What ails America – and how to fix it

 America is a country of undoubted vast strengths—technological, economic, and cultural—yet its government is profoundly failing its own citizens and the world. Trump’s victory is very easy to understand. It was a vote against the status quo. Whether Trump will fix—or even attempt to fix—what really ails America remains to be seen.

The rejection of the status quo by the American electorate is overwhelming. According to Gallup in October 2024, 52% of Americans said they and their families were worse off than four years ago, while only 39% said they were better off and 9% said they were about the same. An NBC national news poll in September 2024 found that 65% of Americans said the country is on the wrong track, while only 25% said that it is on the right track. In March 2024, according to Gallup, only 33% of Americans approved of Joe Biden’s handling of foreign affairs.

At the core of the American crisis is a political system that fails to represent the true interests of the average American voter. The political system was hacked by big money decades ago, especially when the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited campaign contributions. Since then, American politics has become a plaything of super-rich donors and narrow-interest lobbies, who fund election campaigns in return for policies that favour vested interests rather than the common good.

Two groups own the Congress and White House: super-rich individuals and single-issue lobbies.

The world watched agape as Elon Musk, the world’s richest person (and yes, a brilliant entrepreneur and inventor), played a unique role in backing Trump’s election victory, both through his vast media influence and funding. Countless other billionaires chipped into Trump’s victory.

Many (though not all) of the super-rich donors seeks special favours from the political system for their companies or investments, and most of those desired favours will be duly delivered by the Congress, the White House, and the regulatory agencies staffed by the new administration. Many of these donors also push one overall deliverable: further tax cuts on corporate income and capital gains.

Many business donors, I would quickly add, are forthrightly on the side of peace and cooperation with China, as very sensible for business as well as for humanity. Business leaders generally want peace and incomes, while crazed ideologues want hegemony through war.

There would have been precious little difference in all of this with a Harris victory. The Democrats have their own long list of the super-rich who financed the party’s presidential and Congressional campaigns. Many of those donors too would have demanded and received special favours.

Tax breaks on capital income have been duly delivered by Congress for decades no matter their impact on the ballooning federal deficit, which now stands at nearly 7 percent of GDP, and no matter that the U.S. pre-tax national income in recent decades has shifted powerfully towards capital income and away from labor income. As measured by one basic indicator, the share of labor income in GDP has declined by around 7 percentage points since the end of World War II. As income has shifted from labor to capital, the stock market (and super-wealth) has soared, with the overall stock market valuation rising from 55% of GDP in 1985 to 200% of GDP today!

The second group with its hold on Washingtons is single-issue lobbies. These powerful lobbies include the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, Big Oil, the gun industry, big pharma, big Ag, and the Israel Lobby. American politics is well organised to cater to these special interests. Each lobby buys the support of specific committees in Congress and selected national leaders to win control over public policy.

The economic returns to special-interest lobbying are often huge: a hundred million dollars of campaign funding by a lobby group can win a hundred billion of federal outlays and/or tax breaks. This is the lesson, for example, of the Israel lobby, which spends a few hundred million dollars on campaign contributions, and harvests tens of billions of dollars in military and economic support for Israel.

These special-interest lobbies do not depend on, nor care much about, public opinion. Opinion surveys show regularly that the public wants gun control, lower drug prices, an end of Wall Street bailouts, renewable energy, and peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. Instead, the lobbyists ensure that Congress and the White House deliver continued easy access to handguns and assault weapons, sky-high drug prices, coddling of Wall Street, more oil and gas drilling, weapons for Ukraine, and wars on behalf of Israel.

These powerful lobbies are money-fuelled conspiracies against the common good. Remember Adam Smith’s famous dictum in the Wealth of Nations (1776): “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

The two most dangerous lobbies are the military-industrial complex (as Eisenhower famously warned us in 1961) and the Israel lobby (as detailed in a scintillating new book by historian Ilan Pappé). Their special danger is that they continue to lead us to war and closer to nuclear Armageddon. Biden’s reckless recent decision to allow U.S. missile strikes deep inside Russia, long advocated by the military-industrial complex, is case in point.

