Chartbook 377 "Not with a bang but a whimper". How Trump's United States denounced the global agenda of sustainable development and no one noticed.

The image is from a year ago. A dapper American diplomat speaks from the UN rostrum in New York on “debt sustainability and socio-economic equality”. It is a “high-level debate”, no less, otherwise known as the boiler plate of international affairs.

Source: UN

Fast forward, not quite eleven months and that same diplomat takes a very different stance.

Faced with resolutions backed amongst others by Bahrain on declaring UN days for Peaceful Coexistence and Hope (sic), the United States demands a formal vote and declares that it will be voting no. Yes, Trump’s America will vote against a UN Day of Hope. Perhaps unsurprisingly that turned out to be a minority position. Paraguay and Peru abstained. The United States was the only conscientious objector.

Now one might imagine a principled conservative taking the view that for the UN to designate July 12 as the “Day of Hope” is fatuous and that even the largest UN majority is not going to turn 28 January into an International Day of Peaceful Coexistence.

One might well take the position that this makes the UN look ridiculous.

But that was not the American position. Instead, on behalf of the United States, Edward Heartney, a distinguished career diplomat with a long track record in economic diplomacy delivered a flaming, folk Schmittian (Carl Schmitt that is) denunciation not just of the Day of Peaceful Coexistence or the Day of Hope, but of the entire UN agenda of Sustainable Development. This attack was made in the name of the sovereignty of the United States. Furthermore, the United States sought to expose the UN’s embrace of peaceful coexistence and dialogue amongst civilizations as a front operation for Xi Jinping thought.

The missive from the US mission to the UN is powerful but short. It is worth quoting in full.

Edward Heartney
Minister Counselor to ECOSOC
New York, New York
March 4, 2025

AS PREPARED

International Day of Peaceful Coexistence – Bahrain

“Thank you. The United States strongly supports efforts to sustain peace and pursue diplomatic solutions to crises in the world.

We firmly support individual rights as expressed through freedoms of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and religion or belief. They are fundamental to America’s security and the promotion of tolerance, mutual respect, and peace around the world.

We have, however, decided to call a vote on this resolution. We have a concern that this resolution is a reaffirmation of Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Although framed in neutral language, Agenda 2030 and the SDGs advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans.

In the last U.S. election, the mandate from the American people was clear: the government of the United States must refocus on the interests of Americans. We must care first and foremost for our own – that is our moral and civic duty. President Trump also set a clear and overdue course correction on “gender” and climate ideology, which pervade the SDGs.

Put simply, globalist endeavors like Agenda 2030 and the SDGs lost at the ballot box. Therefore, the United States rejects and denounces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals, and it will no longer reaffirm them as a matter of course.

We are also concerned that the resolution’s titular reference to ‘peaceful coexistence’ could be co-opted to imply the United Nations’ endorsement of China’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which are not the product of UN-recognized negotiations by member states and were not endorsed through UN processes. Any attempt to imply such endorsement could undermine the UN’s independence, circumvent important processes, and deny member states the opportunity to shape the direction of the UN. Further, it would undermine international calls for accountability for China’s flagrant human rights abuses.

Similarly, the concept of ‘dialogue among civilizations’ is rooted in President Xi Jinping’s Global Civilization Initiative that seeks to shield Beijing from criticisms over its governance system and human rights abuses by redefining the basic meaning of terms such as democracy, human rights, and justice – and twisting definitions previously set down in foundational texts such as the UN Charter to suit PRC interests. “

Source: US Mission

It is an astonishing statement.

Think about the juxtapositions being mobilized here.

• “framed in neutral language” v. actually advancing a program

• Soft global governance v. sovereignty and rights and interests of Americans

• Elections and clear mandates: “we must care first and foremost for our own - that is our moral and civic duty”

• Trump v. “gender” and climate ideology

• Clear v. pervasive

• Ballot box v. globalism

• United States v. 2030 Agenda of SDG

• member states v. cooption

• US and UN v. China

• Trump v. Xi

This is the Trumpian, “folk Schmittian” criticism of the liberal globalism. Some of it is quite arcane. According to google scholar the term “soft global governance” enjoyed a brief vogue in academic writing about international relations more than ten years ago.

In this missive the US mission mounts a criticism of substance (US interests and “caring for our own” v. globalism, gender and climate). But it is also a criticism of form. The SDG are framed in “neutral language” but are actually advancing a determined agenda. And, in so doing, they are opening the door not just to “gender and climate ideology”, but to Xi Jinping and CCP-ruled China.

