Trump is Coming for the SDGs

The United States is now actively opposing the Sustainable Development Goals — and taking the fight to the UN

It’s something of a bemusing oddity around the UN that there’s an “international day” for pretty much everything. World Pulses Day (February 10) is a celebration of dry beans, lentils, chickpeas, and peas. Then there’s World Bicycle Day (June 3), International Day of Yoga (June 21), World Bee Day (May 20), and International Day of Parliamentarism (June 30), just to name a few. Pick a topic, and at some point in the UN’s 80-year history, the General Assembly has probably commemorated it with a specially designated day — or, in the case of quinoa, an entire year (2013).

These are not meaningless, per se — these designated days can sometimes serve a useful diplomatic purpose when a country or region wants to showcase leadership around an idea, or in the case of Bolivia, an ancient grain. But they don’t require anything of anyone, with the singular exception that for one of these days to become official, the General Assembly needs to take a vote.

Such was the case on March 4, when the General Assembly was seeking to designate an "International Day of Peaceful Coexistence.” These proceedings tend to be fairly dull affairs — high-stakes geopolitics this is not. But what unfolded was anything but routine: the United States upended the vote with a forceful objection, all because the resolution endorsed the Sustainable Development Goals.

Speaking at the General Assembly, a mid-level American diplomat rose in objection to the resolution, saying the United States would not support the General Assembly action because the resolution in question referenced the Sustainable Development Goals, which, he announced, the United States now “rejects and denounces.”

“Put simply, globalist endeavors like Agenda 2030 and the SDGs lost at the ballot box,” said Counselor for Economic and Social Affairs (ECOSOC) at the U.S. Mission to the UN Edward Heartney, to a stunned General Assembly hall. “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.”

This statement is the diplomatic equivalent of ripping the foundation from a decade of work at the UN — not just walking away from the table, but flipping it over on the way out.

The Sustainable Development Goals are a set of 17 goals, including ending extreme poverty, that the entire 193-member UN agreed to set as their economic, social, and environmental lodestar for 15 years hence. They are due by 2030. Some are on track, most are not — but the entire world agreed that the SDGs would be a blueprint for how we might make progress against some of our greatest global challenges. They are now very firmly the organizing principle around which pretty much everything at the UN revolves.

But this statement from the Trump administration showed that the United States is not going to simply ignore the SDGs — rather, it is going to target them for elimination. And in the weeks since, we have seen the Trump administration open new fronts against the SDGs, which suggest that the administration is seeking to strip the entire edifice of international cooperation on sustainable development from the whole UN system.