By JIANG SHIXUE*
Let's hope that President Javier Milei doesn't bark up the wrong tree, and chooses to support the UN's efforts to some degree.
1.
The Future Summit opened at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on September 22. It adopted the Compact for the Future and its two annexes, namely the Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations. These documents are the UN’s master plan to address the challenges that lie ahead for humanity, with 56 actions covering a wide range of themes, including peace and security, sustainable development, climate change, digital cooperation, human rights, gender, youth and future generations, the transformation of global governance, etc.
They highlight the “increasingly complex challenges” for traditional and non-traditional security. Consequently, most countries expressed positive attitudes towards the successful adoption of the Pact.
Brazil supports the adoption of the Pact, although President Lula said in his speech to the UN General Assembly that the difficult approval of the document demonstrates the weakening of our collective capacity for negotiation and dialogue. He also said that the limited scope of the Pact is an expression of the paradox of our time: “We move in circles between feasible commitments that lead to insufficient results.”
In contrast to President Lula’s enthusiastic support for the United Nations, Argentine President Javier Milei expressed a negative attitude toward the global organization, the Compact and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in his speech to the UN General Assembly. He said: “I do not come here to tell the world what to do; I come here to tell the world, on the one hand, what will happen if the United Nations continues to promote the collectivist policies that it has been promoting under the mandate of the 2030 Agenda, and, on the other, what are the values that the new Argentina defends.”
President Javier Milei also said: “An organization that had been thought of essentially as a shield to protect the realm of men has been transformed into a multi-tentacled Leviathan that seeks to decide not only what each nation-state should do, but also how all citizens of the world should live.”
President Javier Milei expressed his disagreement with the “Pact for the Future” because he considers that it represents “socialist” ideas and has proposed a new “freedom agenda.” He defined the UN as “an organization that, instead of confronting these conflicts, invests time and effort in imposing on poor countries what and how they should produce, with whom they should link up, what they should eat and what they should believe, as the current Pact for the Future seeks to dictate.”
2.
However, President Javier Milei is wrong to choose to criticize the Pact and the 2030 Agenda.
First, the Compact represents the UN’s commitment not only to address immediate crises, but also to lay the foundations for a sustainable, just and peaceful global order for all peoples and nations. The commitments embodied in the Compact undoubtedly reflect the collective will of UN Member States to promote global peace and development, which are urgently needed for humanity.
Secondly, the Compact promises to accelerate efforts to achieve the 2030 Agenda, which aims to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, step up the fight against hunger, promote gender equality and education. This is why it has won great acclaim from the international community.
Third, 21st-century challenges require 21st-century solutions, and one of the best 21st-century solutions is to strengthen global action in a fully integrated manner. Past experience has shown that no single country can effectively respond to today’s political, economic, environmental and technological challenges. Only global action based on collective strength can work.
Last but not least, Argentina can also benefit from the implementation of the Pact, because it also faces many problems that the Pact will strive to solve. So let’s hope that President Javier Milei doesn’t bark up the wrong tree, and chooses to support the UN’s efforts to some degree.
*Jiang Shixue is a professor of international relations at Sichuan University of International Studies (China).
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