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In the letter, the U.S. government categorically rejected the entirety of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. This wasn’t simply a withdrawal, as from the climate commitments of the Paris Agreement; it was an unambiguous denunciation of the collective ambition to improve the material condition of humanity. American voters, the letter claimed, had delivered a clear mandate in the last election: Their government must put America first, caring first and foremost for its own.

Yet the justification did not stop at nationalism. It expanded into a broader geopolitical critique. The letter argued that the resolution’s language—specifically, its reference to “peaceful coexistence”—could be read as an endorsement of China’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. Similarly, the United States objected to the resolution’s phrase “dialogue among civilizations,” interpreting it as a nod to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Global Civilization Initiative.

In effect, the U.S. position framed the resolution as a covert endorsement of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideology and sought to delegitimize the SDG framework by painting it as ideologically compromised. For good measure, the letter added sideswipes against “gender” and “climate ideology.”

While the rest of the world proceeded with the vote, the Trump administration’s intervention laid bare the fact that the apparent consensus around the SDGs—touted since 2015 as a universal blueprint for development—had collapsed.

This blunt-force critique is an embarrassment, and the U.S. cancellation of much-needed aid is a crime against commonsense humanitarianism. But indignation at the Make America Great Again (MAGA) crowd should not be allowed to smoke-screen a broader and more comprehensive failure.

The broader vision of the SDGs was always a gamble at long odds, and in practice, it has delivered so little that it raises the question of whether it was ever anything more than a self-serving exercise on the part of global elites. For the sake of their own collective vanity, they needed to convince themselves and the world that they had a comprehensive and bold vision. But it’s something else to mobilize and sustain an effort to realize the SDGs.

And this, in turn, reflects a refusal to admit what development actually means or to anticipate how the status quo powers will react once it happens. With hindsight, the SDGs, for all their capaciousness and generosity of spirit, seem like an effort to craft a world organized around a spreadsheet of universal values rather than politics and around a happy blend of public and private economic interests.

This may promise a “better world.” But it is a world beyond conflict and politics, a last gasp of “end of history” thinking. On that score at least, MAGA may even have a point.

Matt Chase illustrations for Foreign Policy

China, the greatest success story in development history, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Foreign aid, investment, and trade helped, but the real engine was domestic mobilization and state-directed investment. Perhaps for this very reason, China’s success has not fostered greater trust or agreement on a rules-based order. Instead, it has triggered a new cold war.

Following U.S. President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia, during Donald Trump’s first term, the Biden administration, and Trump 2.0, China has been clearly identified as the pacing threat or challenge of the Defense Department. This is down to China’s increasing sophistication in military technology and its revisionism in the South China Sea. But above all what motivates this ranking is China’s economic heft, which Beijing itself understands as overcoming “centuries of humiliation.” In the age of powerful nation-states, development, whenever it is of significant scale, almost by definition means a threat to the international status quo.

If China doesn’t prove the point, Russia does. Russia in the late 1990s was on the edge of becoming a basket case. Its first elected president, Boris Yeltsin, was deeply beholden to Washington. Both current President Vladimir Putin’s strategic independence and his domestic legitimacy are built on a track record of economic and financial recovery. And this, too, is powered by a sense of historical missions, fueled by grievance. From the moment he rose to power, Putin has always seen economic development, national resurrection, and self-assertion, if necessary with hard power, as indissoluble.

Nor should that be surprising. Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022 was a misjudged, high-risk gamble. But his tendency to throw his weight around, far from being the exception, conforms to the historical norm. His brutal version of great-power policy, in which economic capacity and collective welfare are seen as being in the aid of national sovereignty and state power, is not the logic of an ancien régime balance of power. Putin’s progenitors are the exponents of aggressive 19th-century imperialism.

And in the shatter zones of that period of turmoil, notably the Middle East, that logic is still at work today. For an example, look no further than Israel, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, fissile products of the history of power play between the Ottoman and the British empires in the Middle East.

