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  America's New Agenda: How the US Can Fix its Damaged Reputation Abroad

America's New Agenda How the US Can Fix its Damaged Reputation Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Part 2: The US Must Lead by Example on Climate Change

As hard as preventing a spiral of nuclear proliferation may be, it is easy compared to stabilizing climate change. Aside from the technical difficulties, there are heavy financial and political costs associated with the measures necessary to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Arms control and nonproliferation, by contrast, actually save money. Furthermore, we have been living with the danger of blowing ourselves up for more than 60 years -- and we have experience, and success, in not doing so.

The danger that we may fatally overheat the earth -- or, depending on the vicissitudes of climate change, drown, starve, or, in some parts of the world, freeze ourselves to death -- is a new nightmare. The possibility of its coming true lies beyond the horizon of many of us alive today and, perhaps, of our children as well. But our children's children may well discover whether the optimists or the pessimists were right about climate change, especially since even the optimists are, with nearly every new report, less reassuring.

US Vice President Dick Cheney famously warned in the context of terrorism that if there is even a one percent chance of something very bad happening, we should act as though it were a certainty. Since the odds are approaching 100 percent that if humankind continues to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will alter the planet in ways that no one can predict, Cheney's rule should make him, on the subject of climate change, a soulmate of Al Gore.

As the science of the problem becomes clearer to all of us, the politics, economics, and timetable of the solution become starker: in order to slow down the rate at which the earth is warming, the United States, the European Union, Russia, and nine other countries -- the so-called "dirty dozen" that account for 80 percent of the problem -- will have to accept drastic and mandatory cuts in emissions. Half of the countries on that list are considered "developing." Under the Kyoto Protocol, they get a pass on binding reductions. The Big Three are India, China -- whose giant populations and thriving economies make them major greenhouse-gas emitters -- and Brazil, the leading source of greenhouse gases produced by tropical deforestation. (The other members of the dirty dozen are Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Iran, Australia, and South Africa.)

Kyoto will expire in 2012. That means the next US president will have fewer than four years to play a decisive role in the design of an effective successor to the treaty. The United States must do this through diplomacy and by example. Given the amount of time and effort that would go into ratifying Kyoto, the new administration will likely not want to go down that road. However, if it instead passes legislation imposing stringent emissions limits on itself, while offering other countries --especially developing countries -- substantial incentives to be part of a global effort, then the goal of replacing Kyoto with an accord mandating universal reductions may be feasible.

Collaboration with Europe can help. The new EU trio presidency -- France, the Czech Republic, and Sweden, which will chair the European Union in 2008-2009 -- are set to work on "SIS2," a revised edition of the Solana security paper of 2003. Entitled "A Secure Europe in a Better World," the paper characterized the transatlantic relationship as "irreplaceable" and called for strengthened US-EU ties. According to the priorities laid down by the Swedish government for its semester of presidency, the European Union is likely to elaborate a broader definition of security that would include a greater embrace of climate- related policies. If the efforts of the new American administration are deemed to be headed in the right direction, the United States will have political cover to take on the other problem polluters. Together, the European Union and the United States will have better leverage to urge the "dirty dozen" to comply with higher environmental standards. US engagement along these lines would also provide the most concrete sign the new administration could give Europeans of its changed course and thus significantly contribute to a new strengthening of transatlantic relations.

A Tall Order

It is asking a lot of the world -- and the next president of the United States -- to grapple simultaneously with proliferation and climate change, but it is not asking too much, given the consequences of failure. Greater public awareness of the way in which these and other dangers are connected might help galvanize support of the necessary remedies, sacrifices and trade-offs.

As farmlands turn to dust belts or deserts, and as rising sea levels engulf heavily populated coastal regions, whole nations will be thrown into economic and political chaos, which will be likely to lead to both internal and cross-border violence. Projections indicated that the most onerous effects of climate change will be felt in the poorer parts of the world, where soaring temperatures, encroaching sands and rising sea levels are likely to cause or hasten the failure of fragile states. In failing, they will teach us about the link between their misery and our insecurity: failed states are often outlaw states, sources of regional instability, incubators of terrorism, and thriving markets for lethal technology.

There is also a connection between climate change and proliferation when it comes to solutions: peaceful nuclear energy is coming back in fashion because it relies on available technology and produces no greenhouse gases. If the world increases its reliance on nuclear-generated electricity, emerging nations will need assistance from advanced industrialized ones to build hundreds of new nuclear power plants. In exchange for that help, they may accept tighter controls on the material and know-how that can be used for bombs. They result could be a 21st-century version of President Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace plan -- and a much-needed shot in the arm for the languishing NPT.

If history is any guide, it is an open question as to whether humankind is capable of responding adequately to nuclear proliferation and climate change. By and large, progress in international cooperation has needed spectacular failures in order to yield even modest and temporary progress. It took the Thirty Years War to bring about the Treaty of Westphalia; the Napoleonic wars motivated the creation of the Concert of Europe; the first world war spurred what turned out to be the false start of the League of Nations; only after the second world war did the world's leaders try again, more successfully, with the United Nations. The most pertinent and encouraging exception to this woeful pattern was the maintenance of nuclear peace during the Cold War: It did not take the actual experience of Armageddon to spur the international regulation of national arsenals. Recognition of the menace was sufficient.

At the dawn of the atomic age Robert Maynard Hutchins, the chancellor of the University of Chicago, saw the detonation of A-bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki as heralding "the good news of damnation" -- the ultimate wake-up call -- that would frighten the leaders of the world into taking the steps necessary to avert catastrophe. The next US president must act quickly on the hope that the clear and present dangers posed by proliferation and climate change will similarly concentrate minds and political will on what needs to be done. After its long journey down the path of unilateralism, the United States must demonstrate its own resolve to the international community. As it does so, America will also look to its traditional allies to work to marshal the global support necessary for thoroughgoing change. For those on both sides of the Atlantic, this effort must be driven by the recognition that meeting those twin challenges of nonproliferation and climate change is not merely very important but truly urgent.

Strobe Talbott is president of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Mr. Talbott was US deputy secretary of state for seven years in the Clinton administration.

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