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The Future of Women, Peace and Security Belongs to America’s Allies

December 16, 2025

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For international partners sustaining the global WPS agenda amid shifting U.S. priorities

Introduction

The international community marked the 25th anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 during a year that has altered the geo-political landscape for Women, Peace and Security (WPS). According to the 2025 UN Secretary-General’s report on WPS, women now live closer to deadly conflict than they ever have since the 1990s, civilian casualties among women and children quadrupled this year, and conflict related sexual violence increased by 87 percent compared to the previous two year period. Additionally, in early 2025, a series of executive orders from the second Trump administration in the United States fundamentally altered the institutional framework that had positioned the U.S. as a major contributor to global WPS efforts.

Allies are accustomed to policy adjustments across U.S. administrations, but 2025 has been different. The changes to America’s WPS policy and governmental infrastructure coincides with broader shifts in U.S. approaches to immigration, trade, and national security. It also mirrors a global backlash against gender equality and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ communities. When the world’s largest donor and most influential democracy changes course, the effects ripple outward, with some governments strengthening their approaches whilst others reconsidering previous commitments and unsettling long-standing partnerships. The U.S. once leveraged its leadership on WPS to shape international security agendas. Now, in both bilateral and multilateral forums, Washington has grown conspicuously quiet—or openly dismissive—of what Trump administration officials now brand as part of a “woke” agenda. The signal to partners is clear: the United States is taking its domestic ideological debates internationally, despite historical bipartisan support for the WPS Act.

For European and other international partners, this moment requires careful assessment, presenting both challenges and opportunities. The recently released 2025 National Security Strategy makes clear that the U.S. will be more selective in its international commitments, expecting allies to shoulder greater responsibility for regional security and global initiatives. The immediate concern involves resource gaps, coordination challenges, and stalled progress in crisis and conflict zones. However, the opportunity is strategic: to demonstrate that the WPS agenda was never dependent on American leadership. Allies already leading in WPS policy innovation and operational integration—such as Canada, Australia, Norway, Japan, and numerous others—are well positioned to redefine what global leadership on WPS looks like in an era of U.S. retrenchment toward the agenda.

The question is no longer solely how to engage the U.S., but how the international community will organize to sustain the WPS agenda collectively—adapting to new resource realities and leadership configurations without the United States.

Understanding the U.S. Policy Change on WPS: The Role of Executive Orders

Within months of taking office in 2025, the second Trump administration issued a series of executive orders that dismantled the institutional structures built over the previous three presidencies to advance the WPS agenda. Executive orders—legally binding directives that guide federal agency implementation of existing laws—allow presidents to reshape policy implementation without congressional approval. None of these orders explicitly repealed the WPS Act (which only Congress can undo), but they significantly affected its practical implementation by redirecting or defunding programs, reassigning or dismissing personnel, and disassembling the institutional infrastructure that had integrated WPS objectives into U.S. foreign policy since 2011. Today, the law remains in effect, but its implementation has been significantly degraded by executive orders focused on other priorities, such as restructuring the federal workforce, realigning foreign assistance, and eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

For international partners seeking to understand Washington’s policy shifts, it is important to note that WPS and DEI programs serve different purposes within the U.S. government and target different audiences. DEI focuses inward, on U.S. federal employees, and aims to build a fairer, more representative government workforce. WPS, by contrast, focuses outward, and aims to advance women’s participation, protection, and leadership in fragile and conflict-affected regions outside the United States.

However, in practice, U.S. departments and agencies have sometimes conflated these distinct policy aims. Since 2011, following the publication of the first U.S. National Action Plan on WPS, the bureaucratic overlap and shared terminology around “gender” and “inclusion” led some U.S. government officials to blur the boundaries between WPS and DEI. This conflation proved costly in 2025: when the Trump administration dismantled DEI offices, it mistakenly included WPS programs as well. For many European and other partners whose WPS work intentionally bridges both domestic institutions and international operations, understanding this U.S. distinction helps explain why cuts to DEI reverberated through its legally mandated WPS agenda.