Modern development economics itself was not born of geopolitical innocence, far from it. Beginning with thinkers such as Friedrich List, writing in the 1830s, it was tied to the emerging national interest of the early United States and the aspiration to German unification. In the 1920s and ’30s, the technocratic elites of the embattled, newly independent nation-states of Eastern Europe and the Western European imperial regimes advocated for the deliberate promotion of state-led economic growth. The Poles and Romanians wanted to develop themselves to ward off their avaricious neighbors. In a democratic age, the Dutch, the French, and the British needed to modernize their colonies and make them pay for themselves.

The best results were achieved, not by coincidence, in the East Asian states most closely aligned with the United States. Nevertheless, too much success could be a problem.

Development economics both in theory and practice really came of age above all with U.S. sponsorship in the Cold War struggles over decolonization. These shaped a new understanding of the world as divided into three great zones: the U.S. bloc of the First World; the communist Second World; and the Third World, to which development policy was to be applied. Under the guise of the Marshall Plan in Europe or in Latin America, Indonesia, or Vietnam, U.S. development economics was an antidote to the rival models of development, politics, and geopolitical alignment offered by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China.

Its track record was patchy to say the least. Outside Western Europe, the best results were achieved, not by coincidence, in the East Asian states most closely aligned with the United States: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. They were tightly integrated into U.S. grand strategy in Asia. Nevertheless, too much success could be a problem. In the 1980s, many Americans worried about the techno-industrial challenge from Japan. This original specter of “Asian invasion” powerfully shaped Trump’s bleak views about the harm done to the United States by free trade.

The successes were the exceptions. In general, the 1970s and ’80s were a disastrous period for development policy. Latin America was reeling from debt crisis. Sub-Saharan Africa was ravaged by HIV/AIDS. India was mired in extreme poverty. China was only beginning to scramble its way out.

With the Cold War over, it was against this stark backdrop that development economics in the 1990s took a new, universalist turn. The 1987 Brundtland Commission report brought the idea of sustainable development into the mainstream, promising a new synthesis of values rooted in a common interest in ecological balance.

This was then elaborated on, by way of the 1992 Earth Summit and the 1995 World Summit for Social Development, into six monitorable international development goals. These offered a blend of basic material aspirations—halving poverty, achieving universal primary education, reducing infant and maternal mortality—with wider social goals. The U.N. went on to articulate its anti-poverty priorities in the eight Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, which, together with the extensive engagement of private philanthropy in global public health and comprehensive debt relief, would give poorer countries a fresh start in the new age of globalization.

In Central Africa, the disasters continued. But after the shock of the 1997 crisis had worn off, the Asian giants—most notably Bangladesh, China, India, and Indonesia—achieved remarkable progress. And that, in turn, fed a commodity boom that translated into a considerable uplift for Latin America’s new middle class.

The SDGs were born from the more focused MDGs. Along the way, they accumulated a vast set of aspirational targets and technocratic ambitions, summarized in 17 goals and 169 targets, which critics saw as overly idealistic or utopian. The hope was that politics and geopolitics could be transcended by a comprehensive grid of targets and colorful infographics. To this day, enthusiasts wear a colorful wheel pin to signal their adherence.

The trifecta of global agreements in 2015—the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on finance, the U.N. vote on the SDGs, and the adoption of the Paris Agreement—set in motion a cottage industry of economists, who converged on the idea that investments of around $5-7 trillion per year, roughly 5-7 percent of global GDP, were needed to drive global progress toward a sustainable and prosperous future. Of that amount, roughly $4 trillion in additional spending was required to meet the needs of the developing world. The key to a better future was a giant investment boom.

On the face of it, this kind of “Big Push” planning was a throwback to 1950s state-centered economic development. After decades of neoliberal austerity, there was no appetite for a revival of “big government.” Bridging the gap was the job of a new economic specialty called development finance. Its core idea, known as “blended finance,” proposed that public funds, rather than bearing the full weight of development, should be used to “de-risk” private investment, thus allowing billions of dollars in government aid to be turned into trillions in private investments.

In retrospect, the SDGs now look less like a new dawn than the final gasp of a unipolar, end-of-history fantasy.

