Climate politics in global Hobbesian Jungle

Introduction

I have written my work, not as an essay to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

——Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

The vicissitude of humanity has waxed and waned through the coaster ride of history. Every age has its leitmotif and every generation has their own focal points and challenges. In the young twenty-first century, along with food security, terrorism, public health and hygiene, and poverty, climate change as a shot-across-the-bow of our generation has become an inveterately arising crisis. Hence, the world had been awaiting an agreement by countries which could be in a position to hold a global vision to mitigate the rapid climate change. As an upshot, there was the 2016 Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2020), aimed at keeping temperature increase below two degrees Celsius compared to the preindustrial level. After its ratification in 2016 (Clarke and Searle, 2021), the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and the non-mandatory long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies (LT-LEDS) had been submitted by signatories by 2020 to show their internal aspirations and planned measures towards mitigating climate change, striving for transforming the efforts for abating global warming from headlines to trend lines and translating conceptual recognition into concrete acts.

Even though the national strengths are in constant flux, the Paris Agreement has proved a possibility that distinct countries can cooperate on common goals through quasi formal mechanisms. Where there is an agreement, there is a foreseeable benefit; where there is a benefit, there is an order to grant and maintain it agreeable, attainable, and sustainable for the players. Thereby, the overarching questions arise: is this order established for abating climate change entire unto itself or integrated into a wider international system? And with deepening cooperation on climate change among countries, which order’s norms could prevail on the scene?

In this study, I examine the 2016 Paris agreement, the one that has not been forged in the school of hard knocks. A climate treaty needs to take the multiplicity of different interpretations on climate change among countries with distinct historical experiences into consideration and sublimate a variety of societies with diverse national interests into common search for curbing GHGs emissions. The vitality of climate treaty is reflected in the balance it strikes between changes in national power caused by climate change and that by the adoption of GHG emission reduction policies, which depends on the relative method of calculation given to each, indicating the necessity to form congruent perceptions of how the policies on GHGs reduction would affect the geopolitics in practice for a society. Climate policy is a cost-and-benefit analysis.

According to history, when confronting potential threats that may occur, most countries preferred waiting until a major threat took tangible, specific shape. In the history of Europe, Realpolitik promoted by Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck (1815–1898) and Raison d'état proposed by Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu (1585–1642) had the historic roles as the standard-bearer of German and French statehood, respectively. Both Bismarck and Richelieu believed that there was no superior principle that can constrain the inner desire of a country for power and development, and an international agreement could only be attained by correctly evaluating the components of national strengths.

The essence of international politics

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

——Bertrand Russel

Power, the asymmetric control of valued resources including wealth, information, social networks, affects most human interactions (Schwab and Singh, 2024; Smith and Hofmann, 2016). In the global Hobbesian jungle, the overriding aim of a state’s foreign policy is to ensure the safety and prosperity of its own people (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2007). Despite the fact that climate risks are related to financial problem (Wagner, 2022). Realism, whose representative politics referred as the balance-of-power logic or realpolitik (Mearsheimer, 2009), focuses on national interests, which means the survival of the state and its sovereignty in making decisions free of coercion. In other words, survival is a country’s raison d'être. The principal driver is balance-of-power logic and cold realism. By unapologetically pursuing national interests, powers are balanced among countries.

Thus, all the great masterful countries have been fighting countries. The time a great country loses its hard-fighting virtues, no matter what else it may retain, it loses its rightful places in the pecking order. Cowardice is an unpardonable sin and nonstarter. Embracing the reality of the jungle, every expansion of a country, either by cultural osmosis or missionary zeal, is a victory for law, order, and righteousness. For sophisticated and successful decision-makers, they often talk like liberals and act like realists, as they always regret for not adopting realist logic. To maximize prospects for survival in a threatening world, countries have to compete for power, the overarching goal of a country is to be as more powerful as possible relative to their competitors. In other words, becoming a regional hegemon is the ultimate goal.

The regional orders in history: implications for climate order

Wilsonianism and the League of Nations

The Wilsonianism proposed by Woodrow Wilson was aimed to seek for world peace and universal harmony by cultivating shared principles and standards to bridge the gaps between realism and idealism. However, to some extent unmoored from the rules in the global Hobbesian jungle and taking refuge in wishful thinking, Wilsonianism, which mainly focused on international law, humanitarian objectives, and goodwill, ran into the sand due to its disconnection from a sense of geopolitics (McDougall, 2015). In other words, mortgaging futures on the cultivated goodwill is quixotical and hardly successful, because the core interests of a nation cannot be respected if itself is unable or unwilling to fight for them. The past is the best mentor for the future. The League of Nations (1920-1946) failed to promote the disarmament in 1920s and 1930s (Eloranta et al., 2011), because it failed to offer security guarantees for memberships due to a lack of resolutions for enforcements.

