Chartbook 408: After the Last Utopia: China, the US, sustainable development and Hayek's bastards.

2015 was an extraordinary moment in world history. Ten years ago this month, the UN General Assembly resolved the Sustainable Development Goals, closely followed in December by the Paris climate accords. It was a unique moment of convergence around universalist goals, a high point of reformist “global governance”. To coin a phrase, which we will return to, it was the moment of a “Last Utopia”.

Ten years on, in March 2025, the second Trump administration announced its arrival in the UN by denouncing those agreements in the most extraordinary terms. The following is the text as delivered by the US representative at the UN:

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.

I covered the remarkable rhetoric of denunciation by the US government earlier in the year.

How do we explain the resurgence of right-wing sovereign-tism exemplified by the Trump administration?

One possible line of interpretation is suggested by Quinn Slobodian’s new book Hayek’s Bastards which appeared only days after the newsletter in mid April.

As always Slobodian takes us on a fascinating tour of the right-wing mind. But what I find truly compelling about his analysis is the broader question that frames it: What happened to neoliberalism after the West’s victory in the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the 1990s and 2000s?

One might think that it was a moment of maximal triumph for neoliberalism. After all, the Washington consensus was coined in the 1990s. But as Slobodian points out for at least one fundamentalist strain of neoliberalism this was actually not a moment of triumph, but of danger.

This book argues that the appeal to nature was a central part of the neoliberal solution to a problem they faced in the decades after the Cold War. This was an era in which communism was dead but, as they put it, Leviathan lived on. Public spending continued to expand even as capitalism became the only surviving economic system. Behind this was a political problem. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative action, and ecological consciousness into the veins of the body politic. An atmosphere of political correctness and “victimology” stultified free discourse and nurtured a culture of government dependency and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote. Confounded by persistent demands for the redress of inequality at the expense of efficiency, stability, and order, neoliberals turned to nature in matters of race, intelligence, territory, and money as a way to erect a bulwark against the encroaching demands of progressives and hopefully roll back social changes to return to a hierarchy of gender, race, and cultural difference they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition.

As Slobodian reports, for those committed to neoliberalism as a militant creed rather than a constitutional design, the defeat of Soviet communism was just the opening of a new battle. And from the earliest stage, ideas of ecology, environmentalism were at the core of it. As Slobodian quotes the Wall Street Journal as saying in 1991:

“It is fitting that the Mont Pelerin Society, the world’s leading group of free market scholars, was meeting the week that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, … Communism exits history’s stage, the main threat to liberty may come from a utopian environmental movement that, like socialism, views the welfare of human beings as subordinate to ‘higher’ values.”11 Communism was a chameleon. It was changing shades from red to green. “Having fought back a red tide, we are now in danger of being engulfed by a green one,” warned Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute at a Mont Pelerin Society meeting a decade later. “The forces that once marched under the banner of economic progressivism have regrouped under a new environmental banner.”12

The very least one can say is that this wing of Mont Pelerin were prescient. Their vision of a new configuration of power organized around the bien pensant values of human rights and environmentalism is precisely what reached its apogee in 2015 in the double dispensation of SDG and the Paris climate accords.

This was not socialism, of course, but a new moloch, adorned with new labels, like “public private partnership” and ESG. This is the complex that Daniela Gabor early on identified as a new complex. This was no longer the Washington consensus centered on the World Bank and the IMF, but a “Wall Street consensus” centered on private capital. The goals, like SDG, were acclaimed as universal values. Net zero was set as a long term goal. And the whole thing, according to the agenda of “development” and “climate finance” was to be framed by global public-private partnerships and blended finance. As Gabor recognized, this was a reshaping of global policy, at least at the rhetorical level, under the sign of private capital, directed towards humanistic global goals, in synergy with public action but unabashedly “for profit”. It was the latest update of what Slobodian refers to it as “neoliberalism solutionism”.

One could also read it, as the ultimate act of depoliticization. A final statement of the end of history on even more comprehensive grounds. And Slobodian does a brilliant job of showing how the new right rallied against it, from within. The nativism and racism of the new right are not antithetical to neoliberalism, but born from within it.

But read further in the statement of America’s diplomats in March 2025 and you see something else. Following the denunciations of climate and gender ideology, comes a second turn:

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. … 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. “

The enemy targeted here are not globalist liberal elites, but the CCP .

Strikingly, China seems to have made no significant impact on the radical milieu that Slobodian studies - China appears only twice in the text. As he notes, his crew were tickled by 1980s talk about Asian values. Some worried about Asian outperformance on the “Bell Curve”.

