There has been considerable commentary regarding the decline of American global leadership over the last several years. For well-meaning minds in the rapidly declining Cold War-era rightward political center, the most astonishing changes have been those surrounding American alliances and military postures. For another set of Cold War–era brains who uncomfortably saw the political center shift rightward, the American response to the global climate emergency has been a sign of weakening global preeminence.
The climate emergency facing our Earth is a global calamity. Just in 2003, the World Health Organization estimated that 150,000 people were dying each year due to the planet’s warming. That was twenty years ago. The impact was already evident in increased opportunities for people in post-colonial nations to contract malaria and diarrheal disease in warmer waters, as well as disruptions to crop supply lines that exacerbated famine and rendered nations vulnerable to starvation. Those numbers were from 2003. By the time Jessica Williams published 50 Facts That Should Change the World 2.0 in 2007, she could write that man-made climate change was “indisputable.”
Since then, the numbers have only sharpened. The WHO now estimates that between 2030 and 2050, climate change will cause at least 250,000 additional deaths per year…just from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat. In Europe alone, more than 61,000 people died in the summer of 2022 from extreme heat, and across three consecutive summers (2022–2024), the toll reached 181,000. In the United States, wildfire smoke has killed more than 160,000 people since 2006, with projections suggesting 70,000 Americans could die each year by the 2050s if warming continues unchecked. South Asia and the Sahel, meanwhile, face a brutal arithmetic: extreme heat plus fragile infrastructure equals silent epidemics of undernutrition, stunting, and disease.
And yet America has pulled back. The withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement was not only a diplomatic misstep but the culmination of deeper American-flavored fractures. It was driven by the incentives of domestic partisan politics, by the cultural hangover of regions that once trained laborers rather than thinkers and now recoil at scientific expertise, and by a well-funded machine of negative polarization that thrives on mistrust. In a century that demands literacy in data, climate science, and global interdependence, America’s allergy to expertise looks less like rugged individualism and more like national sabotage.
This is where the long arc of American exceptionalism collapses into its mask of unexceptionalism. The nation that once promised a global “American century” cannot muster the political courage to lead the planet’s most urgent collective action. The League of Nations faltered after the First World War because the U.S. refused to join; nearly a century later, the Paris Agreement is faltering under the same sovereignty anxieties and the same suspicion of supranational responsibility.
It is history rhyming, and again, the rhyme costs lives.
The inability of the world’s most agile, endowed (for now), and once-regarded nation to lead in this climate emergency not only creates an environmental power vacuum but also emboldens the worst instincts of power elsewhere. China touts its Belt and Road renewables while the U.S. dithers. The European Union positions its Green Deal as a form of soft power, while America squanders its credibility. If Cold War nostalgists fixate on NATO’s troop deployments, then they miss the true measure of decline: not tanks or treaties, but the silence of American leadership on the warming of the only home we have.
But perhaps this was always in the genes. America’s body politic has long been calcified by racialized backlash, quick to paralyze progress whenever it threatened hierarchies of class and color. A two-party system flattens a continental nation into binary choices, simplifying and obscuring diverse realities into crude slogans. In that simplification, the incentive structures reward surface radicalization. What wins a news cycle can rarely govern a nation, let alone marshal global consensus.
And yet, the possibility remains.
Climate change presents the ultimate opportunity to build consensus, not from fear, but from a shared love of a planet that nurtures cultures, foods, and histories too rich to lose. We are a species that can cross oceans in hours, that can split atoms and beam voices across satellites, that can, in the same breath, annihilate itself in nuclear fire or chart a sustainable course for centuries to come.
To fumble that bag, as the young folks say, is not only the tragedy of the American century, but the betrayal of a human story that still could be extraordinary.
References
Ballester, Joan, et al. “The Impact of Heat on Mortality in Europe during the Summer of 2022.” Nature Medicine 29, no. 8 (2023): 1813–1821. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-023-02419-z.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II, and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: IPCC, 2023. https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6.
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). “Forecasts of Fatalities: Mapping the Health Impacts of Extreme Heat.” Press release, January 2025. https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2025/forecasts-fatalities-mapping-health-impacts-extreme-heat.
Williams, Jessica. 50 Facts That Should Change the World 2.0. London: Icon Books, 2007.
World Health Organization (WHO). “Climate Change and Health.” Fact Sheet, updated December 2023. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health.
“People Are Dying from Climate Change. But How Many?” E&E News, April 2023. https://www.eenews.net/articles/people-are-dying-from-climate-change-but-how-many/.
Right now, the American voter has stumbled into the clutches of a leader who is totally immoral and driven by lies, greed, racism, and fear. The entire administration is corrupt, taking bribes from everyone and disregarding laws. They have captured a cult following by using racism and religion wrapped in the flag. They are well funded by a group of entitled billionaires who want to own everything.
But this is not what most Americans want. We have to openly stand in opposition, make sure we have free elections, and irk together to crush this fascist/religious MAGA movement.