Next 4 Years' Lesser-Evil Impact on Global Climate Cooperation?

Kamala and Joe by Nancy Ohanian

-by Emorej

Long-term, many have analysed how a Biden-Harris win in 2020 could cement Harris’s dominance of the Democratic Presidential nominating process, likely until 2032 (after 1 Biden term and 2 Harris terms). Similarly, one could argue that a Trump loss in 2020 would accelerate the Republican transition to a new Presidential nominee who would pursue most of Trump’s ugliest policies with more consistency, diligence and governing knowhow, and who could easily win in 2024 if Biden-Harris stick to their telegraphed track of too-little-too-late economic stimulus and healthcare reform while blaming "pantry emptied out by Trump’s [Pelosi-supported] bailouts of Wall Street!"

But the following shorter-term analysis also requires consideration:

• Global action against climate change can only start with cooperation between USA, China, Russia, etc.
• Such cooperation cannot start until the USA’s militaristic (& finance-weaponizing) hegemonism is downgraded to merely “first among equals” in a new balance of power.
• This downgrading is unlikely to happen until Germany leads much of Western Europe into terminating their 75 years of mainly deferring to the USA.
• Germany has been mainly waiting out Trump’s first term, but Trump’s re-election would probably catalyze that termination (facilitated by Trump’s absurd obsession with Germany’s failure to raise its military spending to 2% of GDP, although the biggest catalyst will probably be USA sanctions on the nearly completed Russia-German gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea).
• In contrast, the Biden-Harris foreign policy team:


(a) will put top priority on restoring Germany’s prior trend-line of very slow erosion of deference to the USA,

(b) will put much lower priority on de-escalating the confrontations that Trump has initiated with China and (under pressure from Russiagaters) with Russia, and

(c) will put medium priority on de-escalating with Iran, which will not be easy when constrained by the political mentality behind Harris’s recent pledge that USA aide to Israel will be “unconditional.”

Meanwhile, domestically:

• Serious action against climate change can only start when the federal government allocates massive new resources towards the poor people who are dependent on the fossil fuel economy, and away from the politically dominant industries who are enriched by fossil fuels and weapons manufacturing (and usage).
• The unlikeliness of Biden-Harris making these politically difficult changes is dramatized by their refusal to even pretend to make the popular (with voters) and pandemic-justified (to many donors) change of supporting Medicare-For-All.

A re-elected Trump, in contrast, would be unpredictable. At worst, he would start a shooting war with China, and, when an aircraft carrier or two gets sunk, he would start firing nuclear weapons, which could easily trigger an uncontrollable cycle of retaliatory escalations. But the military command structure knows that Trump is impetuous, so they are more likely to delay and/or sabotage his impulsive military orders than they would if the same orders were generated by a more professional process of the more diplomatic Biden-Harris team. Trump is likely to find governing as a lame-duck second termer to be even less fun than what has happened so far, and it would be logical form him to be tempted to declare victory and resign (for health reasons, of course) in return for pardons from Pence. Europe would doubtless find anybody more tolerable than Trump, but Europe also hosted centuries of religious wars, and is unlikely to be wooed back, into deference, by a USA President with Pence’s profile of religious extremism.