“US an increasingly bizarre disruptive factor in global politics”

A basic principle of international law says that “agreements must be kept,” Stefan Kornelius writes in a commentary for Süddeutsche Zeitung. By publicly pondering whether to pull his country out of the Paris Climate Agreement, US President Donald Trump “ignores” this principle and provides proof for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s warning that the US currently cannot be fully relied on anymore, he writes. It would be an “almost insane contradiction” if Trump decided to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as he would ignore the opinion of climate, economics, and energy experts, and would instead listen to a group of advisers, “who might well believe the world was made in six working days”, Kornelius argues. Even if Trump “doesn’t understand anything about climate policy”, he should be made wary by the fact that strategists from both political camps in the US fear that Washington could say farewell to its leadership role, and could instead become “a bizarre disruptive factor in global politics”.

Read the article in German here.

See the CLEW article German reactions to reports on US withdrawal from Paris Agreement for more information.