The military-industrial complex aims for U.S. “full-spectrum dominance.” It’s purported solutions to world problems are wars and more wars, together with covert regime-change operations, U.S. economic sanctions, U.S. info-wars, colour revolutions (led by the National Endowment for Democracy), and foreign policy bullying. These of course have been no solutions at all. These actions, in flagrant violation of international law, have dramatically increased U.S. insecurity.

The military-industrial complex (MIC) dragged Ukraine into a hopeless war with Russia by promising Ukraine membership in NATO in the face of Russia’s fervent opposition, and by conspiring to overthrow Ukraine’s government in February 2014 because it sought neutrality rather than NATO membership.

The military-industrial complex is currently—unbelievably—promoting a coming war with China. This will of course involve a huge and lucrative arms buildup, the aim of the MIC. Yet it will also threaten World War III or a cataclysmic U.S. defeat in another Asian war.

While the Military-Industrial Complex has stoked NATO enlargement and conflicts with Russia and China, the Israel Lobby has stoked America’s serial wars in the Middle East. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, more than any U.S. president, has been the lead promoter of America’s backing of disastrous wars in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria.

Netanyahu’s aim is to keep the land that Israel conquered in the 1967 war, creating what is called Greater Israel, and to prevent a Palestinian State. This expansionist policy, in contravention of international law, has given rise to militant pro-Palestinian groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Netanyahu’s long-standing policy is for the U.S. to topple or help to topple the governments that support these resistance groups.

Incredibly, the Washington neocons and the Israel Lobby actually joined forces to carry out Netanyahu’s disastrous plan for wars across the Middle East. Netanyahu was a lead backer of the War in Iraq. Former Air Force Command Chief Master Sergeant Dennis Fritz has recently described in detail the Israel Lobby’s large role in that war. Ilan Pappé has done the same. In fact, the Israel Lobby has supported U.S.-led or U.S.-backed wars across the Middle East, leaving the targeted countries in ruins and the U.S. budget deep in debt.

In the meantime, the wars and tax cuts for the rich, have offered no solutions for the hardships working-class Americans. As in other high-income countries, employment in U.S. manufacturing fell sharply from the 1980s onward as assembly-line workers were increasingly replaced by robots and “smart systems.” The decline in the labor share of value in the U.S. has been significant, and once again has been a phenomenon shared with other high-countries.

Yet American workers have been hit especially hard. In addition to the underlying global technological trends hitting jobs and wages, American workers have been battered by decades of anti-union policies, soaring tuition and healthcare costs, and other anti-worker measures. In high-income countries of northern Europe, “social consumption” (publicly funded healthcare, tuition, housing, and other publicly provided services) and high levels of unionisation have sustained decent living standards for workers. Not so in the United States.

Yet this was not the end of it. Soaring costs of health care, driven by the private health insurers, and the absence of sufficient public financing for higher education and low-cost online options, created a pincer movement, squeezing the working class between falling or stagnant wages on the one side and rising education and healthcare costs on the other side. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans did much of anything to help the workers.

Trump’s voter base is the working class, but his donor base is the super-rich and the lobbies. So, what will happen next? More of the same—wars and tax cuts—or something new and real for the voters?

Trump’s purported answer is a trade war with China and the deportation of illegal foreign workers, combined with more tax cuts for the rich. In other words, rather than face the structural challenges of ensuring decent living standards for all, and face forthrightly the staggering budget deficit, Trump’s answers on the campaign trail and in his first term were to blame China and migrants for low working-class wages and wasteful spending for the deficits.

This has played well electorally in 2016 and 2024, but will not deliver the promised results for workers in the long run. Manufacturing jobs will not return in large numbers from China since they never went in large numbers to China. Nor will deportations do much to raise living standards of average Americans.

This is not to say that real solutions are lacking. They are hiding in plain view—if Trump chooses to take them, over the special interest groups and class interests of Trump’s backers. If Trump chooses real solutions, he would achieve a strikingly positive political legacy for decades to come.

