Ghosts of 2015

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2025 will mark the anniversary of the SDGs, Paris climate pact and the Iran nuclear deal.  It was the year that UN members charted the multilateral pathway that we are still supposedly on – but clearly we have gone off the rails. What went wrong? Why? Can we bring back the spirit of 2015 in 2025?

The United Nations is an institution that loves to celebrate anniversaries. In 2025, it will see the eightieth anniversary of the signing of the UN Charter in San Francisco. Politicians and diplomats will doubtless queue up to honor the occasion. But they will also have an opportunity to look back a decade to 2015, when UN members approved both the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris climate change agreement. They may feel a twinge of nostalgia for a time, not so very long ago, when the UN was capable of striking such broad and ambitious bargains. 2015 was a high-watermark for multilateral cooperation. The SDGs and Paris deal had been years in the making, with a lot of false starts and tensions along the way. But the Obama administration, entering its final phase in office, invested in getting these agreements over the line. President Obama also used the annual high-level General Assembly session that year to host a summit on boosting blue helmet peacekeeping. Chinese President Xi Jinping, making his first and so far only in-person appearance in Turtle Bay, participated in the summit and pledged 8,000 peacekeepers.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hosted a signing ceremony for the Paris Agreement on Climate Change on 22 April at the United Nations. More than 165 Member States were expected to attend the signing ceremony, including an estimated 60 Heads of State and Heads of Government.
United States Secretary of State John Kerry, with grand-daughter in tow, signs the Paris Agreement.

 

Obama and Xi were not the only leaders who put their energy into these multilateral innovations. French President Francois Hollande, an insipid figure in domestic politics who came alive on the UN stage, played a crucial role in orchestrating the Paris climate deal.  Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon badgered world leaders to finalize and ratify the climate text quickly. The Pope made a rare visit to the General Assembly. For a brief moment it felt like multilateralism was moving ahead.

There were a few disturbing signs that all was not well around the UN. The Security Council was trapped in endless debates over the civil war in Syria. On the eve of the General Assembly high-level week, Moscow announced that it was deploying troops and warplanes to support the government in Damascus. President Vladimir Putin still attended the Assembly – the last time that he did so – but conspicuously passed on participating in the U.S. summit on peacekeeping. Always a contrarian, I warned in an article in December 2015 that the UN’s successes should not conceal mounting geopolitical divisions, which were evident not only over Syria but Ukraine and other crises. I was a minority voice of gloom. In the wake of the SDGs and climate pact, diplomats and UN officials argued that the organization had new framework to deal with global problems.

Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, addresses the United Nations summit for the adoption of the post-2015 development agenda.

 

In retrospect, the optimists were at best half right. The legacy of 2015 still shapes many debates around the UN. International officials treat the SDGs in particular as a form of holy writ, citing the Goals as the basis for policy initiatives on everything from economics to disarmament. Developing countries have insisted that fulfilling the SDGs must be the UN’s overarching purpose. When UN members negotiated a wide-ranging new “Pact for the Future” this September they declared that “sustainable development is and always will be a central objective of multilateralism.”

Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, addresses the general debate of the General Assembly’s seventieth session.

 

Yet as Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has repeatedly reminded governments, there is a yawning gap between all this rhetoric about the SDGs, and actual progress on fulfilling them. In 2023, Guterres released a report suggesting that the world is on track to meet only a tenth of the 169 targets under the SDGs. The global economic shocks associated with COVID-19 and Russia’s war on Ukraine have left poor states extremely economically vulnerable, just as many richer states have cut back aid spending. In recent years, extreme poverty has been on the rise in some regions, and a growing number of UN members are struggling to service unsustainable debt loads.

The state of progress on implementing the Paris climate change agreement is also disturbing. The central plank of the agreement – strongly advocated by Small Island Developing States – was a commitment to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. There is now a scientific consensus that this target is unrealistic, and the key question is now how much higher warming will go. Diplomats acknowledge that the annual UN climate conferences, which attract tens of thousands of participants, are too slow and complex to get temperatures in check.

There are also worrying signs that some influential UN members are retreating from their Paris commitments. In negotiations on this year’s Pact for the Future, major fossil fuel producers pushed hard to water down language on climate issues. Overall, it is clear that while the UN remains wedded to the promises of 2015 in principle, they are increasingly losing credibility.

The upbeat diplomatic mood of 2015 also now feels other-worldly. In the years since these frameworks were sealed, it has become harder for UN members to envisage equally ambitious deals. A push to agree a Global Compact on Migration in 2018 – filling in an area for cooperation that the SDGs had only touched on – became poisonous, with states battling over the rights of migrants and anti-migration trolls spreading misinformation about the scope of the UN proposals.

United States President Barack Obama (third from left) and Vladimir V. Putin (second from right), President of the Russian Federation, share a toast at a luncheon hosted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in honour of world leaders attending the general debate of the General Assembly. Also pictured: Andrzej Duda (left), President of the Republic of Poland.

 

Member states have managed to get a few further worthwhile bargains over the line. In 2022, Canada and China stewarded successful talks on a new set of goals to fight biodiversity loss. The next year, UN members agreed on a high seas treaty to help protect the oceans. Last August, diplomats approved a new cybercrime convention. But other negotiating processes – such as talks on a plastic treaty – have been slow-moving and tended towards underwhelming outcomes.

The Secretary-General’s broader effort to instill new life in multilateralism through the Pact for the Future also proved extraordinarily hard to complete. The final Pact was a useful guide to ways to make the UN work better on different files, ranging from the digital economy and Artificial Intelligence to peacekeeping but lacked the high ambition and compelling framing of the SDGs.

What has gone wrong? Diplomats and UN officials frequently talk about a general lack of trust permeating the organization. This is in part because of the unfulfilled promises of 2015.  Member states have demonstrated a striking lack of faith in each other’s pledges, often citing the lack of progress on past agreements to justify their skepticism. The sharp decline in relations between the UN’s biggest powers has only exacerbated this negative trend. Whereas China the U.S. cooperated effectively on climate change and peacekeeping in 2015, Beijing and the U.S. now see most of their interactions at the UN (and more broadly) in zero sum terms, looking for ways to do each other down. Russia, already a spoiler on Syria in 2015, has become more confrontational across a range of multilateral files, and came close to blocking the Pact for the Future altogether.

The UN now hovers between the frameworks for cooperation laid down in 2015 and a much bleaker world picture. One crucial variable is Donald Trump. During his first administration, Trump walked out of the Paris climate deal. UN members expect him to do the same in 2025, and worry that the U.S. could take further steps to undermine the world organization during his second term.

Ironically, it will not be long before another generation of negotiators start talking about a new set of goals for the UN. The SDG Implementation period is set to end in 2030. While it patently obvious the SDGs will not be complete by then, UN members will have to work out a new set of targets for the years ahead. Some enthusiasts for UN reform believe that this could be a decisive opportunity to reboot the organization after its recent ups-and-downs. More cynical veterans of past multilateral negotiation processes wonder if it will be possible to agree anything meaningful.

In the interim, it behooves UN members to look at what they can salvage from the high ambitions of 2015. Even if it won’t be feasible to deliver the SDGs on schedule for example, it might be possible to focus on some key elements of the Goals – most obviously reversing the spike in extreme poverty – to show that countries can turn some of their rhetoric into action. If they cannot achieve this on at least a few files, 2015 may look less like a high-watermark of multilateralism than the prelude to a long period of decline for the UN and international solidarity.

 

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