The most consequential orders included:

Executive Order	Summary	Impact on U.S. WPS Act Implementation
EO 14151 – “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” (Jan. 20, 2025)	Mandated the elimination of all DEI and DEI and Accessibility (DEIA) offices, staff, grants, and performance measures across federal agencies.	Deepened confusion between DEI and WPS initiatives. Although WPS focuses externally on women’s roles in peace and security abroad, it was included in DEI-related compliance reviews because both efforts reference “women’s issues.” This led to WPS program pauses and personnel reviews.
EO 14168 – “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” (Jan. 20, 2025)	Redefined “sex” strictly as biological male or female, removing recognition of gender identity across all federal policies and programs.	Initiated broad keyword searches for terms like “gender” and “gender-based violence,” which overlap with WPS work. Despite WPS using “gender” analytically (to understand/assess differences in men’s and women’s roles in conflict affected regions and peace building), the order led to the review and removal of key terminology from WPS guidance, training, programs, and other key documents.
EO 14169 – “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid” (Jan. 20, 2025)	Ordered an immediate freeze on all U.S. foreign assistance pending review. Empowered the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).	Disrupted humanitarian, stabilization, and development programs, many of which were critical to women and girls. Eliminated USAID’s WPS experts and halted integration of WPS into foreign assistance. Initiated department-wide foreign assistance reviews at the Departments of State and Defense; the outcomes are not publicly available.
EO 14173 – “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” (Jan. 21, 2025)	Extended the DEI changes to hiring practices across federal agencies and contractors, revoking affirmative action safeguards.	Reinforced conflation between DEI and WPS concepts due to shared terminology. DOGE’s compliance searches flagged WPS activities as potentially noncompliant, leading to further bureaucratic scrutiny and pauses on funding for WPS personnel and programming.
EO 14185 – “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” (Jan. 27, 2025)	Directed the Department of Defense to remove all hiring or promotion considerations based on sex, race, or ethnicity, eliminate DEI programs, and ban instruction on “divisive concepts” or “gender ideology.”	Intensified confusion between WPS and DEI initiatives within the Defense Department. Created varied interpretations across Defense Department organizations regarding WPS programs, with only some successfully demonstrating WPS as an operationally mandated initiative distinct from DEI.
EO 14210 – “Implementing the Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative” (Feb. 11, 2025)	Ordered large-scale federal workforce reductions, prioritizing DEI-related positions for elimination. Military personnel were exempt; agencies retained discretion over civilian cuts.	Facilitated the termination of WPS offices and personnel at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as WPS functions were misclassified as DEI-related.

Current Status and Implications

The WPS Act remains U.S. law—it has not been cancelled. Only the U.S. Congress can repeal the law, so formally, the WPS Act endures. Operationally, however, the U.S. government infrastructure supporting its implementation no longer exists. The four agencies charged with carrying out the WPS Act, specifically the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, USAID, and the Department of Defense, still bear the legal mandate to comply, but now lack the institutional capacity to do so.  

Most of the U.S. government’s WPS expertise has been dismissed or reassigned—and those who remain are operating under tight constraints. The subject-matter experts once responsible for implementing the WPS Act have been dismissed or reassigned under the executive orders that restructured major agencies. USAID lost its WPS staff during the agency’s dismantling under Executive Order 14169. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, where its WPS work was housed, closed in March 2025. At the State Department, more than 1,300 officials, including nearly all WPS personnel within the Office of Global Women’s Issues, were terminated through compliance with Executive Order 14210. Legal compliance with the WPS Act has been absorbed piecemeal by remaining civil servants and will likely stay dormant unless Congress requests updates or international partners engage.

Interestingly, the Department of Defense still retains a handful of assigned staff, though its Secretary has signaled plans to eliminate the program entirely. In an environment defined by political scrutiny, those WPS experts left in the Department of Defense are navigating their mandates cautiously and carefully, focusing on compliance with both their secretary’s intent and U.S. law.

The U.S. administration is not debating the merits of WPS; it is rejecting the premise. The current administration is pursuing the president’s priorities with a handpicked team aligned to his agenda—and WPS is not on it. Though President Trump signed the 2017 WPS Act into law during his first term, his advisors and department level political appointees in his second term view it as part of a discarded “woke” legacy, not a strategic imperative. International partners naming and shaming Washington over its WPS reversal may satisfy personal and domestic political needs, but it will not influence or alter U.S. policy.

Consider, too, in early 2025, that WPS experts across the State Department, USAID, Homeland Security and Defense Department would have tried to make the moral, legal, and operational cases for preserving WPS initiatives that aligned with the administration’s new policy priorities. Based on the subsequent personnel dismissals and programming cuts, their appeals appear to have fallen flat. Traditional arguments about law, operational effectiveness, ethics and human rights, or international order no longer seem to resonate with an Executive branch that views gender equality as political baggage, and not a national security advantage.

The pragmatic question is not whether Washington’s approach aligns with its previous commitments or is consistent with its legal obligations—it self-evidently is not—but rather how to continue advancing the WPS agenda as an international community when the U.S. is, at best, ambivalent about the work, and at worst actively hostile towards it.

