Amid the torrent of announcements pouring out of the White House over the past two months, one small but significant drop may have been missed. At the United Nations in New York last week the US representative spoke on a resolution (proposed by American ally Bahrain) calling for a UN Day of International Peaceful Coexistence.
“We have a concern that this resolution is a reaffirmation of Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” read the prepared statement. “Agenda 2030 and the SDGs advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with US sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans… Therefore, the United States rejects and denounces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals.”
For those not familiar with the SDGs and the Agenda that accompanies them, they are the global targets for the eradication of poverty and hunger, universal education, clean water, gender equality, environmental protection and other development objectives. They were adopted unanimously by all 193 members of the UN in 2015. (Progress has been uneven since, but the goals were strongly reaffirmed at the UN Summit for the Future last year.)
In practice, it’s of little consequence that the United States has decided rhetorically to reject the SDGs. But this unprecedented statement serves as a useful marker of how far Donald Trump’s ideological campaign is reaching into the furthest outposts of American government and policy.
And it accompanies actions with very significant consequences. On Monday secretary of state Marco Rubio confirmed that more than four-fifths — in excess of 5000 — of the overseas aid programs run by the US Agency for International Development were being terminated. USAid itself is to be dismantled and its remaining programs absorbed into the state department. Almost all USAid staff based overseas have been put on paid leave, and 2000 officials in the United States were told their jobs will be eliminated. Rubio’s announcement came a month after Elon Musk declared that he and his “Department of Government Efficiency” had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.” The USAid website has been taken down.
American NGOs have been explaining what these cuts will mean. USAid spent US$40 billion last year, mainly in seventy-seven low- and lower-middle-income countries, in areas such as maternal and child health, malnutrition, primary education, clean water, malaria and TB prevention and humanitarian disaster relief. Summarily ending these programs will have “terrible” impacts, says Oxfam America, particularly in crisis-torn countries such as Sudan, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and those dependent on US aid to fund basic health and education services.
Oxfam has joined a lawsuit with employee unions against the federal government, arguing that closing USAid without congressional approval is unconstitutional. International aid organisations have meanwhile begun axing thousands of jobs funded by the cancelled USAid grants.
The attack on US overseas aid includes funds for developing countries to tackle climate change. Trump’s decision to take the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement was announced on the day of his inauguration in January. It was accompanied by the “rescinding and revoking” of the US International Climate Finance Plan adopted by the Biden administration, which last year provided $11 billion in grants and loans for emissions reduction and climate adaptation in developing countries. This was around 8 per cent of the global total.
Among other targets the cuts remove US$4 billion from the UN Green Climate Fund, and last week the US announced it is pulling its funding out of the much-trumpeted Just Energy Transition Partnerships, which support South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam to transition away from coal-fired power. The US has also withdrawn from the board of the UN Loss and Damage Fund.
Its cuts to overseas aid are the starkest indication of the Trump administration’s new approach to global governance, but there are others. A quarter of a century ago the US helped create the G20, the group of the world’s largest economies. Since then it has played a leading role in the forum, helping to coordinate global economic policy and promote US-friendly development in the global South. Last month, though, when the first of this year’s G20 ministerial meetings took place in South Africa, the US stayed away. Rubio explained his absence in a post on X: the G20 presidency South Africa, he said, was “using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change.”
It was a surprising argument. In the discourse of international relations, solidarity, equality and sustainability are standard terms, and tackling climate change a universally agreed goal. No other Western country had batted an eyelid at the South Africans’ slogan. But Rubio was making clear that the Trump administration is not going to play the accepted game. The following week the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent refused to attend the G20 finance ministers’ meeting.
The US absence made it impossible to reach decisions at either the foreign or the finance ministers’ meetings. The G20 operates on a basis of unanimity, and the officials the US sent said they were not authorised to take positions. So neither meeting was able to issue the usual agreed communiqué. Instead the South Africans released a “chair’s summary” of what had been discussed. The finance ministers’ summary begins: “Generally, members: 1. Expressed support for the G20 South African Presidency’s theme of ‘Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability’ and discussed international policy cooperation to further promote global prosperity and address key shared challenges.”
It is not, in truth, a big deal that the G20 couldn’t come to any decisions. Much of what it does is to make lowest-common-denominator statements to which its members can all agree, often largely made up of sentences they have accepted previously. (This saves negotiating time.) The world is not generally much affected by them. But it is not always the case, and on those occasions when decisions really do need to be made, the absence of the US could be crippling. This year, for example, South Africa wants to come to an agreement on relieving rising debt in Africa, which is severely hampering many countries’ development. But without the US this will be impossible.
