

ICCROM’s Photographic collections depict worldwide heritage sites, monuments and objects, some of which no longer exist. Source ICCROM.

There is also an irony in the administration’s posture. If the concern is national interest, the United States is withdrawing from one of the cleaner ways to pursue it. ICCROM is not a tribunal, not a regulator, and not a supranational legislature. It is a platform where expertise circulates. Walking away does not “take America out of the politics”; it leaves America with less capacity to shape best practices, less credibility when condemning heritage destruction, and fewer partnerships when it wants rapid technical help on the ground.

A more coherent approach would be surgical rather than scorched-earth: keep funding for technical heritage cooperation; demand audits and measurable performance. If you must, insist that participation remain narrowly focused on conservation practice (not ideological programming); and separately, overhaul the domestic process by which cultural property agreements are negotiated so that preservation aims are not used to launder geopolitical tradeoffs. That is how to address waste and bias where they exist without sabotaging preservation where it clearly works.