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/.
I see two problems, or shall I say causes
The first is the quarterly report, the salaries and benefits, not to mention tenure of the executives of corporations depends on the latest quarterly report. This leads to short term thinking, the future be damned they want to survive the next three months. That's the Achilles heel of capitalism, and the threat to mammalian life on earth. Whereas dictatorships like China, think long term with 5 year plans, and even longer future goals.
The second would be racism, not the over kind where people are called names, and visibly discriminated against.
Musk is an avowed racist, and a neo NAZI,,his acne squad of Big Balls and friends, killed USAID, and Trump has neutered the State Department. The result is that Africa and other third world counties will suffer even more from the ravages of disease and climate change, which will lead (hopefully for Musk , et al) a decrease in the non white population, but the unintended consequences will be an increase in migration north, resulting in a rise of the right in the form of fascism (neo NAZI) political organizations and even governments. Orban, and now FIico's Slovakia. All European countries are moving right because of immigration, not so much because of racism. (American racism is different and has different roots than any racism in Europe), but because of the threat of powerful, insistent and homogeneous ultra conservative culture, that of Islam, threatening to overwhelm liberal western culture.
As America retreats Russia and China advance, Russia brings its mercenaries, like the Wagner Group, as essentially body guards for the reigning regime. China brings the promise of construction, rail roads and ports. Railroads and ports that will transport resources to China and import goods from China. It promises but supposedly is not so good at delivering.
America retreats, Russia and China advances, it is almost as if by design.
America under Trump has become a second rate world power. The only power he has is our propensity and addiction to consume resources and products, and that ability is powered by debt, government, corporate, private.
And that ability is declining, Moody's downgraded the U.S. government's credit rating from the highest possible (Aaa) to Aa1 in May 2025, citing rising federal debt, mounting interest costs, and fiscal imbalances. This move caused Treasury yields to spike, which can increase borrowing costs for consumers and pressure the stock market.
The rise in interest rates leads to a reduction in consumption, a reduction in consumption leads to a loss of sales, a loss of sales leads to a loss of jobs, in production, transportation, advertising, sales personnel, maintenance personnel, etc, and that is why Trump needs the Fed to reduce interest rates.
However reducing interest rates will only affect the national market, it will reduce the interest rates the Fed charges member banks as they purchase government securities, which they use as their fractional reserve base, the base that they use when they loan (and thus create) money, when they approve a mortgage or you swipe your credit card.
A reduction interest rates has nothing to do with the interest charged on your credit card balance
And nothing to do with the interest on government securities (Treasury bonds and bills), they are sold to the Association of Primary Dealers in Government Securities, which then sells them to the Fed, institutions and overseas investors (sovereign funds and Central banks) They are printed with a Yield but as the demand decreases, the discount price also decreases, in other words they are sold at discount, and if the rating drops lower the discount price further increases
Trump is too stupid, too ignorant, he doesn't know this stuff,so he is being advised, by who? Bessent?
Trump apparently believes that by dropping interest rates, he is going to spur consumption, and give an illusion of prosperity, but his policies (immigration, tariffs, social/political like SNAP) are hurting the economy
Not to fear though, his base, farmers, rural America, the heartland which is MAGA remain firmly in the cult, their quality of life may degenerate, but at least he is winning the culture war, saving them from the threat of. Spanish speaking brown people and that enemy to be feared above all else. the gransgendered.
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.