The first is to face down the military-industrial complex. Trump can end the war in Ukraine by telling President Putin and the world that NATO will never expand to Ukraine. He can end the risk of war with China by making crystal clear that the U.S. abides by the One China Policy, and as such, will not interfere in China’s internal affairs by sending armaments to Taiwan over Beijing’s objections, and would not support any attempt by Taiwan to secede.

The second is to face down the Israel lobby by telling Netanyahu that the U.S. will no longer fight Israel’s wars and that Israel must accept a State of Palestine living in peace next to Israel, as called for by the entire world community. This indeed is the only possible path to peace for Israel and Palestine, and indeed for the Middle East.

The third is to close the budget deficit, partly by cutting wasteful spending—notably on wars, hundreds of useless overseas military bases, and sky-high prices the government pays for drugs and healthcare—and partly by raising government revenues. Simply enforcing taxes on the books by cracking down on illegal tax evasion would have raised $625 billion in 2021, around 2.6% of GDP. More should be raised by taxation of soaring capital incomes.

The fourth is an innovation policy (aka industrial policy) that serves the common good. Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley friends have succeeded in innovation beyond the wildest expectations. All kudos to Silicon Valley for bringing us the digital age. America’s innovation capacity is vast and robust and an envy of the world.

The challenge now is innovation for what? Musk has his eye on Mars and beyond. Captivating, yet there are billions of people on Earth that can and should be helped by the digital revolution in the here and now. A core goal of Trump’s industrial policy should be to ensure that innovation serves the common good, including the poor, the working class, and the natural environment. Our nation’s goals need to go beyond wealth and weapons systems.

As Musk and his colleagues know better than anybody, the new AI and digital technologies can usher in an era of low-cost, zero-carbon energy; low-cost healthcare; low-cost higher education; low-cost electricity-powered mobility; and other AI-enabled efficiencies that can raise real living standards of all workers. In the process, innovation should foster high-quality, unionised jobs—not the gig employment that has sent living standards plummeting and worker insecurity soaring.

Trump and the Republicans have resisted these technologies in the past. In his first term, Trump let China take the lead in these technologies pretty much across the board. Our goal is not to stop China’s innovations, but to spur our own. Indeed, as Silicon Valley understands while Washington does not, China has long been and should remain America’s partner in the innovation ecosystem. China’s highly efficient and low-cost manufacturing facilities, such as Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai, put Silicon Valley’s innovations into worldwide use … when America tries.

All four of these steps are within Trump’s reach, and would justify his electoral triumph and secure his legacy for decades to come. I’m not holding my breath for Washington to adopt these straightforward steps. American politics has been rotten for too long for real optimism in that regard, yet these four steps are all achievable, and would greatly benefit not only the tech and finance leaders who backed Trump’s campaign but the generation of disaffected workers and households whose votes put Trump back into the White House.

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To break out of its paralysis, the West needs to take a hard look and address three key challenges

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To address these pivotal developments, UN Sec-Gen Antonio Guterres had called for a Summit of the Future to reform our international institutions so that they are fit for purpose in our fast-changing world. —AP

Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has been advisor to three UN Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres.

We are at a new phase of human history because of the confluence of three interrelated trends. First, and most pivotal, the Western-led world system, in which countries of the North Atlantic region dominate the world militarily, economically, and financially, has ended. Second, the global ecological crisis marked by human-induced climate change, the destruction of biodiversity, and the massive pollution of the environment, will lead to fundamental changes of the world economy and governance. Third, the rapid advance of technologies across several domains—artificial intelligence, computing, biotechnology, geoengineering—will profoundly disrupt the world economy and politics.

