By Michelle Dixon and Keya Chatterjee
President Trump’s decision to eventually withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change has done exactly what he fears most -- made the U.S. a laughing stock around the world. Trump has ceded leadership on this issue to the European Union and China, damaged U.S. credibility, and abandoned a growing clean energy economy that can no longer be ignored.
Now that the dust has settled from that decision, there’s an additional component to this story that hasn’t received much attention: The raison d'être of the Trump administration is to spurn collective action and multilateralism, and the biggest influence of that mindset flows largely from President Trump’s strategic advisor Stephen K. Bannon. In effect, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is one battle lost in that larger ideological struggle about America’s role in the world.
Trump’s speech announcing the U.S. withdrawal was littered with falsehoods and misrepresentations of both the Paris Agreement itself and of climate change. It also laid bare the combination of Trump’s zero-sum worldview and the renewed primacy of Bannon’s nationalistic fantasies, both of which represent a severe danger to our collective security and wellbeing.
“The Paris agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country's expense,” he said. “They don’t put America first. I do and I always will.”
In other words, Trump doesn’t believe shared interests are possible. His foreign policy is a zero-sum transaction. So if the rest of the world believes that the Paris agreement is in their national interests, Trump thinks America loses.
Of course, empirical evidence shows that America is stronger and safer when it works with friends and allies to solve problems, and the Paris Agreement was another piece in that complex but fruitful puzzle.
And ironically, pulling out of Paris will actually cost American jobs, but the bigger issue with Trump’s “America First” mantra is that climate change isn’t an America-only problem. In fact, our responsibility to lead on climate change is outsized, particularly seeing that the U.S. is and has been one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. And because greenhouse gases know no borders, the reality is that climate change is a global challenge that requires collective action.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka -- who along with her husband Jared Kushner, represent the so-called “globalist” faction inside the White House (if one believes the favorable press they’ve generated for themselves) -- was supposed to save the Paris Accord. But news reports gave Bannon -- who just weeks ago was reportedly on the cusp of being fired -- and his band of nationalists in the Trump administration most of the credit for Trump’s decision to pull out of Paris, calling it “the clearest sign yet that Bannon and his cohort are prevailing in an internal power struggle for the president’s ear.”
This development should worry us greatly.
Bannon’s re-emergence means that Trump’s tribalistic instincts -- i.e. further American retreat from shared action on global challenges -- will have a greater and more influential internal voice.
And while we must fight to prevent the United States from realizing Trump’s plan of withdrawing from Paris, our larger war is fighting to maintain American leadership and participation on the international stage. With the Paris withdrawal and Trump’s disastrous NATO and G7 meetings -- which apparently convinced German Chancellor Angela Merkel she could no longer depend on the United States -- Bannon’s “America First” ideology is becoming a reality as we fall further into self-imposed isolation.
We believe that global challenges like climate change, and national security, economic inequality, food insecurity, human rights, terrorism, and pandemic disease, cannot be successfully confronted with a fragmented international community where the United States is thumbing its nose at the rest of the world from the sidelines.
The health of our planet is fundamental to everyone, not just Americans. Collective action to combat climate change and the Bannon-Trump philosophy of putting “America First” endangers our friends around the world and in turn, makes America less safe.
While the remainder of Trump’s time in the Oval Office is anyone’s guess, we must in the meantime rally to expose Bannon as one of the biggest threats to our shared global values and oust him from the White House. Our collective livelihood depends on it.
Michelle Dixon is Director of Global Progressive Hub and Keya Chatterjee is the Executive Director of the U.S. Climate Action Network