"Paris was nothing but hot air. Withdrawing was a perfectly plausible policy choice (the other being remaining but trying to reduce our CO2-cutting commitments). The subsequent attacks on Trump were all the more unhinged because the president's other behavior over the last several weeks provided ample opportunity for shock and dismay."
"Take Trump's climate-change decision. The hyperbole that met his withdrawal from the Paris agreement -- a traitorous act of war against the American people, America just resigned as leader of the free world, etc. -- was astonishing, though hardly unusual, this being Trump.
"What the critics don't seem to recognize is that the Paris agreement itself was a huge failure. It contained no uniform commitments and no enforcement provisions. Sure, the whole world signed. But onto what? A voluntary set of vaporous promises. China pledged to "achieve the peaking of CO2 emissions around 2030." Meaning that they rise for another 13 years.
"The rationale, I suppose, is that developing countries like India and China should be given a pass because the West had a two-century head start on industrialization." . . .
"It's good to see our Sunni allies confront Qatar and try to bring it into line. But why make it personal -- other than to feed the presidential id? Gratuitously injecting the U.S. into the crisis taints the endeavor by making it seem an American rather than an Arab initiative and turns our allies into instruments of American designs rather than defenders of their own region from a double agent in their midst.
And this is just four days' worth of tweets, all vainglorious and self-injurious. Where does it end?"