The downfall of Wilsonianism and the League of Nations was because policies followed public opinions which viewed agreements can be maintained by disinterested consensus and harmony is the natural condition of humans, thus often departing from Hobbesianism. For another case, Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859) could not stop the unification of Germany by Prussia, the most powerful geopolitical opponent of Austria, because his policy concentrated too much on principles but failed to maintain an equilibrium of power in central Europe. In a conventional global Hobbesian jungle, when expecting the worst from human and making a virtue of necessity, decision-makers rarely find themselves disappointed. Since climate change policy has no strong geopolitical binding force, the outcome may end up like that of the Wilsonianism-based League of Nations.

Throughout the history of humanity, two types of international order have been established and prevailing regionally, shown in Figure 1. Following the doctrines of Hobbesianism and reaching a strategic equilibrium, the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and 1815 Treaty of Vienna succeeded to maintain peace. On the contrary, following the doctrines of Wilsonianism and failing to balance the power, the League of Nations and 1919 Treaty of Versailles ended in war.

Figure 1. International orders that had prevailed in history: Following the doctrines of balancing the power, the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and 1815 Treaty of Vienna ended in obedience and peace; on the contrary, the League of Nations and 1919 Treaty of Versailles failed to balance the power and ended in disobedience and war.

The core ideas of the balance-of-power in Europe and the Confucian hierarchy in East Asia are basically similar to the Hobbesianism while the climate agreements are more likely derived from Wilsonianism.

The lodestar of an order that is supposed to be sustainable contains three elements: it defines the minimum condition of the survival of a nation, its scope must contain the minimum arrière pensée of a nation for its own development, and it must assess the maximum aspiration of a nation for pursuing its national interests. Meanwhile, a treaty should reflect a sense of shared purpose, a recognition of common threat, and the ability to gather strengths for joint actions.

Climate order

Ambiguity in the notion and scientific basis of carbon neutrality

The 2016 Paris Agreement is the first widely accepted international treaty to introduce the notion of carbon neutrality. But the concept and definition of carbon neutrality are nebulous. Whether the term ‘carbon neutrality’ only includes net zero emissions of CO₂ or contains other types of GHGs is unclear. Common GHGs include CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, NF₃, SF₆, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and perfluorocarbons (PFCs). According to Le Ravalec et al. (2022), carbon neutrality means that anthropogenic GHGs emissions are offset by reduced emissions and increased sequestrations, thus striking a balance between discharges and sinks. European Union (EU) has planned to realize climate-neutral by 2050, indicating that the EU takes the total GHGs emissions into account (European Council, 2021). However, currently, China only focuses on the net zero emissions of CO₂ and does not take the emissions of other types of GHGs into considerations.

Another discombobulating unclearness is the definition of net zero emissions. The question arises of how to evaluate whether carbon neutrality is achieved. According to Huovila et al. (2022), carbon neutrality means that CO₂ emissions are balanced by local sinks. The categories of CO₂ emissions and sinks can be divided into natural and anthropogenic sources. Recently, a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed carbon neutrality means human-induced CO₂ emissions are counterbalanced by anthropogenic CO₂ removals over a specified time horizon (IPCC, 2021). However, so far, there is still no official confirmation that whether carbon neutrality includes natural emitting sources and natural sinks or not. Anthropogenic CO₂ sinks are inclusive of two pathways: industrial and ecological. Industrial removals refer to carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies (Chen et al., 2022). Ecological removals refer to the absorption of atmospheric CO₂ through protection, restoration, and sustainable management of ecosystems (Lu et al., 2022; Griscom et al., 2017), such as afforestation and silviculture. However, because these artificially cultivated trees have been afforested all over the country, often mixed with natural forests, it’s hard to assess their total carbon sequestration abilities.

The lodestar of strategy-making process in statecraft involves five successive, ironclad elements in sequence: firstly, making a rational, pragmatic calculation of long-term trends in the grand schemes of things on the basis of national interest in order to handle the rough patches of confronted challenges; secondly, meticulously drawing a strategic landscape and then detachedly exploring the range of choices and means of tactics; thirdly, sweepingly calibrating the internal abilities of a country and then cautiously questing for any underlying congruence and confluence of interests around the world to establish potential international cooperation under the banner of mutual respect and symbiosis; fourthly, prudently opting the most eminent practical pathway of implementation, swinging into a tentative action via daring execution to outline the maximum real-life capacity, and then warily assessing the division, if at all, between the anticipatable and the achievable; fifthly, progressively, scrupulously adjusting to a more attainable, crystalized stance through nuance and osmosis to deftly realize the optimal objectives at the minimum costs amid the kaleidoscope of changing circumstances (Kissinger, 1994, 2012).