The U.S. will use the WPS agenda as a bargaining chip. WPS civil society advocates have long noted the persistent gap between high-level government commitments and meaningful impact for the women and girls those policies are meant to serve. The United States has been no exception. Despite having WPS legislation, successive administrations of both parties have prioritized the agenda when it advanced U.S. interests and deprioritized it otherwise.

Today, Washington seems inclined to leverage the agenda as a diplomatic bargaining chip used to extract concessions or signal alignment with U.S. positions in multilateral negotiations that extend beyond WPS. This recalibration has consequences. Partners that once maintained WPS policy alignment due to international expectations and influence—from certain Eastern European states to parts of Africa and Asia—now feel emboldened to change course on their previous commitments. Hungary, for example, has cited Washington’s new posture to justify softening gender equality language in NATO deliberations, whilst Russia continues to frame WPS as a “Western political agenda.” For international partners genuinely committed to the framework, the challenge will now be how to sustain WPS as a pillar of collective security whilst managing—and, when necessary, counterbalancing—the shifting influence of the United States.

Strategic Approaches for Sustaining the WPS Agenda

Should allies confront Washington’s policy shifts directly, seek common ground, or bypass the United States entirely? Observations of the U.S. over the past year provide lessons in navigating institutional constraints to preserve WPS work whilst complying with shifting policies. As Washington continues engaging in multilateral venues like the UN and NATO, those lessons offer strategies for partners navigating similar constraints on the international stage.

Advancing the WPS agenda will require strength in numbers. When it comes to preserving the WPS agenda, individual efforts will face greater challenges than collective, coordinated approaches. Issues in foreign policy or international security are never negotiated in isolation; there are always bargaining chips. As Washington leverages WPS to pressure allies into alignment, allies should look to countries who have previously experienced similar push back on gender equality for shaping collective counter strategies. For example, organizing coalitions of three or more countries (or organizations), formally or informally, who agree to maintain a similar and consistent position on WPS in key multilateral arenas is one proven approach. Tacit coordination among like-minded partners distributes political risk and prevents Washington from isolating or dismissing individual countries or leveraging their policy positions against them.

Both NATO and the United Nations have shown how this works in practice. When the U.S. sought to dilute WPS language at the UN earlier this year, member states from the European Union and Latin America held firm as “key defenders.” Similarly, within NATO, coordinated approaches from several European allies retained WPS by reframing its core concepts in military terms that support NATO defense planning.

In Washington, partners can tap into the bipartisan support for the WPS agenda that still exists, even if quieter than it has been in the recent past. The Congressional WPS Caucus in the House of Representatives remains active, and lawmakers in both chambers seem receptive when allies raise specific WPS issues during delegation visits. International engagement provides congressional supporters rationale and political context to discuss WPS and connect its relevance to American interests.

Additionally, a network of American WPS professionals remains available to share context and analysis to help international partners make informed choices. Many of these professionals have spent the past year complying with policy guidance that dismantled the programs they helped build. Inviting American WPS experts to international working groups, conferences, and dialogues provides them a platform to share their expertise and insight into U.S. developments, and reconnects them to a global network that values their contributions. Maintaining engagement with American experts and supporters is both an act of solidarity and a strategic investment in preserving the institutional memory and motivation of a community now operating defensively.

The lesson for today’s global WPS network is as true today as it was in 2000—coalitions, even informal ones, will help preserve hard-won progress.

Be strategic, not symbolic, when advocating for the WPS agenda. International partners should calibrate their WPS advocacy with precision, not passion. The U.S. will pursue its chosen course, so partners must organize collectively to sustain momentum and manage Washington’s influence on the global WPS agenda. This is no longer an era where symbolic statements win applause before the forum moves on; raising WPS without a plan to defend it risks losing the issue entirely.

International partners should assess when new strategies, policies, or directives are necessary versus when existing frameworks can be adapted or applied. Embedding WPS activities into higher-priority or sustainably funded programs can help maintain implementation even when the terminology itself becomes politically charged, a best practice learned over the past 25 years. For governments long accustomed to operating with limited WPS support, this approach is familiar—impact does not require specific branding. For some, this will feel like an unbalanced compromise but preserving the work may matter more than naming it.

Above all, be deliberate: raise WPS when the conditions are favorable, build coalitions of support beforehand, and prepare to defend the agenda because it will be challenged.

