How the U.S. Superpower Experience Wrecked the Paris Climate Agreement

Heather Hurlburt wrote for The National Interest on what the Paris Climate Agreement reveals about the debate over international agreements.

What the Trump kabuki dance clarified was the shape of the two schools of thought that will struggle over American security policy in the next decades. Like climate change itself, their outlines have been a long time building, and they are now starkly revealed. But what the language about the greatest security threat and supreme moral challenge of our time obscures is that the struggle is not about climate change. It is about whether it is possible, and preferable, to make policy as if the United States is part of a larger whole—or as if we are an island unto ourselves.