The climate issue involves two aspects that are unusual compared with the other crises. Firstly, it affects almost every country and every species in the world, thus GHGs emissions show a pattern of global externality; secondly, it represents a problem that a single country alone cannot solve (NASEM, 2017). Hence, mitigating global warming needs international cooperation. However, even though the long-term trend is clear and the strategic landscape is certain as our planet keeps heating up, but since the definition of carbon neutrality is vague, the policy-making process could not be fully completed. Ambiguity at times is the lifeblood and fulcrum of policy-planning in order to entitle the battle-hardened decision-makers enough elbowroom to create margin of flexibility, blunt the edges of tangential factional disputes, gain freedom of maneuver and degree of resilience, and balance powers (Kissinger, 1994, 2015). However, upon tactic level, a commonly-accepted definition would furnish the impetus for decisive, unified, and audacious actions, and the de facto effective policy formulation would not be come forth if the scientific notion, the bedrocks of policy-making, began to diverge.

Implications for formulating climate policies

Climate policies are refracted and filtered through the prism of national interests. Deviated from geopolitical realities, the feasibility of green growth strategies for the economy has been frequently doubted (Franssen and de Wilde, 2021), reflecting the current dilemma of many countries around the world: how to balance their carbon emissions reduction and economic development (Kotz et al., 2024), and how to seek to navigate the narrowest of passages between economic development and greenhouse gases (GHGs) reduction. Reportedly, the realizations of the commitments of GHG emission reductions by countries made in the 2016 Paris Agreement can keep the global warming below 2 °C (Meinshausen et al., 2022; Hausfather and Moore, 2022). However, as a fait accompli, with the strictest practicality and most level-headed realism, yet falling far short of their rhetoric, the 20 largest economies around the world have not fulfilled the letter of their pledges for the reduction of GHGs emissions and instead have focused more on economic developments, especially during the COVID-19 period (Nahm et al., 2022), indicating the facts that their demands for economic development have transcended their internal desire for climate change mitigation (Liu et al., 2022). The reality of the 2016 Paris Agreement seemed emphasizing atmosphere over substance, showing that most countries have deemed that sacrificing economic developments to lower climate change is pyrrhic. A predominant reason for this judgement is a sense of doubts on the unfounded and undemonstrated impact of global warming on human welfare (Lomborg, 2020). Also, some climate models predict that the future will get too hot too fast (Hausfather et al., 2022), undermining the credibility of climate science (Voosen, 2022).

In the resulting maelstrom, evidently, global CO₂ emissions in 2021 were almost equal to that in 2019 (Davis et al., 2022), exhibiting a strong rebound of anthropogenic emissions from the COVID-19 pandemic and experiencing the largest-ever yearly increment in the absolute term of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions compared to that of the previous year (IEA, 2022). The understanding that insufficient actions will never lead to political debacle results in political flexibility on climate targets (Geden and Löschel, 2017). De facto, climate order is an outgrowth of a balancing of risks and rewards in terms of geopolitical considerations and calculations of the national interests. Again, reality proves that international agreement is built on quicksand if it deviates from the doctrines of balance-of-power on the basis of Hobbesianism which embody in the German Realpolitik during the times of Bismarck and in the French Raison d'état during the times of Richelieu. Actually, departing from Bismarck’s Realpolitik and Richelieu’s Raison d'état, and ignoring current geopolitical imperatives, the milk-and-water climate agreements present an ominous vista and a myopic form of risk-taking.

