Even as Russia and China wage a relentless cyber war against the West, the United Nations is celebrating a new cybercrime treaty whose chief architects were none other than Moscow and Beijing.

It should come as no surprise, then, that this U.N. convention, signed by 65 nations last month, is less about fighting cybercrime than about legitimizing authoritarian repression of free speech. Although his predecessor grudgingly supported the treaty, President Trump should lead the charge against it.

Russia’s and China’s efforts to shape global cyberspace norms stretch back decades. In 1999, Moscow proposed “principles of international information security,” although this initiative received little support. In 2001, Russia and China refused to ratify the first-ever international treaty on cybercrime, known as the Budapest Convention, viewing it as too intrusive and a threat to state sovereignty.

But Moscow and Beijing did not give up. In 2018, the Russians launched a fresh effort to replace the Budapest Convention. They formed a new U.N. working group on cyber as an alternative to a rival U.S.-favored forum.

The following year, the U.N. General Assembly passed a Russian resolution, cosponsored by China and other authoritarian countries and opposed by Washington and its allies, to begin drafting a new international treaty to counter cybercrime.

The U.S. and other democracies then had little choice but to join that process or else cede it entirely to the authoritarians. And in 2021, shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration launched an abortive effort to find common ground with Moscow on cyber and other issues.

During the drafting of the convention, the U.S. and its allies advocated for “a focused criminal justice instrument which is aimed at improving the investigation and prosecution of cybercrime” as traditionally defined. Moscow, Beijing and like-minded regimes, by contrast, pushed for an expansive definition of cybercrime that would provide U.N. approval of repression of online political dissent and independent media.

In 2022, after invading Ukraine, Putin signed laws threatening draconian penalties for anti-regime speech, and the Kremlin has cracked down on Western press and social media. Also, Russia has built its own social media platforms and promotes “the RuNet,” instead of the global internet.

Similarly, China’s Golden Shield Project allows Beijing to surveil its citizens and censor their access to online content. Meanwhile, both countries continue conducting cyberattacks against Western governments, companies and critical infrastructure and encouraging Russian and Chinese cybercriminals to do the same.

Ultimately, the Biden administration, along with the European Union and other Western countries, elected to support a compromise draft. The U.N. General Assembly adopted it in December 2024. The treaty will enter into force 90 days after it’s been ratified by 40 countries.

Yet despite some improvements, the current treaty remains dangerously flawed. The Cybersecurity Tech Accord, an organization representing over 150 major technology and cybersecurity companies, has warned that the convention “presents grave risks to human rights and legitimate commerce.” Major human-rights organizations similarly opposed it.

Even prominent Democrats in Congress urged the Biden administration to “lead the charge at the U.N., with allies and partners, for a more balanced and rights-respecting approach to cybercrime.” They are concerned that this treaty is a threat to “privacy, security, freedom of expression, and artificial intelligence safety.”

In addition, cybersecurity researchers Andrew Adams and Daniel Podair noted that this treaty “would weaken the United States’s ability to resist requests from authoritarian governments, whether or not made pursuant to a mutual legal assistance treaty, and weakens the United States’s ability to dissuade foreign states from assisting in improper, suppressive investigations launched from states such as Russia or Iran.”

In short, the treaty is “not a Trojan Horse, it’s a Russian horse, and it always was,” as one observer put it last year. And unlike the Trojans, Washington has ample warning about what it is about to let through its gates.

Trump should not go along. Instead, he should refuse to sign the treaty and should lobby other countries to reject it as well in favor of the Budapest Convention, which remains the gold standard for international cybercrime governance.

John Yoo is a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership and a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, the Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Ivana Stradner is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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