“We propose […] to establish a “UN Parliamentary Assembly” as a subsidiary body of the UN General Assembly according to Article XXII of the UN Charter”

These interconnecting developments—geopolitical, environmental, and technological—are stoking huge uncertainties, societal dislocations, political crises, and open wars. To address these pivotal developments, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for a Summit of the Future (SOTF) (September 22-23rd, 2024 at the UN headquarters in New York) to reform our international institutions so that they are fit for purpose in our fast-changing world. Since global peace depends more than ever on the efficacy of the UN and international law, the SOTF should be a watershed in global governance, even if it does no more than point the way to further negotiation and deliberation in the years immediately ahead.

Our existing institutions, both national and international, are certainly not up to the task of governance in our fast-changing world. The late, great evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, often described our predicament as follows: “We have stumbled into the twenty-first century with stone-age emotions, medieval institutions, and near godlike technologies.” By this he meant that we face our challenges today with the basic cognitive and emotional human nature that was formed by human evolution tens of thousands of years ago, with political institutions forged centuries ago (the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787), and with the lightning speed of technological advance (think of ChatGPT as just the latest wonder).

Perhaps the most basic fact of deep societal change is uncertainty, and the most basic reaction to uncertainty is fear. In fact, the technological advances—if used correctly—could solve innumerable problems in economic development, social justice (e.g., improved access to healthcare and education through digital connectivity), and environmental sustainability (e.g., a rapid transition to zero-carbon energy sources). Yet the mood today is anything but optimistic, especially in the West. Open wars rage between the United States and Russia in Ukraine, and between U.S.-backed Israel and Palestine. The possibility of war between the United States and China is widely, openly, and even casually discussed in Washington, though such a war could mean the end of civilization itself. At the root of these conflicts is fear, built on our stone-age emotions.

The biggest fear of all is that of many American and European political leaders that the West is losing its hegemony after centuries, and that somehow the loss of hegemony will have catastrophic consequences. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made this Western fear explicit in an April 2024 column for the UK’s Daily Mail, when he stated that if the West loses the war in Ukraine, “it will be the end of Western hegemony.”

Herein lies the essence of the Ukraine war, and many other global conflicts as well. The United States and its allies want to expand NATO to Ukraine. Russia has firmly said no. Both Washington and London were ready to fight a war with Russia over NATO enlargement to protect Western hegemony (specifically, the right to dictate security arrangements to Russia), while Russia was ready to fight a war in order to keep NATO away. In fact, Russia is prevailing on the battlefield over Ukraine’s army and NATO’s armaments. This is not surprising. What is perhaps surprising is how the West completely underestimated Russia’s capabilities.

In broad terms, with the changing global order, including the rise of China and the rest of East Asia, the military and technological strength of Russia, the rapid development of India, and the growing unity of Africa, the Western-dominated world has been brought to an end, not by a tumultuous collapse of the West, but by the growing economic, technological, and therefore military, power of the rest of the world. In principle, the West has no reason to fear the rise of the rest, as the United States and Europe still maintain an overwhelming deterrence, including nuclear deterrence, against any military threat from the outside. The West is bemoaning its loss of relative status—the ability to dictate to others—not any real military insecurity.

Nothing is going to restore Western hegemony in the coming years—no military victory, technological advance, or economic leverage. The rise of advanced military, technological, economic, and financial capacities to Asia and beyond, is unstoppable (and of course should not be stopped, since it signifies a world that is fairer and more prosperous than the preceding Western-dominated world). Yet, the end of Western hegemony does not mean a new Chinese, Indian, or Asian hegemony. There are simply too many power centers—the United States, the EU, China, Russia, India, the African Union, etc.—and too much capacity and diversity to enable any other hegemon to replace the Western-led world order. We have arrived, after centuries of Western dominance, to a world beyond hegemony.

This new world, beyond hegemony, should be the starting point for the Summit of the Future. The United States, UK, and the EU should come to the Summit not in a vain attempt to sustain their hegemony (as Boris Johnson fantasizes), or equivalently, to protect America’s self-declared “rules-based order”—a vacuous expression that envisions the rules as determined by the United States alone. They should come as part of a new multipolar world looking to find solutions to profound ecological, technological, economic, and other challenges. The new order should be based on multilateralism and international law under a suitably reformed UN Charter.

