Donald Trump Can’t Turn Back History
If President Trump withdraws the U.S. from the Paris climate-change agreement, it would be a stark confirmation of his intention to undermine the American-led postwar system.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY MANDEL NGAN / AFP / GETTY
The United States is no stranger to isolationism or the willful rejection of international agreements. After the First World War, the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles because many senators didn’t want the country to join the fledgling League of Nations, which was part of the treaty, and which President Woodrow Wilson had played a big part in conceiving.
In a two-hour speech that is sometimes cited as one of the most powerful orations ever delivered in the upper chamber, Senator William Borah, the Republican of Idaho, argued that joining the League would “conflict with the right of our people to govern themselves free from all restraint, legal or moral, of foreign powers.” If the Senate ignored these concerns, Borah said, it would “have forfeited and surrendered, once and for all, the great policy of ‘no entangling alliances’ upon which the strength of this Republic has been founded for one hundred and fifty years.”
Even now, there is scholarly debate about the consequences of the 1919 Senate vote, which was 53–38 against the treaty. Some historians argue that the U.S.’s repudiation doomed the League. Others believe it was a utopian project from the start, and that it would have failed with or without U.S. participation. In any case, the important point is that, though the League failed, the U.S.’s isolationism couldn’t be maintained.
Following the rise of fascism in Europe and Japan, the U.S. was forced to reëngage with the world. Initially, this engagement was limited to providing military and financial aid to Britain and other countries that were fighting Nazi Germany. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. joined the conflict directly, helping the Allies win, and then forging a postwar global order based on American-led military alliances and other forms of international coöperation.
Following the principles of enlightened self-interest, officials such as Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, George F. Kennan, and George Marshall recognized that, in the age of totalitarianism, jet aircraft, and the atomic bomb, it was folly to think the U.S. could retreat into its shell. Only by engaging with the world, they believed, could Washington shape agreements, institutions, and events in ways that benefitted America. For all its faults, the global system they created served this country and other Western nations well. (Its effect on many non-Western nations was less welcome.)
If Donald Trump goes ahead and pulls the U.S. out of the Paris climate-change agreement, which has the backing of a hundred and ninety-five countries, it would be the starkest confirmation yet of his intention to undermine the American-led postwar system, and to revert to the isolationism and suspicion of foreign entanglements that typified U.S. policy before it accepted the mantle of being a superpower.
Aligning the U.S. with Nicaragua and Syria—the only two countries of any size that aren’t parties to the Paris Agreement—would undermine the one serious international effort to confront climate change. More broadly, it would signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. has abdicated, at least for now, its role as the global leader and agenda-setter. It would confirm that Washington has gone rogue.
Now, the Senate also refused to ratify the Kyoto Accord, a nineteen-nineties precursor to the Paris Agreement. Why should another display of American dissent matter now? Well, for one thing, the scientific evidence about the effect of global warming has continued to accumulate in the past twenty years, the threat has grown more immediate, and it can be tackled only on a global scale. But, also, a decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement wouldn’t be just about climate change; it would be part of a wider pattern.
As recently as early April, when Trump decided not to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, it seemed as though, inside the White House, the globalists had taken the upper hand over the isolationists. More recently, however, beset by official investigations and record-low poll ratings, the President has reverted to the jingoistic rabble-rousing he employed in his campaign.
Last week, during the NATO summit, he failed to reaffirm the U.S. government’s commitment to defend other members of the alliance if they are attacked. During a meeting with European Union leaders, he strongly criticized Germany for exporting too many cars to the U.S. And, during a G7 summit in Italy, he refused to join other leaders in pledging to “swiftly implement the Paris Agreement.”
As the trip unfolded, it was tempting to treat Trump’s incendiary statements as mere rhetoric. But, on Wednesday, H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, and Gary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, confirming that the President’s words reflected a deliberate underlying doctrine. “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage,” McMaster and Cohn wrote. “We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.”
In the eyes of some observers, these two men are Trump’s adult supervisors. Yet here they were, subverting the very idea that nations can engage in anything more than Hobbesian competition and conflict. In other words, they were rationalizing Trump’s nihilistic, zero-sum view of the world.
To be fair to McMaster and Cohn, they also wrote, “America First does not mean America alone. It is a commitment to protecting and advancing our vital interests while also fostering cooperation and strengthening relationships with our allies and partners.” Evidently, the duo view themselves as adherents of the school of foreign-policy “realism,” which prioritizes material concerns and denigrates anything smacking of woolly idealism. But Trump is no realist. Whether he understands it or not, he is aggressively subverting U.S. national interests
In trolling NATO, he is undermining an alliance that has been the bedrock of American security for seventy years. In inveighing against international trade, he is threatening the future of American corporate giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Disney, and General Motors. If he pulls the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, he will raise the risks of environmental calamities, erode America’s claim to the moral high ground, and undercut the nation’s efforts to forge a leadership position in the transition to a low-carbon global economy.
In all likelihood, this transition will go ahead with or without American participation—a point that McMaster, Cohn, and Rex Tillerson must surely have been making to their boss. Despite his verbal skills, Senator Borah was unable to turn back history a century ago, and Trump won’t be any more successful. Even as he was preparing to say whether he would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, China and the European Union were agreeing to move ahead with implementing it.
The still unresolved question is whether Washington will seek to mold the world that is coming, as it did after the Second World War, or engage in a futile effort to escape, as it did after the First World War. Any moment now, we will find out the answer.