With bite on granite, according to a report from World Meteorological Organization (WMO, 2022), there is a 50:50 change that the global annual average temperature for at least one of the next five years will reach 1.5°higher than the average over the years between 1850 and 1900. The visionary statesman Henry Kissinger once stated “No one eats with impunity from the tree of immortality” (Kissinger, 1994). The ends justify the means, not the other way around. The lessons of history have told us that the geopolitical imperatives are the main driving force to reshape the road towards net zero (Thompson, 2022). Carbon neutrality is hard to realize when the geopolitical realities have been ignored. Evidently, the willingness of voluntary corporate actions for mitigating global warming by companies has been frequently questioned (Bjørn et al., 2022a,b). Several world-famous companies or institutions, inclusive of Shell, British Petroleum (BP), Equinor, and International Energy Agency (IEA), introduced incompatible energy development pathways with that recommended for Paris agreements 1.5 °C goal (Brecha et al., 2022). Ratification of a climate treaty alone but neglect of the geopolitical realities never can be a sort of deus ex machina to slow down climate change. After all, for now, before the occurrence of the tipping point which is more obvious to identify in ex post facto retrospect than when we are moving towards it, carbon neutrality, for most countries, is more a price of bargaining chip for playing out geopolitical gambit, less a principle. Ultimately, in the international community, possession of power is nine-tenths of the law. To the victor belong the spoils, which is the rights to interpret the definition of carbon neutrality. Without meeting the geopolitical imperatives or considering Machiavellian realism, complying climate treaty is not a natural condition of man, but a temporary oasis in a perilous world where obedience could only be sustained by permanent vigilance.

Top climate scientists do doubt that countries around the world will effectively control global warming (Tollefson, 2021). Decades from now, historians will possibly hold a fact-finding debate on who must bear the responsibility for completing the construction of the doomsday machine that has led us to irreversible global warming and for blowing away the house of cards assembled by the most far-sighted scientists who have an unerring eye for the long-term future trend.

Yet I guess at the time of the start of this future debate, no one country will be singled out to blame for this mad dash towards climate change. Each of them contributed its own quota and did so with the carefreeness which would never again be possible when the negative consequences of global warming they have triggered enter the shared memory of humanity. In preparing themselves for the worst-case scenario, they facilitate to make it a reality and are hoisted by their own petard. However, taking the future with a grain of salt, I deem that when temperature keeps going up with the passage of time to the degree that will impact the geopolitical imperative of most countries, the gains for lowering global warming transcend that for pursuing social and economic developments and major economics will place a greater premium on curbing GHGs emissions without falling by the wayside. Reportedly, the time to take alarm for human survival as the tipping point is when the increase of global average temperature exceeds at most 5 °C above preindustrial levels (Lenton et al., 2019; O’Grady, 2022; McKay et al., 2022).

Actionable recommendations and future work

My suggestion is that when policymakers are formulating climate policies, they must consider the geopolitical realities. Evidently, without taking geopolitical imperatives into considerations, the endeavors to mitigate global warming are limited in the effectiveness (Thompson, 2022). For instance, China used its rare earth mineral resources as a weapon to weaken its geopolitical opponents. Rare earth minerals are essential for the development of renewable energy. Meanwhile, due to the Taiwan crisis in August 2022, driven by a realistic evaluation on national interests and internal capabilities, China announced the suspension of Sino-US climate talks. Therefore, if only history were more forgiving, it seems that the world is still waiting for the occurrence of the tipping points, as determination is the handmaid of destiny. Destiny deals the hands and men plays the cards.

When an international order cannot be actualized by consensus or enforced by power, chaos may occur in a dehumanizing way. Since the tolerance of temperature rise for different countries differs, confronting may fill the vacuum between the different tipping points of two countries. From the perspectives of Machiavelli and Clausewitz, in the battle for survival, a nation may use the GHGs emissions as a weapon to weaken its geopolitical opponents who are more sensitive to climate change.

When dealing with a challenge, a proper understanding of three things is necessary: the possible threats that may appear, history’s lessons for the best common method to address the danger, and how to apply the current era’s resources in the most efficient way. The tectonic stress of crafting climate policies is that climate conventions, e.g., 2016 Paris Agreement, treat all countries equal, demanding them to achieve carbon equality, but every country seeks its rightful place in the pecking order in an unequal world which is dominated by power politics. For policy-makers, events can begin to take on their own momentum, overwhelming those who now worry about the outcome of their earlier decisions. In global Hobbesian jungle, climate policies should be integrated into an overall geopolitical framework, which determines whether a country would lead or lag in achieving relevant actions toward carbon neutrality (Meckling et al., 2022). Otherwise, there must always be a repeated disjunction between what countries say and what they do (Barrett, 2018). Without powerful international leadership, large global commons problems will continue to be ceded to humanitarian organizations and the voluntary behaviors of groups which lack of statecraft and power (Boyd et al., 2018) and are not on track to close the gap between ambition and action (Bistline et al., 2023). Even though climate economics is important (Dietz et al., 2021; Tienhaara et al., 2022), climate politics should be considered first (Moyer, 2024). Policymakers must balance sustainable development, climate change, and geopolitics.

Once Bismarck wrote in his poet: “That which is imposing here on earth has always something of the quality of the fallen angel who is beautiful but without peace, great in his conceptions and exertions but without success, proud and lonely.”

Data availability

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