The National Interest
Fall 2001

Bonn Voyage

by Daniel Bodansky

 

. . . Perhaps the decisive factor contributing to Bonn's success was President Bush's own actions. Before the meeting, most observers had expected that his rejection of Kyoto would deflate the process, depriving it of the momentum necessary for success. But Bush's decision had the opposite effect: It united countries around the Kyoto Protocol and galvanized them into action. The peremptory way in which the administration acted—repudiating years of multilateral work in response to domestic special interests, without consulting other countries or undertaking a serious policy review—combined with his failure to offer a credible alternative, stuck in other countries' craws. When the spokesman for the developing countries declared at the end of the meeting that the Bonn agreement represented the triumph of multilateralism over unilateralism, he received a rousing ovation. The Bush Administration compounded its mistakes by taunting the Europeans for not having ratified Kyoto, implying that they were hypocrites. Thus, the European Union came to Bonn determined to make whatever compromises were necessary to reach agreement and so prove Bush wrong.

American disengagement from the Bonn negotiations also made agreement easier from a substantive standpoint. In The Hague, the Clinton Administration felt it had to win on virtually every issue to have even a prayer of overcoming Senate opposition to Kyoto. By contrast, other countries had fewer walk-away issues and thus could agree more easily on a compromise package in Bonn. In particular, the U.S. absence made one of the most contentious issues easier to resolve: how much credit to give for the carbon sucked out of the atmosphere by carbon "sinks." With the United States out, the Europeans had plenty of room to accommodate the demands for sink credits by Japan and Canada, since they no longer had to satisfy the much larger demands of the United States. . . .