Self defeating

I’ve been off enjoying wife Jackie’s Sarah Lawrence reunion, which followed hard on my own Haverford festivities. But I’ve not been completely out of touch. By now, it should be obvious to all that

1. The President of the United States has inappropriate and counterproductive reactions to terrorist events.
2. His withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate accord is inane.

Let us consider these two propositions.

The London attacks on Saturday provoked Trump to tweets that called his own travel ban a Travel Ban (thus removing any doubt about its intentions), suggested that current American security measures are inadequate (who, pray tell, is responsible for that?), criticized the (Muslim) mayor of London for trying to reassure the city’s population that the appropriate security measures had been taken, retweeted an exaggerated report of the number killed from a notoriously unreliable source, and suggested that the use of knives by the attackers has somehow silenced the gun debate in the US.

I can’t imagine anyone I know having any one of these reactions to an attack in which the police reacted quickly and effectively to prevent what might otherwise have been a much more serious loss of life. Terrorists seek to create terror. Trump’s reactions were fearful, amplified the magnitude of the attack, and brought him to bizarre conclusions. Contrast this with his personal failure to react to the murder by a white supremacist of two men trying to defend a Muslim and a black woman in Portland, Oregon on Friday. That didn’t fit the Islamic extremism narrative Trump is trying to promote. Hence the silence, even though two Americans were murdered. Homicidal white supremacist attacks in America have been almost three times frequent as Islamist attacks since 9/11.

As for climate change, the President sought to justify his decision on the basis of falsehoods. That of course made no difference to him. Nor did support for the Paris climate agreement from American industry. He preferred to claim to be saving the relatively few coal miner jobs that remain, which won’t happen, and to be serving the interests of the citizens of Pittsburgh, which gave up coal and steel as its primary industrial activities decades ago and voted 75% for Hillary Clinton (not quite the 80% the mayor claimed).

The international ramifications of withdrawal from the Paris accord are many:

1. The US may still have a seat at the table, but it will no longer be able to speak with any moral authority on the issue of climate change.
2. Leadership on that will shift to China, which is giving up a lot of coal-powered electrical plants, and to Europe, both of which are forging ahead with renewable sources of energy that will produce lots more jobs than those lost in the coal industry.
3. No country will in the future accept any American push on environmental standards to be included in trade agreements–all will first require that the US re-commit to Paris.
4. Trump’s personal standing with many world leaders, already shaky, will decline sharply.

America may still meet its Paris agreement goals, because natural gas is replacing coal rapidly due to market forces and American states and private industry will continue to try to limit greenhouse gases. That would be the ultimate irony: we pay the price for getting out of the agreement, but still meet its targets. That and Trump’s reaction to the London incident are self-defeating.