As President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)—a worldwide network of more than 2,000 universities and think tanks dedicated to sustainable development generally and to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) specifically—I have the opportunity to discuss humanity’s future with university leaders, scientists, technologists, policymakers, and politicians around the world, with the goal of envisioning a future that is prosperous, fair, sustainable, and peaceful for all of the world, not for a privileged West or any other small part of the world. Based on these extensive discussions, the SDSN issued a Statement on the Summit of the Future, responding to the five main “Chapters” for decisionmaking at the Summit: (1) achieving sustainable development; (2) ensuring global peace; (3) governing the cutting-edge technologies; (4) educating young people for our new world; and (5) reforming the UN institutions to make them fit for the post-hegemonic balance of the twenty-first century. 

Here is a summary of the core recommendations of the SDSN.

 

Achieving Sustainable Development

1. The SDG Agenda should remain the core of global cooperation to 2050.

The SDGs were initially set for the fifteen-year period between 2016 and 2030, following the fifteen-year period of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It is clear that the SDGs will not be achieved in the original time frame. We strongly urge that the SOTF recognize the pivotal role of the SDGs in aligning national, regional and global policies, and commit to the SDG framework until 2050, so as to reinforce the efforts already underway and recognize the time horizon needed to reorient the world economy to sustainable development. The new horizon of 2050 does not mean a slackening of effort. Rather, it means improved long-term planning to achieve highly ambitious 2050 goals and milestones on the way to 2050. 

2. The Sustainable Development agenda should be properly financed.

All evidence developed by academia, the Bretton Woods system, and UN institutions is that there remains a massive shortfall in the pace of investments needed for the poorer nations to achieve the SDGs. In order to mobilize the needed investment flows for human and infrastructure capital, the global financial architecture must be reformed and made fit for sustainable development. The major objective is to ensure that the poorer countries have adequate financing, both from domestic and external sources, and at sufficient quality in terms of the cost of capital and the maturity of loans, to scale up the investments required to achieve the SDGs.

1.3 Countries and regions should produce medium-term sustainable development strategies

Sustainable Development in general and the SDGs specifically, require long-term public investment plans, transformation pathways, and a mission orientation to provide the public goods and services required to achieve the SDGs. For this purpose, all nations and regions need medium-term strategies to achieve the SDGs. These strategies, with a horizon to the year 2050, and in some cases beyond, should provide an integrated framework for local, national, and regional investments to achieve the SDGs, and for the technological transformations needed to achieve green, digital, and inclusive societies. 

 

Achieving International Peace and Security

2.1 The core principles of non-intervention should be reinforced and extended. 

The greatest threat to global peace is the interference by one nation in the internal affairs of another nation against the letter and spirit of the UN Charter. Such interference, in the form of wars, military coercion, covert regime-change operations, cyberwarfare, information warfare, political manipulation and financing, and unilateral coercive measures (financial, economic, trade, and technological), all violate the UN Charter and generate untold international tensions, violence, conflict, and war.

For this reason, the UN member states should resolve to end illegal measures of intervention by any nation (or group of nations) in the internal affairs of another nation or group of nations. The principles of non-intervention, enshrined in the UN Charter, UN General Assembly Resolutions, and international law, should be reinforced along the following lines. 

First, no nation should interfere in the politics of any other country through the funding or other support of political parties, movements, or candidates. 

Second, no nation or group of nations should deploy unilateral coercive measures, as recognized repeatedly by the UN General Assembly.

Third, in a world operating under the UN Charter, there is no need for nations to permanently station military forces in foreign countries other than according to UN Security Council decisions. Existing overseas military bases should be reduced dramatically in number with the aim of phasing out and eliminating overseas military bases over the course of the next 20 years. 

2.2 The UN Security Council and other UN agencies should be strengthened to keep the peace and sustain the security of UN member states.