I call this “folk Schmittian”, because its denunciation of bien pensant global liberalism is so reminiscent of the writing of Carl Schmitt, particularly his 1929 essay, the “Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticization”, which you can download here and the longer essay on the “Concept of the Political” (1932). In the latter you can find the following juxtapositions with which Schmitt dissected the buried politics of 19th-century liberalism.

It was by means of this series of juxtapositions that early 19th century liberals like Benjamin Constant “framed” their agenda to transform the world.

At an even more fundamental level, politics itself, as in the sovereign power of decision, was constricted by a series of alternative value systems, codes and actual social processes, each of which presented themselves as progress, but each of which was, in fact, its own form of power, whether religious, cultural, economic, legal or scientific.

For Schmitt, casting his lot with the “National Revolution” of the Nazi party was the way to detonate this iron cage of anti-political power. Until he fell out with the Nazi Party, he would become the chief legal advisor to the Third Reich.

Those were high stakes. The language invoked by the Trump administration also frames the choices before the UN in grandiose terms. The missive is drafted in terms that suggest a grand historical statement, written for the court of world opinion and the history books. In the UN, this was America’s “Liberation Day”.

What was the reaction?

The Trump administration has attacked many of the central pillars of what used to be called the “rules-based international order”. We know what it looks like when it hits a nerve. The world is in uproar over Trump’s upending of global trade. Trillions of dollars have been lost on financial markets. Even America’s own sovereign debt market and the American currency sold off.

The US attack on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals is, if anything, more fundamental in its logic. The SDG, along with the Paris climate accord were both agreed in 2015. They are the two cornerstones of modern, liberal globalism. If they do not embody the bien pensant “rules-based international order” nothing does. And yet the contrast between the two instances of Trumpian rejection - SDG and trade - could hardly be more stark.

Whereas the whole world is obsessing over American trade, virtually no one noticed Heartney’s letter of March 4th.

As far as I can tell there was no report in either the Financial Times or the New York Times. There was one letter to the FT. There was barely any reaction online or even on twitter.

I only learned about the extraordinary US statement from a friend who lives and breathes SDG (Thanks JH and I’m sorry).

This lack of reaction is, in its own way, no less telling than the omni-scandal provoked by Trump’s tariffs.

On the one hand, with its Schmittian assault on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the Trump administration confirms its highly mythological view of the world. It denounces the SDG as though they were a major ideological anchor of the world that it rejects.

In fact, as the lack of reaction attests, it is tilting at windmills.

The entire agenda of 2015 is not a bust. Climate policy has had elements of seriousness about it. Most consequentially, it has shifted the balance of global energy investment (many updates on this to come).

The same cannot be said for the far more wide-ranging ambitions of the SDG. The rainbow-color roundel of SDG objectives is full of promise, but by the UN’s own reckoning it is painfully short on delivery.

Furthermore, it is not just the United States that has abandoned the 2015 commitments. As I wrote for the FT recently, we are witnessing a counter-revolution in foreign aid policy across the West.

It is not just the Trump administration that has shutdown USAID, but the UK has slashed aid spending too. There is a wholesale retreat from any comprehensive commitment to global development.

Though the initial horror stories of a total and immediate end to all aid by the United States have proven to be Trumpian hyperbole, the latest compilation of aid budgets around the world, show a disastrous cut. By the latest reckoning in mid April it comes to almost $40 billion. The vast majority of this is due cuts by the largest donors, the United States and Germany.

This is not verbiage that no one ever cared about. This is not a UN vote on a day of hope. (And before you scoff too much about the “Day of Hope”, check out Overshoot and the acerbic comments by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton on how Obamaesque themes of hope and optimism fueled the global politics of sustainability. Positive thinking is an ideology.)

The $40 billion taken out of global aid budgets are real money. These cuts will directly impact the lives of some of the most vulnerable people around the world. They put millions of lives at risk in a way that is far more dangerous than any shock to the global trading system. As I’ve banged on about for some time now, if you are worried about genuinely comprehensive globalization, marginal adjustments to rich-country trade deals pale by comparison with the question of incorporating Africa into the global economy (on reasonable terms).

And …

Public opinion in the global North barely flickers. There are no mass protests. There is no market reaction. The future of Africa’s demographic revolution moves hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, but it does not move trillions of dollars. Faced with other challenges, the double agenda set in 2015 - climate AND sustainable global development - is simply being abandoned.

Not to lay it on thick, but amidst the demise of global liberalism how can one not think of T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”, of 1925:

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour.
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

….

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

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