SCMP: As Larsen C Prepares To Break Up, So Too Will Existing Global Leadership - On Climate & More
With rich and tragic irony, Trump spoke as China’s Li Keqiang met European ministers to reaffirm their commitment to the 2015 Paris agreement – a new European friend for a new world order. Leaders in Europe seemed transfixed, perplexed and appalled to watch the US deserting a peaceful and cooperative world order that the US itself had forged after the Second World War, and were forced to begin contemplating a new world order with the US at the margins – or worse still, entirely absent from the field of play.
After disagreements with Trump on trade, Russia, Nato and finally climate, Angela Merkel cryptically captured Europe’s mood: “The times when we could completely rely on others are, to an extent, over.” Less noticed, but with tragic symbolism for all who are concerned about the pace of global warming, Trump’s withdrawal came as 1,900 square miles of the Larsen C ice sheet in the western Antarctic began to separate to become the biggest iceberg ever to be born – that is three times the area of Singapore or 20 times that of Hong Kong Island. If, as scientists expect, this destabilises the entire Larsen C ice sheet, the result could in due course lift global water levels by six metres.
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As Europeans cringe at Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, it is important to remember he speaks for a large and longstanding community that we outside the US have wilfully ignored. Alarmingly, the America we know and admire as a champion of global freedoms, and architect of the international institutions that have framed a peaceful world over the past seven decades, seems to have no home in this Trumpian heartland.
As the US under Trump withdraws from its long-valued world leadership role, and people in Europe like Merkel and Emmanuel Macron seek new, more predictable allies, it is hard to resist the feeling that China has been handed a strategic gift. Its progress towards world leadership alongside the US was perhaps inevitable, but Trump’s dangerous unpredictability in core areas like international trade, climate change, Nato defence commitments or even engagements with Russia seem set to project China into a power vacuum that yearns to be filled.
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http://www.scmp.com/business/article/2096811/donald-trump-gift-keeps-giving-china-centre-stage-role-new-world-order