Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) firstly developed a biological-psychological description of human nature based on inherent self-affirmation and reason, from which the starting point of modern politics might lie ( Xifra, 2017). Hobbes argued that the perpetual and unchanging humanity accords the politics and order timeless necessity ( Ewin, 2001). John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) also traced a similar viewpoint that timeless self-love frames the direction of social evolution. Sown in the nature of man, the principles and legitimacy through the evolution of human society have been established, so is the international order. On the basis of self-love and intrinsic yet frail sense of reason in essentially Hobbesian analysis, conventional order has seen peoples and nations—regarded as inherently competitive with a Sisyphean character—two intrinsic purposes: survival and development, which are labelled as the core interests of all living organisms, of which the inner dynamic of self-preservation is the fundamental driving force. Natural selection favors the genes that manipulate the world to ensure their own reproduction and altruism is not a part of our biological nature ( Dawkins, 1989). The strength of a people or a society is the principle of order with which it most efficiently marshals its limited resources. When two nations meet, a testing of limits and strengths is inevitable and then a broader range of order may emerge as a corollary of collisions between two unparallel egos. Goodwill and neutrality are required to reach an agreement or a consensus peacefully. But in international politics, the imperatives of geopolitics override the pursuit of philosophical loftiness or moral purity ( Kissinger, 2015), rendering a pragmatic dimension on actions. So as to the issue of global warming, leadership does not need to search for an idealism at the expense of lowering a country’s aspiration for survival and development. The ultimate motivation to curb climate change is distilled from an ecumenical calculation of national interests, not ethical restraints. In this view, the possible gain and loss from climate change are integrated into a panoramic analysis of national interests. What matters is how to incorporate the climate change with the other factors that impact on the survival and development of a nation into a design to make an overall guideline for policy-making. After all, the only sustainable foundation of policy of great powers is egotism and there is no reciprocity for sentimental policies. No country would do anything regarded as the rewards for others’ sacrifice. Entente cordiale is strictly due to utility, not gratitude.

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 Hobbesian analysis 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 Hobbesian analysis, 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.

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.

The treaties of Westphalia in 1648, which was aimed to reduce the risks of exhaustion by excessive consumption of human resources and drain of strength in vain by congenitally competitive nature of man in the incessant competitions, had marked a turning point in the history of Europe ( Kissinger, 1994), verifying that peace and sovereign equality can be established upon balancing rivalries and appealing to all participants into a shared search for establishing order. In Westphalian principle, a system can be constrained in a narrow range of equilibrium through limiting the more powerful competitors by spontaneous alliance of counterweighing forces. Since the powers are in constant flux, the ingenuity of Westphalia-style order embodies in its pathway: it is essentially procedural, not substantive ( Kissinger, 2015). In this view, adroitly maintaining the equilibrium and deftly shifting in coalescence as a balancer towards the weak side among powers is the central strategic purport of foreign policy for a nation, effectively preventing the emergence of a Machiavellian approach by the strongest nation. The kernel of this kind of order is epitomized by its fluidity and pragmatism. Even though some may point out that equilibrium is the temporary consequence of an intermeshing of self-serving intentions, history has revealed that the eras of the successful enforcement of balance-of-power were the most peaceful time in Europe. For example, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 ushered in a century of comparative stability in Europe, because it achieved the geopolitical equilibrium in Central Europe. The success of peace-keeping in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia indicates that only by achieving a geopolitical balance-of-power can a treaty be implemented and obeyed. Since the damages of climate change is too difficult to make similar evaluation among countries, the willingness to vindicate the GHGs emissions too multifarious, and imposing punishment for violation is highly likely out of the question, the climate agreements only spin a web of moral restrictions without geopolitical restraints. Thus, the weakness of climate treaty is the interests of countries in a changing climate are not uniform and the enforcement is rarely seamless, leading to inaction whose alibi may be circumspection. The signatories of climate treaties may highly possibly witness the withdraw of the most powerful member who feels its own survival will not be much impacted in a warming climate. Actually, on November 4, 2019, the United States announced its decision to withdraw from the 2016 Paris Agreement.