The UN Security Council should be reformed, expanded, and empowered to keep the peace under the UN Charter. Reform of the structure of the UN Security Council is described in Section 5 below. Here we emphasize the enhanced power and tools of the UN Security Council, including super-majority voting within the Security Council to overcome the veto by one member; the power to ban the international flow of weapons to conflict zones; strengthened mediation and arbitration services; and enhanced funding of peacebuilding operations, especially in low-income settings. 

In addition to the Security Council, other key instrumentalities of global peacekeeping, human rights, and international law should be strengthened. These include the authority and independence of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, the functionality and support for UN-based humanitarian assistance especially in war zones, and the role of the UN Human Rights Council in defending and promoting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

2.3 The nuclear powers should return to the process of nuclear disarmament.

The greatest danger to global survival remains thermonuclear war. In this regard, the 10 nations with nuclear weapons have an urgent responsibility to abide by the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) mandate under Article VI “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” All nations, and especially the nuclear powers, should ratify and comply with the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. 

 

Governing Cutting-Edge Technologies 

3.1 Enhancing the multilateral governance of technological risks.

The world is experiencing unprecedented advances in the power, sophistication, and risks of advanced technologies across a range of sciences, technologies, and applications. These include biotechnology, including the ability to enhance pathogens and create new forms of life; artificial intelligence, including the potential for pervasive surveillance, spying, addiction, autonomous weapons, deep fakes, and cyberwarfare; nuclear weapons, notably the emergence of yet more powerful and destructive weapons and their deployment outside of international controls; and geoengineering, for example proposals to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans, or to deflect solar radiation, in response to anthropogenic climate change.

We call on the UN General Assembly to establish urgent processes of global oversight of each class of cutting-edge technologies, including mandates to relevant UN agencies to report annually to the UN General Assembly on these technological developments, including their potential threats and requirements of regulatory oversight. 

3.2 Universal access to vital technologies.

In the spirit of Section 3.1, we also call upon the UN General Assembly to establish and support global and regional centers of excellence, training, and production to ensure that all parts of the world are empowered to participate in the research and development, production, and regulatory oversight of advanced technologies that actually support sustainable development (rather than hyper-militarization). Universities in all regions of the world should train and nurture the next generation of outstanding engineers and scientists needed to drive sustainable development, with expertise in structural transformations in energy, industry, agriculture, and the built environment. Africa in particular should be supported to build world-class universities in the coming years. 

3.3 Universal access to R&D capacities and platforms. 

More than ever, we need open science for scientists in poorer countries and regions, including universal free access to scientific and technical publications, to ensure the fair and inclusive access to the advanced technological knowledge and expertise that will shape global economy and global society in the twenty-first century. 

 

Educating Youth for Sustainable Development 

We call on the Summit of the Future to prioritize the access of every child on the planet to the core investments in their human capital, and to create new modalities of global long-term financing to ensure that the human right of every child to quality primary and secondary education, nutrition, and healthcare is fulfilled no later than 2030. 

4.2 Universal education for sustainable development and global citizenship (Paideia). 

In adopting the SDGs, the UN member states wisely recognized the need to educate the world’s children in the challenges of sustainable development. They did this in adopting Target 4.7 of the SDGs:

“4.7 By 2030 ensure all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development”

Target 4.7 is, in effect, the call for a twenty-first-century paideia, the ancient Greek concept of the core knowledge, virtues, and skills that should be attained by all citizens of the Polis. Today, we have a global polis—a global citizenry—that must be equipped to foster and promote the values of sustainable development and the respect of human rights throughout the world. We call on the Summit of the Future to reinforce Target 4.7 and bring it to life in education for sustainable development around the world. This includes not only an updated and upgraded curriculum at all levels of education, but training at all stages of the life-cycle in the technical and ethical skills needed for a green, digital, and sustainable economy in an interconnected world. 

4.3 Council of Youth and Future Generations 

The empowerment of youth, by training, education, mentorship, and participation in public deliberations, can foster a new generation that is committed to sustainable development, peace, and global cooperation. A new UN Council of Youth and Future Generations can strengthen the UN’s activities in training and empowering young people and can provide a vital global voice of youth to today’s complex challenges. 