This optimism—or should we call it hype?—reached its high point at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, where global financial institutions touted the possibility of leveraging billions in public funds to unlock more than $130 trillion in private finance for green energy and sustainable development. At the summit of this apotheosis of development finance stood none other than future Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, then fresh from his stint as governor of the Bank of England but already a charismatic figurehead of global centrism.

In retrospect, the SDGs now look less like a new dawn than the final gasp of a unipolar, end-of-history fantasy. Rather than billions leveraging trillions, the track record of blended finance is dismal. It is rare to see more than cents on the dollar mobilized in private money. In key areas of innovation such as green energy and artificial intelligence, the developing world, far from catching up, is left even further behind.

Measured against the declared ambitions of the SDGs, this is disappointing. But how seriously were those visions ever intended? Did anyone in 2015 ever contemplate what a world would look like in which they were realized? Imagine, for instance, if Brazil were actually to become an economic and technological powerhouse like Japan. Or if Ethiopia or Nigeria reached Turkish levels of state capacity and GDP per capita.

Such scenarios evoke shoulder shrugging, partly because such futures are deemed implausible—but also because on closer inspection any such scenario is distinctly uncomfortable. The geopolitical ramifications would be incalculable. Imagine, for instance, if Mexico achieved the GDP per capita of Canada. Would that pose a disconcerting challenge for the United States? Of course it would. In the meantime, it’s easier to see that particular set of SDGs as aspirational rather than real.

The coming African century presents the same dilemma in particularly stark form. The demographic forecasts for the coming decades are loud and clear. Africa’s population density is set to surge in many places to European levels. Its share of the global population is projected to top 25 percent. By 2050, 40 percent of all births will be in Africa, and its share of young workers will be far larger. Yet the rest of the world has no real conception of what such a future might look like, when cities in Nigeria or Tanzania are major centers of globally significant tech innovation. How challenging this might be is indicated by the examples of Ethiopia, the Houthis, and Rwanda—each of which demonstrates how development confers real power: the ability, for better and for worse, to project force, shape narratives, and pursue national projects.

Development is thus inherently political. It is about power—the ability to act. A more developed world is, by definition, more multipolar and less controllable.

And as these examples show, it is not just relative scale that matters but absolute levels and thresholds. Rwanda is far from overall prosperity, but it already has a capable military. The Houthis, who do not even have a monopoly on power in Yemen, can nevertheless hurl missiles against Israel, wage war on global shipping, and fight skirmishes with the navies of the rich world.

Development is thus inherently political. It is about power—the ability to act. A more developed world is, by definition, more multipolar and less controllable.

Given the idiosyncrasies of the Trump administration, the effects of this general tendency are illustrated more clearly by the reactions of the Europeans. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom all style themselves as upholders of the rules-based international order. They all profess loyalty to the SDGs and would not be caught dead voting against peace and hope at the U.N. But, like the United States, they have all also been slashing their aid budgets. Why? Because of Ukraine. If national security is paramount, then missiles and tanks are better strategic investments than unavailing efforts to bring sustainable development to the Sahel.

Whatever happens to the individual components of the SDGs—worthy objectives such as reducing child mortality and digital inclusion—one thing is for sure: The age of a politically neutral, universally endorsed development agenda is over.

Matt Chase illustration for Foreign Policy

The passing of the SDGs should be a cause for real regret. Theirs was an extraordinary and comprehensive vision. Along with the Paris Agreement, they marked a high-water mark of a certain kind of universalism.

And we should certainly not fall into the facile cynicism that says good riddance not only to the SDGs but to the U.S. Agency for International Development on the grounds that it was a vehicle of U.S. power. What made the largest aid operation in the world an effective vehicle of U.S. influence were not just its propaganda efforts but the fact that it actually saved lives.

A realistic approach for the post-Trump era needs to start not by dismissing the very idea of development but by distinguishing different imperatives.

If we are not to fall victim to our own euphemisms, we need to recognize that saving lives and development are not the same thing. To conflate the two is to unconsciously echo the bland universalism of the SDG era—an era in which there were officially mandated targets for everything and everyone, whether for starving children or 5G broadband access. The statistical category of overseas development assistance covers everything from support for Ukrainian refugees to actual infrastructure development and emergency assistance in Sudan.