But to understand the disintegration of the 2015/Wall Street consensus and in particular the defection of American power from it, we cannot leave China out of the picture. This is not to distract from the questions about developmentalism and universal values posed by Slobodian’s crew, but to put those questions in a different register.

To frame this in historical terms, it is useful to go back to another highly influential piece of intellectual history, Sam Moyn’s Last Utopia of 2010.

Drawing on the grand narratives offered by French philosophers of history such as Marcel Gauchet, Sam Moyn traced an arc in which the emergence in the 1970s of a vision of a world unified under the rule of universal human rights law, went hand in hand with the discrediting of postcolonial development and its promise of national sovereignty. After the end of the Cold War, the ascent of universal human rights as the gold standard of international affairs, went hand in hand with the enshrining of the unipolar hegemony of the United States.

It was, therefore, anything other than coincidental, that the recasting of global development in the key of human rights, which was the accomplishment of the SDG of 2015, should have gone in hand hand with their stark depoliticization. The SDG were an extraordinary reduction of the problem of development, which historically is organically linked to questions of collective agency and sovereignty, to a matrix of Key Performance Indicators. Up front were the mosquito nets, primary education and gender relations, nowhere to be seen were the “centuries of humiliation” and unequal treaties that shaped the question of inequality and poverty in the first place.

Already in 2015, one has to say, that the SDG were out of time. After all, the global convergence of 2015 followed the clash between the West and Russia over Ukraine and the escalation of violence in the Middle East, resulting in the massive wave of migration and nativist backlash in Europe. Whilst the champagne corks were popping at the UN Conferences, European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker was rumbling about polycrisis. Meanwhile, it was in May 2015 that Beijing launched the Made in China 2025 program that would soon stamp a second “China shock” into Western consciousness.

As I argued in a talk for the Boell foundation, in retrospect 2015 looks more like last chance saloon than the opening of a new chapter. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the populist backlash of 2016 followed so hard on the heels of the 2015 moment.

Ten years on, as I argue in a rather polemical piece for Foreign Policy, that depoliticized vision of development, as nothing more than comprehensive humanitarian amelioration and flourishing, has completely lost its grip on reality.

Ironically, as the US acknowledged in its denunciation of the SDG, the power that upholds the standards of 2015 most loudly is China. Beijing has all the cards. It knows the West has so little to offer. It has won the development battle. Focusing on things like infant mortality, hunger and infrastructure allows it to silence any talk about civil liberties. In 2021 it launched its own parallel effort to push the core material aspects of the SDG - the Global Development Initiative. As a power convinced that it has history on its side, it is unafraid to engage with a global developmentalist agenda. By contrast, the US no longer believes it can afford the luxury of universalisms.

I am not offering this distinction between Slobodian’s internalist account of the intellectual dynamics of the neoliberal right and this wider angle account of US hegemonic decline to suggest a contradiction. The two go together. Hayek’s bastards find ample scope for action and influence amidst the fragmented political culture of American hegemonic decline. But the relationship is contingent. It is sufficient rather than necessary. To see that point, think about what happened between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 in the Biden interlude.

The Biden team went out of their way to insist that they were restoring “normality”. They rejoined the Paris climate accords and paid lip service to the SDG. At their first UN climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 they launched the Jet-Ps (Just Energy Transition Partnerships) starting with South Africa.

Jet-Ps were a classic example of the fusion of SDGs with the Wall Street consensus. They were also, as I argued in Chartbook 267, entirely devoid of substance.

When it came to China on the other hand, the Biden team drew the line. They double down on tech sanctions and built up a global system of alliances to contain China. With regard to the economy, the apogee of their thinking was the slogan of “Small yard. High fence”. This was supposed to square the tension between great power rivalry and economic development by demarcating no-go zones of outright rivalry and zones of friendly competition. But far from allaying tension, what it did was to spell out America’s claim to define what was and what was not acceptable development. And it was Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen of all people wh said the quiet bit out loud. There was no need to worry about the Thucydides Trap or threats of war, she opined, just so long as China remained in its lane and confined itself to growth trajectories that did not challenge American power. America was dictating its peace terms.

If the 2020s are the opening of a new chapter, then what is striking is the contrast to the starting points of both the histories of Slobodian and Moyn.

In the 1970s, Moyn’s starting point, the US may have been reeling from the defeat in Vietnam and the oil shock of 1973, but the response was a revived neoconservatism. In the 1990s, where Slobodian begins, the US could claim victory in the Cold War. Then too neoconservatism with its gestures to universal values like democracy and freedom would emerge as the new creed. The contrast to the current moment is stark. As one intrepid friend recently reported to me after attending NATCON5, the single common thread running through the keynote addresses that he witnessed was this: America is a nation. It is a people (sic). What it is not, is an ideal. What it is not, is an idea.

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