 

Transforming Global Governance Under the UN Charter

5.1 There should be the establishment of a UN Parliamentary Assembly.

Around the world, civil society, scholars, and citizens have called for strengthening global institutions by establishing representation of “We the Peoples” in the UN. We propose as a first instance to establish a “UN Parliamentary Assembly” as a subsidiary body of the UN General Assembly according to Article XXII of the UN Charter (“The General Assembly may establish such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the performance of its functions.”). The new UN Parliamentary Assembly would be constituted by representative members of national parliaments, upon principles of representation established by the UN General Assembly. 

5.2 Other UN subsidiary bodies should be established.

Invoking the powers under Article XXII, the UN General Assembly should establish new subsidiary chambers as needed to support the processes of sustainable development, and the representativeness of UN institutions. The new chambers might include, inter alia:

• A Council of the Regions to enable representation of regional bodies such as ASEAN, the EU, African Union, Eurasian Economic Union, and others;

• A Council of Cities to enable representation of cities and other sub-national jurisdictions;

• A Council of Indigenous Peoples to represent the estimated 400 million indigenous peoples of the world;

• A Council of Culture, Religion, and Civilization’ to promote a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation for cultural diversity, religion, and civilizations;

• A Council of Youth and Future Generations to represent the needs and aspirations of today’s youth and of generations to come (see Section 4.3 above);

• A Council on the Anthropocene to support and enhance the work of the UN agencies in fulfilling the aims of the Multilateral Environmental Agreements (including the Paris Climate Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework) and the environmental objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals.

5.3 The UN Security Council Should Be Reformed in Membership and Powers 

We call on the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly to adopt urgently needed reforms of the Security Council structure and processes. These should include: (1) the addition of India as a permanent member, considering that India represents no less than 18 percent of humanity, the third largest economy in the world at purchasing-power parity, and other attributes signifying India’s global reach in economy, technology, and geopolitical affairs; (2) the adoption of procedures to override a veto by a super-majority (perhaps of three-quarters of the votes); (3) an expansion and rebalancing of total seats to ensure that all regions of the world are better represented relative to their population shares; and (4) the adoption of new tools for addressing threats to the peace, as outlined in Section 2.2.

 

Reflection & Reconsideration

The most fundamental principle for our new world system must be mutual respect among nations. The world faces profound and unprecedented challenges—environmental destruction, widespread political instability, the weaponization of cutting-edge technologies, and the dramatic widening of inequalities of wealth and power—that can only be addressed through peaceful cooperation among nations. Yet, despite the urgency of cooperation, we are drifting towards wider war.

The UN is very much a work in progress. It is the creation of a very different world, one that was dominated by the United States in the intermediate aftermath of World War II. At 79 years old, the UN is still an infant in the age-old challenge of good governance and international statecraft. In a world filled to the brim with ever more powerful weaponry, especially nuclear weaponry, solving the challenge of peaceful cooperation is the most vital challenge of all.

The Summit of the Future is therefore a key moment for reflection and reconsideration on how to govern our new multipolar world, at a time of unprecedented challenges facing humanity. The world’s challenges will certainly not be solved at the September conference, but the Summit of the Future can nevertheless mark a vital starting point for a new global governance in which all regions of the world contribute cooperatively to the global common good.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. Originally published on the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development. 

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US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption, insiders' interests

US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield abstains during a vote to approve a resolution that "demands" all sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict allow the "safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale" at UN headquarters in New York on December 22, 2023.

 (Photo by Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)

The $1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders.

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.

As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.

The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.

Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.

Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.

The more wars, of course, the more business.

The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role.

The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI.

In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018).

In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex.

There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making.

In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth.

The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.

The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors.

The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition.

From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded.

It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement.

This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.

The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024.

When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest.

JEFFREY D. SACHS

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

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https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corruption-of-us-foreign-policy

https://www.pressreader.com/malaysia/the-star-malaysia/20240107/282024742096098

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