The contradiction at the heart of Biden’s foreign policy

As world leaders gather for the latest global climate meeting – COP27 – this week in Egypt, the sad state of efforts to combat climate change reveals a contradiction at the heart of President Biden’s foreign policy.

In October, the White House released its National Security Strategy (NSS), a dubious exercise mandated by law. But if strategy is setting priorities and aligning means with ends to achieve national goals, then the NSS lacks coherence and appears self-contradictory. 

Why? The NSS claims expansive goals. “We face two strategic challenges,” it states. “[T]he first a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next. The second is the effects of shared challenges that cross borders—whether it is climate change, food insecurity, communicable diseases, terrorism, energy shortages, or inflation. These shared challenges are not marginal issues that are secondary to geopolitics. They are at the very core of national and international security and must be treated as such.” (Italics mine.)

The NSS thus gives equal weight to major power competition and redressing global issues, some, such as climate change and communicable diseases, existential in nature. The NSS rightly says, “By their very nature, these challenges require governments to cooperate if they are to solve them.” The document concedes: “we will have to tackle these challenges within a competitive international environment where heightening geopolitical competition, nationalism and populism render this cooperation even more difficult…”

That is a major understatement. What if simultaneously addressing these two challenges is not just difficult but at odds with each other, pulling U.S. policy in opposite directions? As Jessica Chen Weiss wrote in The New York Times, “US-China competition risks becoming an end unto itself, pressing leaders in Beijing and Washington to embrace maximalist positions meant to thwart each other and crowding out efforts to meet global challenges.”

The woeful state of climate change after 30 years of conferences filled with ambitious, but mostly unfulfilled, promises, illuminates the contradiction. Bear in mind that the U.S. and China are the world’s largest polluters, accounting for nearly 45 percent of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

In a paroxysm of anger in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) August visit to Taiwan, Beijing suspended military, political and climate dialogue with the U.S. It will be interesting to see whether China responds to U.S. climate envoy John Kerry’s desire to follow through on previous pledges of cooperation at COP27. I suspect that Moscow is unlikely to be very forthcoming either, uneasy about efforts to transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.       

The irony is that for the first time, the U.S. can boast new moral authority at the climate conclave to combat climate change and accelerate the transition to a post-oil economy. This is a result of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, passed last August, which commits $370 billion to combat climate change.

But climate change has taken a back seat to a spate of intersecting calamities, what some call a “polycrisis.” The war in Ukraine has heightened major power conflict, wreaked havoc on energy markets, added to global inflation and, as evidenced in elections from Sweden to Italy and Brazil, prompted a rise in inward-looking populist nationalism. Add deepening distrust and tension between the U.S. and China and you have an uncertain world in turmoil where global cooperation is in retreat.

Worse, this state of affairs comes amid increasing impact from climate change: record heat and droughts and drying rivers from East Africa to the Mississippi River; floods that have left one-third of Pakistan underwater; floods and extreme weather from hurricanes.

The goal of the Paris climate agreement – limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – is nowhere in sight. National pledges to curb GHG, to fund developing nations to adapt to and combat climate change, remain mostly unmet. A recent UN report said that based on current policies, the trajectory of warming is 2.8C degrees by the end of the century, and that even if current climate pledges were implemented, temperatures would rise 2.5 percent by 2100. While either eventuality is far less than some of the catastrophic forecasts, it is enough to wreak havoc on the planet.

Of course, straight-line projections are usually wrong, and things could well take a turn toward the better. The gas shortages and price spikes from sanctioned Russian gas and oil has led Europe to rethink its dependency on Russian energy. One hundred dollars a barrel oil may accelerate efforts to deploy renewables, and technology breakthroughs on battery and other renewable tech could also accelerate the transition to a post-oil future. The International Energy Agency (EIA) has forecast that the world will reach peak demand (coal, gas, oil) by 2030.

But absent cooperation among the major polluters, accelerating efforts to slow climate change, climate goals will be unachievable. This problem – the tension between major power competition and meeting the challenge of global issues threatening the human race – goes beyond climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic was another problem facing all where necessary cooperation failed. Beyond infectious diseases, food insecurity and global financial stability are just two of the global problems requiring cooperation among major actors.

Yet the disconcerting global trends discussed above suggest even impending doom is not enough to spur action based on common interests. But ideology, whether democracies versus autocracies or great power quests for influence and narrow nationalism, has its limits. Recognizing those limits in the face of global challenges requiring cooperation is the beginning of wisdom.

Robert A. Manning is a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center. He served as senior counselor to the undersecretary of state for global affairs from 2001 to 2004, a member of the U.S. secretary of state’s policy planning staff from 2004 to 2008 and on the National Intelligence Council Strategic Futures Group from 2008 to 2012. Follow him on Twitter @Rmanning4.