To be published on medium.com
From Cuba to Climate, the world’s most powerful democracy keeps saying no to the very idea of collective welfare
When you scan the roll calls at the United Nations, one country keeps turning up on the lonely end of the tally. Against the “Right to Development.” Against ending the embargo on Cuba. Against the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Even against the International Day of Peaceful Coexistence.
It’s the United States—the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, the model democracy. And yet, time and again, Washington’s votes speak less of freedom and more of a deep discomfort with equality, solidarity, and global responsibility.
The pattern behind the “No”
Look closely, and a pattern forms. In November 2024, the U.S. voted against the UN resolution recognizing the Right to Development—a principle that every human being has a right to participate in, contribute to, and benefit from economic, social, cultural, and political development. The American explanation was clinical: the right “is not recognized in any of the core UN human rights conventions.”
A few months later, Washington voted against a resolution reaffirming the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, dismissing it as a “globalist endeavour inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty.” Then came the rejection of the Decade of Sustainable Forest Management, another nod to its resistance to UN-led climate initiatives.
And when 187 countries voted to end the decades-old Cuba embargo, the United States—joined only by Israel—stood apart again.
This is not diplomatic coincidence. It is ideological architecture.
War as an industry, not an aberration
If democracy is supposed to value peace, then the U.S. interpretation is an odd one. A nation that spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined often treats war less as tragedy and more as enterprise.
At the UN, this shows up in voting behaviour that sidelines peacebuilding when it challenges strategic or corporate interests. When the General Assembly voted on a framework for a “just and lasting peace” in Ukraine, the U.S. opposed it—aligning with the militarised logic that peace cannot precede victory.
The military-industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower warned about has become the spine of U.S. foreign policy. Every war, from Iraq to Ukraine, feeds a chain of supply, innovation, and profit. Drones, software, logistics, private contractors—war has become America’s largest export.
So when Washington resists UN resolutions about demilitarisation, nuclear restraint, or sustainable peace, it isn’t simply ideology. It’s economics.
Democracy for whom?
The irony deepens when we consider how these votes undermine the very values the U.S. claims to defend—freedom, democracy, and human rights. In principle, democracy should mean the will of the majority. In practice, at the UN, it often means the will of the wealthy.
Each “no” from Washington carries weight far beyond a single ballot. Aid, trade, debt, and technology are all instruments that can bend smaller nations to comply. A developing country that dares to defy the U.S. line risks economic punishment or diplomatic cold shoulders.
That is not democracy—it is dominance wrapped in democratic language.
Even the UN itself bends around this reality. The structure of the Security Council, with permanent veto powers for the U.S. and four other countries, is proof that global democracy is conditional. One veto can erase the will of nearly 200 nations.
If a superpower can routinely vote against global welfare measures and still claim moral leadership, what does democracy mean anymore?
Capitalism over cooperation
These votes also reveal something larger about the American worldview: a persistent belief that markets, not multilateralism, solve everything. The U.S. frequently opposes collective frameworks for redistribution—whether climate finance, global taxation, or technology sharing—because they run counter to the logic of profit.
In May 2025, for instance, Washington pushed to weaken a global development-finance deal in Seville, stripping it of language on climate, gender equality, and fossil-fuel phase-outs. Development, in this worldview, remains an investment opportunity, not a moral duty.
At its core, it’s a choice between two futures. One imagines a planet governed by cooperation, sustainability, and fairness. The other is still trapped in the 20th-century model of extraction, arms, and capital accumulation. America’s record suggests it knows which one benefits its corporations more.
The illusion of moral authority
And yet, at home, the U.S. continues to sell its foreign policy as “defending democracy.” The problem is that democracy without empathy becomes theatre. When the same hand that signs human-rights statements also blocks food, medicine, and development funds through sanctions, the rhetoric collapses.
The UN, too, becomes complicit—by design or by paralysis. Its structure allows the very nations most responsible for war and inequality to police everyone else. It preaches universality but practices hierarchy.
From Karachi or Havana or Kigali, the message looks different: the votes of the powerful often decide whether clean water flows, whether sanctions choke a child’s medicine, whether peace talks ever begin.
What these votes really say
Perhaps the most telling part is not the votes themselves, but the explanations attached to them. The U.S. rarely says it opposes humanity. It says it is defending “sovereignty,” “efficiency,” or “freedom of markets.” Yet behind that language lies the same old hierarchy—the belief that power, not justice, governs progress.
Democracy, in the American sense, seems less about giving voice to the global majority and more about maintaining control of the global system.
Until that changes, the United Nations will remain a stage, not a parliament—a place where the powerful pretend to listen, while the rest of the world keeps counting the cost of every “No.”
