The Trump administration’s big opportunity

The United Nations had a busy spring. The 69th annual session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) met in March. In April, the 58th annual session of the UN Commission on Population and Development (CPD) followed. As always, these events exemplified the UN’s strong push to anchor, by hook or by crook, the secularist West’s post-Christian moral orthodoxy in international law. But this year the United States might have succeeded in initiating a complete reversal of the UN’s new human rights agenda.

The CSW purports to be “the principal global … body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality.” Unfortunately, in UN circles “gender equality” has come to encompass the three big rights areas that often take top priority in the UN: sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), including foremost the right to abortion; sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), comprising LGBTQ and gender-fluidity rights; and the right to comprehensive sexuality education (CSE), which, among other things, indoctrinates children into the new sexual and gender orthodoxies.

The CPD’s primary task is to tie together, ever more closely, government-driven population control and sustainable development. Here’s the thinking: Durable economic and social development cannot be realized without environmental protection and respect for human rights; in order to ensure environmental protection and human rights, population growth must be limited. As a practical matter, population control means vigorous promotion of abortion. But the moral outweighs the practical. Since the UN asserts the new human rights are central to human well-being, they must all be applied universally—not only SRHR, which packages abortion as “reproductive health,” but also gender and sexual ideologies.

For over 30 years, the European Union, Canada, and the United States under Clinton, Obama, and Biden have led the UN’s push for this toxic brew of ideological distortions. But this year the Trump administration refused to join the consensus. It opposed the CSW declaration because it included “gender” terminology, decrying its lack of “clear and accurate language that women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” The United States also blocked a planned CPD agreement, because of its “gender ideology extremism” and its claim that abortion is an international human right.

Both sessions ended amid denunciations of “the poison of patriarchy,” “a ferocious backlash against the rights of women and girls” and similar statements of outrage.

But that’s not all. In true Trumpian fashion, the United States has done the unthinkable. It has “rejected and denounced” the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The cornerstone of today’s global governance project, the SDGs were adopted in 2015, by unanimous vote of all 193 UN member states. Obama, and later Biden, enthusiastically endorsed them. The first Trump administration ignored them but continued U.S. pro forma support. Among the declared aims of the UN goals are to achieve gender equality, halt climate change and end poverty—yes, end poverty—by 2030. In the words of the 2015 leaders’ declaration, “We, the Heads of State and Government … resolve, [by] … 2030, to end poverty and hunger …; to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies; to protect human rights and promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls; and to ensure the lasting protection of the planet. … We envisage a world free of poverty, hunger, disease and want, where all life can thrive … and [with] decent work for all.”

To be sure, the desire to improve the conditions of human life is laudable. But the UN development goals are delusional and utopian and affirm artificial rights.

And if taken seriously (which the UN and many UN member states undeniably do) the agenda amounts to a gigantic power grab in world politics. Can you imagine the powers that would have to be given to the UN in order even to come close to achieving these goals? In announcing the U.S. rejection of the agenda, a U.S. diplomat said, accurately, that the development goals “advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans.”

Until now, such defiance of diplomatic consensus would have been unthinkable. Other than the United States under Trump—and Argentina under Trump ally Javier Milei—no democratic government has ever dared to denounce the hubristic folly of the UN. May Trump and Milei succeed in reversing the UN’s course. May they defeat destructive ideologies and either cancel or fix the horribly flawed goals.