In East Asia, as nations shared the devastating experience of the conflicts derived from misunderstandings, they were committed to preventing the recurrence of warfare. Since Asian countries had more distinguished languages and cultures than Europe, their predominant goal was to find a way to clearly understand the real intention of the distinct neighborhoods to prevent high-wire acts. Overcoming the obstacles in the communications of the continent's diverse peoples, ancient China had established a tributary system to foster an order based on the hierarchical concepts of Confucianism. The essence of this tributary system is not so much material as ritual and conceptual. In fact, China often gave more gifts to the tributary countries than tributary countries offered to China ( Kissinger, 2012). China’s goal was neither to acquire economic gains nor to seek domination, but to reduce the possibilities of potential conflicts triggered by misconceptions or incomprehension of the surrounding nations that had disparate cultures and to promote deference from its recalcitrant neighbors. The prerequisite for countries that chose to join this tributary order was the acceptance of the peaceful resolution of disputes with a shared etiquette of fair conducts among all participants, acting as a decisive catalyst to satisfy all sides' amour propre. China regarded itself as the patriarch of this familial hierarchy with a role in keeping the etiquette functioning smoothly. The genius of this kind of order whose courtesy emphasizes reciprocity is that it’s procedural, not substantive, softly sending all players to find its appropriate place in the system, ensuring dissatisfaction of countries in the East Asia lower than the level at which some may seek to overthrow the established order, and preventing the emergence of a geopolitical rival with the national strength close to China. Through this international order, China had prospered for a long time in history. But when China became weak, the equilibrium of power was broken at the periphery of China and this tributary system inevitably collapsed. In essence, this Chinese-created international system is a balance-of-power in all but name. Similar to the lessons from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the international order in East Asia proved that only by realizing the balance-of-power can a treaty be sustained. The Confucian hierarchy is the Chinese version of Realpolitik and Raison d'état, for assembled therein was similar to the essence of Hobbesianism, indicating when making climate policies in East Asia, geopolitical imperatives should be considered.

The lessons from Wilsonianism, the League of Nations, the Westphalian balance-of-power, and the Confucian tributary hierarchy indicate that agreements or consensus can be only made possible upon the pursuit and fulfillment of self-interests of each participant and that a sustainable order can only be founded in a more procedural and less substantive framework that guarantees, if not boosts, the internal core interests of major players.

In this view, the precondition of the success of the 2016 Paris Agreement depends on a thoroughly, accurate analysis on each nation’s threshold for threats of global warming. Order formation is where the past meets the future. The northern nations, with a cold climate, may prefer to withhold explicit commitments and wait for a major domestic threat from climate change to take specific shape. For example, Russia did not join the Paris Agreement until September 2019. For those nations that have a narrow margin of safety in a warming age, they may find their survival and developments in danger from a smaller degree of climate change than that which causes the other countries to be alarmed. The lifeblood of creating climate policy is reflected in the balance it strikes between the prediction of what the impending risks of climate change are and the evaluation on how much it costs to mitigate it. Each nation’s own methods of calculation given to each variable are the fulcrum to formulate policy. If the scale is tilted towards mitigation, actions may obtain an extent of spontaneity. However, the perspectives on national interests (survival and development) are too diverse and historical experiences too distinct among cultures. For instance, where American envisions infinite optimism, Russian may experience stoic forbearance.

The maximum temperature increase for which different countries can tolerate diverge. Variant degrees of tolerance for climate change among nations may lead to the countries with high threshold to use its endurance as a bargaining chip to render a broad berth for practical necessities towards their own geopolitical advantage. Brinkmanship may become an end result of instituting policies. Thus, climate-related policies are inclined to be integrated into an overall assessment of geopolitical realities, under the framework of either Europe’s Westphalian equilibrium or East Asia’s Sino-centric hierarchy. Since the geopolitical power is in constant flux, the climate order is not so much as a Newtonian concept of interlocking mechanical clockwork regularity as a Darwinian evolution of the survival of the fittest.