Where foreign money is most essential and where aid cuts will most cost lives is in the relief of refugee crises and ongoing medical emergencies, such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, in situations of failed states and desperate poverty—not in “development” per se.

The fact that aid is needed, of course, signifies a broader failure. Ukrainian refugees in Germany and Sudanese refugees in Chad are in very different situations. But as important as it may be to address the longer-term development issues of both Sudan and Chad, and as much as Germany has work to do in integrating migrants into its workforce, the immediate priority is to keep people alive.

As World Bank data reveals, half of the most miserable people today, those in the direst poverty and suffering from severe nutritional risk, are concentrated in fragile and conflict-affected states, in Afghanistan and Myanmar but above all in Syria, Yemen, and sub-Saharan Africa. Basic relief aid and in-due-course adequately funded and well-organized peacekeeping are the key. The aim is not the ambitious and long-term goal of development but basic civil order and the prevention of famines and epidemics.

Though this is not development in any long-term sense, it is a worthy and essential role for international action. Appeals for the worst crisis areas are chronically underfunded, and any rich country wishing to do some good could simply step into the breach. As was demonstrated in the case of the Syrian crisis, a spartan but well-organized system of refugee camps like that run in eastern Turkey can save millions of people from the worst misery and contain the risk of further regional destabilization.

A large injection of aid into a regime lit by a sense of historic purpose and backed by substantial political and social forces, as, for instance, in post-genocide Rwanda, can yield real benefits. A sprinkling of tied loans across isolated projects in a corrupt and unaccountable regime will, unsurprisingly, do little more than feed the aid industry and enrich a few more-or-less unscrupulous individuals.

What matters is clearly to pick partners and build launching pads for self-sustaining progress rather than dependence. A competent state is also one that can handle outside injections of aid without becoming morbidly addicted to them—and putting that aid to good use will further enhance its competence.

If you don’t make a substantial commitment, don’t expect large results. Far too often, Western aid is like a drop of water on a hot stove. 

What is required to identify such states—and the attendant possibility of unleashing such cumulative development processes—is on-the-ground knowledge, long-term commitment, judgment, and a willingness to bite the bullet on tough choices. External assistance can only be a supplement to the hard business of domestic resource mobilization. Technological infusions will raise productivity; foreign capital can ease the trade-offs between investment and consumption. But ultimately states need to mobilize their own labor and prioritize long-term growth over immediate needs. Borrowing is one way to raise the necessary funds, but to make that sustainable, you need a state that can tax as well as spend.

Beyond these basic elements of economics, anyone expounding general theories about either the miraculous benefits of investment or the inevitable pitfalls of foreign aid should be prima facie suspect. One thing is for sure: If you don’t make a substantial commitment—and that is generally true for chronically underfunded development spending—don’t expect large results. Far too often, Western aid is like a drop of water on a hot stove. And this is especially true where the boundary between saving lives and self-sustaining development is fluid and violent.

In recent years, there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the question of how the West “lost the Sahel.” From 2017 onward, European countries helped launch more than a thousand projects as part of the so-called Sahel Alliance. The western Sahel at the time was home to about 100 million of the poorest people in the world, with the human development indices to match. Niger was long hailed as a bastion of Western influence. But before the 2023 coup, which overthrew the reforming government of Mohamed Bazoum, almost two-thirds of Niger’s population could not read. Clearly, Niger desperately needed investment in education, irrigation, and basic health services. And aid did flow.

But on what scale? In the early 2020s, before the coup, Niger was receiving just under $1.8 billion per year for a population of 25 million people. On a per capita basis, that came to $71 per inhabitant, or $1.37 per week, in 2021. Of this meager total, roughly 7 cents went to education, 15 cents to health, and 30 cents to production and infrastructure. Twenty-six cents were spent on the essentials necessary to keep the poorest alive.

So the obvious question is: How much bang would you expect for $1.37 per week, split between the most urgent needs of survival and long-term investment? How much impact on a nation’s education or health do you expect to achieve for a few cents? You shouldn’t expect large effects from tiny means, or use the ineffectiveness of aid in boosting development as an excuse for cutting budgets, when you have barely even tried it.