Establish clear red lines on language to preserve the objective. Rigid adherence to familiar WPS terminology may no longer advance the cause. The 2025 executive orders prevent the U.S. from using much of the terminology long associated with the WPS agenda, restricting the use of the word gender and even making references to women politically sensitive. Partners engaging with Washington should anticipate the U.S. avoiding established WPS language and, in some cases, actively seeking to remove it from joint statements, strategic documents, and policy texts. Successful engagement with the U.S. now depends on clarifying substance in accessible terms grounded in compliance and minimizing traditional jargon and academic precision. For example, when engaging with American officials, anchoring conversations in the WPS Act, specifically its legal obligations in Section 3 (“Sense of Congress”) and Section 4 (“Statement of Policy”), grounds dialogue in statutory requirements rather than normative debates and may mitigate the dismissal of an allies’ position as partisan.

Foreign ministries should work with their WPS experts to establish tiered “red lines,” distinguishing which WPS terms and principles are non-negotiable, and which can be adapted to maintain consensus. These guidelines should be shared across their government agencies to ensure a unified response when WPS language faces challenges. Coordination among like-minded nations is equally necessary. By aligning negotiating positions and agreeing in advance on terminology parameters, even modest coalitions of three or more WPS-committed partners can jointly propose and defend common language in multilateral forums, addressing efforts to substantially alter long-standing terminology.

Words matter, but so does staying in the room. Whether the language refers to gender, men and women, or human security, the mission remains unchanged: protecting and empowering those most at risk, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, from Gaza to Sudan. A coordinated delay or stalemate may not seem glamorous, but in the current climate, maintaining a previous commitment or delaying a decision can be a strategic victory.

Share the load. For years, the United States provided substantial funding for the global WPS agenda, supporting peacekeeping participation, military training, and civil society capacity building, which advanced shared international interests. Those funding streams have been reprioritized or become unreliable. Allies should identify ways to distribute financial and programmatic responsibility across nations to sustain these efforts. That might involve pooling resources to fund participation in multilateral trainings or assuming leadership of initiatives once managed by Washington to continue them.

Leveraging “common funding” models that operate independently of individual state political considerations may prove effective for funding WPS initiatives as well. For example, the NATO Comprehensive Assistance Package for Ukraine offers a template, where allies funded properly fitted body armor for female Ukrainian soldiers in 2024, an initiative organized collaboratively without U.S. financial contribution. For NATO allies specifically, another innovative opportunity may involve identifying national WPS investments that meet the alliance’s defense expenditure criteria for achieving NATO’s 5 percent defense spending commitments, a goal championed by the current U.S. administration at the 2025 NATO Summit. This approach would allow allies to sustain funding for national-level WPS initiatives in their defense ministry or armed forces whilst demonstrating compliance with alliance expenditure targets.  

Importantly, this represents strategic burden-sharing aligned with collective security interests. The message to Washington should be straightforward: partners can assume more WPS resourcing responsibilities so the U.S. can focus on its America First policies.

Consider military-to-military partnerships. Though armed forces have never been the primary drivers of the WPS agenda, their role in advancing it has grown clearer over the past 25 years. Successive UN Security Council resolutions have recognized the role of security institutions, and an increasing number of national action plans on WPS now assign tasks directly to ministries of defense and armed forces.

In today’s polarized political environment, the U.S. military’s apolitical mandate is an asset. During his confirmation hearing, the now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John D. Caine explained the military operational advantages of the WPS program. Other senior U.S. military leaders have recommended  sustaining WPS initiatives, citing their operational and strategic value to national security. Moreover, the military remains bound by law to uphold the statutory requirements in the WPS Act until Congress acts otherwise, so the U.S. military may be the only organization still minimally implementing the law in the U.S. government.

For international partners, this offers a pragmatic opening: engage through military channels. Military-to-military cooperation provides an operationally grounded, legally compliant pathway to sustain collaboration on WPS despite broader policy changes. Though not ideal, it may prove the most viable means of maintaining substantive engagement with the U.S. during this constrained period.

Conclusion

2025 has been a challenging if not devastating year for the global WPS agenda, and realistically more setbacks are likely to come. Yet, the international WPS community is better prepared for this moment than ever before. History shows that when women’s rights and participation face resistance, it is often because progress has become visible and meaningful. The renewed push back on gender equality does not signal failure; it confirms that the WPS agenda has always been advancing in the right direction.

Over 25 years, advocates have built resilient networks, refined proven best practices, and weathered political pushback across every region. The future of WPS will depend not on any single nation’s leadership, but on partnerships strong enough to navigate this period of turbulence. The path ahead will be harder, not easier, but it is one the global community of government WPS advocates, civil society experts, and local women’s networks have navigated together before—and can continue to navigate together.