Global agreements on climate issues can be traced back to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but up to now, no considerable coordinated mitigation has come about yet ( Nordhaus, 2021). The United Nations (UN) plays a role as a platform whose framework provides a procedural, not substantive pathway to blunt the edges of controversies among nations. Thereby, a new order that has combined Europe’s Westphalian equilibrium and East Asia’s Sino-centric hierarchy has been established. Five predominant powers, inclusive of China, the United States of America (USA), Russia, the United Kingdom (UK), and France, have been selected as the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, balancing each other. When these five great powers pursue their own interests with restrain, their intermeshing ambitions can reach an equilibrium, and then possibly an agreement can be fulfilled. Inside the top UN hierarchy, the five permanent numbers are in a Westphalia-style balance-of-power. Outside the top of hierarchy, they act as the patriarchs under the banner of the Charter of the United Nations, mastering the art of adopting a calibrated combination of rewards and punishments to settle disputes and abate conflicts.

A new concept of the climate club has been proposed recently to combat free-riding countries, as the participants in the club supposedly are obliged to take a uniform tariff on all imports from non-club nations ( Nordhaus, 2021). While highly possibly analogous to the test for Wilsonianism-based League of Nations, the trial on the climate club may never be whether the club members are able to enshrine or consecrate the treaty on curbing climate change via amply elaborate rules with a wide range of signatories. The fundamental test is what to do if these rules are violated, challenged, or even manipulated against the core ideas of the club and how to execute it. The fabric of the entire planning edifice may unravel and be out of kilter even if just one strand were drawn out. Hence, in a systematic and conceptual manner, a precondition for the success of the climate club is that those who have been required to take the lead in checking the disobedience of its principles view the dangers of climate change in the same light and have the willpower and capability to mete out the punishments to anyone who violates the principles.

Thus, in this climate club, the guardians of the principles of climate order are of great importance, especially as the power and willingness of countries to maintain these principles are in an ever-changing, fluid equilibrium. Not only proscription is enough, but also prevention is needed by forces. An agreement is workable only if it reflects a balance-of-power. The failure of the enforcements of collective security established from the concepts of Wilsonianism and the League of Nations was because the definition of violation was so vague and the reluctance to take joint action so strong.

Thus, not to put too fine a point on it, doubts arise on what action to take if a member of the Paris Agreement is so determined to disobey the principles, and if the democratic public consider that punitive measures by forces are against current international laws in the framework of UN. Can the rules and principles of the climate club themselves build an order, or are they adding a scaffold unto the geopolitical structure that currently exists? Will the climate order construct a live-and-let-live system? In case of violation, confrontation, or didactic cooperation, which may prevail? If an international framework for cooperation is only made possible when it’s more procedural and less substantive, is the criterion for selecting memberships on the basis of their power or a low threshold of climate change impact? What role will the climate club play when geopolitical imperatives transcend it? How will it compensate for the sacrifices made by countries with high thresholds of climate change risk under the shadow of the future?

As an old saying goes that “history does not repeat; it rhymes” ( Kissinger, 2012). In a Hobbesian analysis, a contest over the preeminence in an order is always predictable and foreseeable. Matters of specific tariff concessions or negotiating norms are not as important as contesting for the leadership over the nature of the climate order. As discussed above that the principles of climate club will be highly likely integrated into a global geopolitical structure, not as a separate order, carbon neutrality is a matter of price, not principle, for the essence of climate orders is based on the geopolitical interests. And a climate institution should consist of a core group of hard-nosed countries to obtain a certain degree of hegemonic stability. Only by this way, a country would have a reason and willingness to accept an international system in which to anchor itself.