To multiply public funds, the blended finance model relied on public-private partnerships, which brings us to the third dimension of aid and development—what might be called the global political economy. If you lend large amounts of money to high-risk, low-income countries, you should expect some of your loans to go bad. That is why they are called high-risk. That is why lenders can command high interest rates and demand assistance in de-risking from public lenders and development agencies in the global north. If things go wrong, creditors must be willing to take their losses and move on. It is what they signed up for.

Yet again and again this is not what debt-restructuring processes deliver. Private creditors haggle for every conceivable concession and use U.S. and U.K. courts to back them up. Borrower nations are loath to push their case too strongly for fear of suffering devastating downgrades. And financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund end up offering de facto bailouts to rich-country lenders by offering offsetting finance, allowing private creditors to exit with minimal losses. All the while financial centers in the West assist in local elites’ corrupt pillaging and asset-stripping by enabling capital flight and offering banking anonymity.

All of these issues have been long discussed in development circles. Moving aggressively to push debt restructurings, picking capable partners, promoting domestic resource mobilization, and building fair and equitable national tax systems that shut loopholes for capital flight—these aren’t calls for a grand “new order” or for some carbon-copy replacement of the SDGs.

Instead, what is needed is the willingness to engage in specific acts of “reordering”—to change, for instance, the way that U.K. courts close to the City of London can be used to defend bond holder interests; to address the acute distributional struggles that link debt negotiations to taxation in Kenya; or to reform cocoa pricing policy that diminishes the livelihoods of peasant farmers in Ghana and opens the door to widespread smuggling and corruption.

China is the world’s greatest development success. On that basis, it has emerged as a lender and as a development power. At its high point in 2016-17, lending under the Belt and Road Initiative for a while matched that by the World Bank. Though Belt and Road subsequently slowed, China’s strategic direction remains clear. The CCP believes that material transformation is the key to legitimacy and peace. The phrase often repeated by the Chinese leadership, quoting from Xi, is that development is the “master key.”

Xi’s Global Development Initiative was China’s answer to the SDGs. It was not an overall rejection, let alone a point-blank denunciation, but a rewriting so as to focus on just eight key areas, including poverty alleviation, food security, pandemic response and vaccines, development financing, climate change and green development, industrialization, the digital economy, and connectivity in the digital age, all under the sign of “results-oriented actions.”

Does China hope and expect that the realization of this agenda will help build friendly relations? Of course it does. Is this a global power play? Of course it is.

Does China hope and expect that the realization of this agenda will help build friendly relations? Of course it does. Is this a global power play? Of course it is. Does China want to haggle about human rights and elections? No, it doesn’t. Would it rather avoid those issues? Of course.

These are what Xi likes to call “bottom lines,” and there is little to be gained by Western liberals harping on such obvious differences. Working alongside China is not going to give you everything you want. Rather than hoping for the “everything bagel” of development, we need to figure out our own bottom lines.

We are not in a world in which the future is mapped either in terms of universal norms or brightly colored SDG targets and cute infographics. The more primal and urgent imperative driving development both at the individual and collective level is not so much the quest for rights but the will to power—power over resources, purchasing power, the ability to resist the influence of others, to have security but also, if possible, to assert one’s own zone of control. Development in this sense is not just about ticking boxes and chasing targets; it is inherently and necessarily political and geopolitical.

The bland box-ticking vision of 2015 is no longer our world. But in its rejection of the shared U.N. agenda in the name of strident sovereignty, the United States is indulging in a politics of denunciation more becoming of a downtrodden developing country than a former unipolar hegemon. By contrast, China’s blend of realpolitik with ideology and national interest cannot help but seem rational and balanced as well as being backed up by an unparalleled national record of development and huge resources.

Western liberalism may balk. But pretending there is no difference between the two superpowers is folly. If the rest of the West wants to both compete and cooperate with China over questions of global development, it will need to come up with its own, more practical and realistic alternative both to the SDGs and to Trumpian atavism.