By JACK NICAS NYTimes News Service
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RIO DE JANEIRO — President Javier Milei of Argentina announced plans to withdraw his nation from the World Health Organization on Wednesday, the latest in a series of moves by Milei that mimic President Donald Trump’s efforts to break with international norms and alliances.

“We will never forget that they were the architects of the draconian lockdowns,” Milei wrote on the social platform X, referring to the WHO’s support for broad quarantines during the pandemic. He called the lockdowns “one of the most egregious crimes against humanity in history.”

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“That’s why we have decided to withdraw from such a nefarious organization,” he added, “which acted as the enforcement arm of the largest social control experiment in history.”

Trump signed an order to withdraw the United States from the WHO in the first hours of his presidency, similarly criticizing the United Nations agency’s handling of the pandemic and the cost of being a member. Milei has long criticized the WHO — even writing a book condemning pandemic policies in 2020 — but he only decided to pull out of the organization weeks after Trump did the same.

If the United States and Argentina follow through on their plans, they will join Liechtenstein as the only U.N. member nations that are not also members of the U.N.’s global health alliance.

That reflects Milei’s effort to align his nation with Trump’s scorched-earth approach to the international order, even if it comes at the expense of Argentina’s previous allies and partnerships.

Milei’s spokesperson said Wednesday that Argentina has also been examining whether to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the main global pact to combat climate change, like the United States did last month. Milei, like Trump, has publicly doubted the science showing that human activity is dangerously warming the planet.

Shortly after becoming president in 2023, Milei canceled Argentina’s plans to join the BRICS economic alliance led by China, saying he instead wanted to move his country closer to the United States.

Leaving the WHO could end up costing Argentina, which is struggling under tens of billions of dollars of international debt.

Unlike the United States, which contributes roughly 15% of the organization’s $6.8 billion budget over two years, Argentina pays a much smaller membership fee, estimated at about $10 million a year by the Argentine news organization La Nación.

The benefits Argentina receives from membership far outweighs the cost, including tracking of outbreaks, disease prevention and sharing of technology, said Leandro Cahn, director of Fundación Huésped, a large public health organization in Argentina. “The problems the Argentine health system has won’t be resolved by not being part of the WHO,” he said.

Milei’s office said Argentina would remain a member of the Pan-American Health Organization.