One year ago today, President Trump announced his intent to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. While the Obama administration and other world leaders recognized the agreement as a pragmatic framework for averting the most catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis, Trump saw it through the lens of his bizarre sense of victimhood. He viewed it as a cunning attack on American sovereignty cooked up by “foreign lobbyists” to “disadvantage the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries” and to “keep our magnificent country tied up and bound down.” This bears no relation to reality.
Even with all that has happened in this tumultuous year, this unhinged decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement stands out as one the worst foreign policy mistakes of Trump’s presidency. It embodied all of his worst policymaking impulses: the failure to grasp the basic issues at play; the casual disregard of the concerns our allies; the eagerness to shelve previous commitments and shatter existing norms; and of course, the willingness to lie to support extremist positions.
And for what? Even for an opponent of the agreement, his announcement was little more than a publicity stunt. It merely expressed his desire to leave the deal, which, by its terms, cannot happen until late in 2020, after the next president has been elected.
But the costs to American interests were substantial and immediate. Because the agreement is held in such high regard around the world -- every other country has signed it -- Trump’s move was universally condemned by the international community. Diplomatically, Trump managed in one fell swoop to antagonize our closest allies, damage our reputation as a country that keeps its commitments, cede leadership and squander goodwill, and undermine our ability to gain the cooperation of others on our diplomatic priorities. He also positioned the U.S. to be left behind as other countries reap the benefits of transitioning to a clean energy economy.
Apart from the consequences for U.S. diplomacy, the broader concern was whether this decision would do lasting damage to the Paris regime. Fortunately, the most dire predictions that Trump’s move would induce cascading defections that would unravel the agreement have not been borne out. But it has posed some challenges that the international community must overcome if the Paris Agreement is to realize its ambitious objective of limiting the climate crisis to relatively manageable levels.
Despite Trump’s rather absurd campaign promise to “cancel” the Paris Agreement, it remains firmly in place. All of the world’s 195 countries have signed the Agreement, and 177 have already formally joined. Just since Trump was elected, 72 countries have formally joined the Paris Agreement. Meanwhile, no country has said it would follow the U.S. out of the agreement or repudiated its carbon pollution reduction commitments.
If anything, Trump’s defection has stiffened the resolve of other countries to advance the Paris framework. All of the major emitters have pointedly reconfirmed their commitments to the agreement, and many foreign leaders have publicly rebuked the president for his betrayal. This was most evident at last year’s G-7 and G-20 summits, where the leaders of our closest allies and the world’s largest economies refused Trump’s entreaties to paper over differences, and insisted on issuing a strong statement supporting the agreement, leaving Trump isolated in lonely dissent. A similar dispute is brewing at next week’s G-7 Summit in Canada.
Over the past year, it has become clear that countries are committed to moving forward regardless of what the U.S. does, not only because they see the threat of failing to act but also because they see the unprecedented opportunities in decarbonizing their economies. They have recognized what Trump does not: That deploying new technologies to reduce emissions will make their cities healthier and more livable, their economies more productive, and their people more prosperous. Far from keeping them “tied up and bound down” by foreign meddlers, proactive climate policies allow nations to improve the lives of their people.
While the rest of the world will continue to move on without the U.S., the lack of U.S. leadership and constructive engagement could pose three challenges that are worth noting.
Loss of U.S. leadership: For generations, American leadership has been essential to the creation and development of enduring international institutions. President Obama paved the way for the Paris Agreement by reaching a rapprochement with China on issues of long-standing difference and persuading other leaders to sign on.
No other single country can effectively play this convening role. With the U.S. on the sidelines, a range of front-running countries will need to drive different aspects of the global challenge. This is beginning to happen. For example, China has joined Canada and the EU in co-leading the Ministerial Meeting on Climate Action, a dialogue of the major economies that is a successor to an effort that had been facilitated by the U.S. The most immediate test of this distributed leadership approach will be whether it can resolve the most difficult challenges of Paris implementation on the agenda this year: Finding agreement on a set of guidelines to apply the Paris framework and creating momentum for countries to strengthen their pledges.
Loss of U.S. emissions reductions and support: Experts agree that the current emissions reduction pledges would lead to far more than the “well below 2° C” or 1.5° C degrees of warming that the Paris Agreement aims to achieve. These pledges must be significantly enhanced to put us back on track. Even if more aggressive sub-national and private sector actions keep the U.S. on track to meet its 2025 pledge, the lack of federal action will make it harder to close this gap. And Trump’s refusal to provide support for developing countries to reduce their emissions will impede their efforts to increase actions.
Testing the resilience of the ambition mechanism: The agreement encourages sustained progress through an “ambition mechanism” that includes a fixed schedule for future pledges, a commitment to strengthening pledges over time and rigorous peer review. By design, however, there is no legal apparatus to back this up. Pledges are not legally binding, and compliance can be enforced only through political pressure.
To ensure the vitality of the ambition mechanism, deterrence is essential: This means sending a clear message that abandoning Paris climate commitments is not acceptable and comes at a significant cost in terms of reputation, influence, and ability to achieve other core diplomatic objectives.
Trump’s announcement last year was a gut punch to the Paris Agreement. But the countries that came together to craft the agreement intended it to flexible and resilient, in the expectation that it would endure as the basis of cooperation for the foreseeable future. While no one could have predicted that the agreement would be forced to deal with the kinds of challenges Trump has posed so soon after it came into force, it’s proving to be as resilient to political shocks as its designers had hoped.