It is not yet clear whether Trump has really decided to boycott the forum. The US is due to hold the G20 presidency next year. But it is hard to see how it can do so if it doesn’t take part this year — especially when its general approach to international relations now stands so far outside the global consensus.
Further questions loom. Could the US pull out of the World Bank, and the other multilateral development banks in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean? These are institutions it largely created — the World Bank in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War; the others in the 1960s, during the heyday of American power and post-colonial optimism. But today they are bastions of the causes Trump dislikes the most, climate change and gender equality. All of the banks focus a proportion of their anti-poverty work on increasing economic opportunities for women and education for girls; and most now devote at least 40 per cent of their total investments to climate mitigation and adaptation in low and middle income countries. This amounted to US$75 billion in 2023.
There are grounds for thinking the World Bank might be in Washington’s sights. As has been widely noted, the Trump presidency is following much of the blueprint laid out in Project 2025, the plan assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 calls for the US to pull out of both the Bank and the International Monetary Fund, arguing that they “espouse economic theories and policies that are inimical to American free market and limited government principles.” (This will come as something of a surprise to their many critics on the left, who see them as too pro-market.)
Project 2025 also says the US should force “reforms and new policies” on the two institutions, which would be difficult if it left them. But others on the right have taken up the idea, describing in detail how the US withdrawal from the Bank could be legally achieved.
The prospect looks sufficiently likely that some of America’s erstwhile allies among the Western powers are actively preparing for alternative scenarios. US withdrawal is one; in another the US might stay in but actively attempt to block World Bank programs, such as on climate, it now opposes. The US has already asked for some such investments to be brought to votes at the banks’ boards, clearly intending to vote against them. At the World Bank this may not be sufficient to stop them being approved; the US, with 16 per cent of equity and voting rights, can be outvoted by other country shareholders. But at the Inter-American Development Bank or IDB, where its shareholding is 30 per cent, the US has an effective veto on lending. It voted last month to oppose the Bank’s nature and climate strategy (forming an unlikely alliance with Venezuela), leaving countries in the region fearful of what will come next.
Perhaps surprisingly, US withdrawal from the World Bank would not have much of a financial impact. Under the Bank’s statutes, shareholders can only withdraw the dollar value of the capital they originally put in, which in the US case is US$3 billion — only around 1.2 per cent of the Bank’s total current equity. That amount would almost certainly be replaced by other shareholders — notably by China, which has long sought greater voting power but has always been opposed by the US.
The Bank would no doubt have to move its headquarters from Washington DC. But its investor status would be unimpaired: the credit rating agency Fitch has noted that even if the US withdrew, the Bank would retain its coveted triple-A credit rating. (In fact, among the major multilateral development banks, only the Inter-American Development Bank would suffer a downgrade if the US pulled out its capital.)
Whatever it decides on membership of these various banks, the Trump administration’s turn against the prevailing consensus on international development and economic governance will inevitably have an impact on relations between the global North and South. Over recent years there has been rising anger in the developing world at the perceived double standards of Western countries. Rich nations that claimed to champion the global poor failed to release their surplus Covid vaccines when the poor desperately needed them. Donors who explained that fiscal realities were forcing them to cut their aid budgets have found apparently unlimited funds for Ukraine. Harsh critics of human rights violations in Africa gave unconditional support to Israel in its war in Gaza.
Unsurprisingly, many governments have found China a more amenable development partner. Over the last decade its Belt and Road initiative has invested the equivalent of more than a trillion US dollars in developing countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Most of this has gone on much-needed infrastructure: roads, railways, dams, ports and power supply. China has invested widely in mineral and fossil fuel extraction, and in buying and developing agricultural land. While Western-led development banks and bilateral donors impose onerous environmental and social conditions on their aid, China is much more relaxed. It naturally exacts a diplomatic price, drawing countries increasingly into its geopolitical orbit. But for most of them it has been an acceptable bargain.
America’s withdrawal from international aid will surely accelerate this shift. It was reported last week that more than 700 diplomats at the state department and USAid had written to Marco Rubio warning that the aid cuts will undermine US security, leaving power vacuums in key parts of the world that China and Russia will eagerly fill. “Foreign assistance is not charity,” their letter argues. “Instead, it is a strategic tool that stabilises regions, prevents conflict, and advances US interests.” Trump clearly isn’t listening. But it would be something of an irony if his actions helped make China great again. •
Amended 17 March to reflect the fact that the Biden administration had already made a US$17 million contribution to the UN Loss and Damage Fund.
