The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation

Hard as preventing a spiral of nuclear proliferation may be, it is easy compared to stabilizing climate change. Aside from the technological difficulties, there are daunting financial and political costs associated with the measures necessary for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. (Arms control and nonproliferation, by contrast, actually save money.) Furthermore, we have been living with the danger of blowing ourselves up for over sixty years. The danger that we will disastrously overheat the earth - or, depending on the vicissitudes of climate change, drown, starve, or, in some parts of the world, choke or freeze ourselves to death-is a new nightmare. The prospect of its coming true lies beyond the horizon of many of us alive today, and perhaps of our children, too.

The generation after theirs, however, may not be so lucky. Brooke and I are among the millions for whom that reckoning is not an abstraction. Our first grandchild, Lola, was born at the end of April 2007. We don’t want her to discover whether the optimists or the pessimists are right about climate change, especially since even the optimists-at least the scientifically respectable ones-are, with nearly every new report, less reassuring. Dick Cheney famously warned in the context of terrorism that if there is even a 1 percent chance of something very bad happening, we should act as though it were a certainty. [3] Since the odds are approaching 100 percent that if humankind continues to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will alter the planet in ways that no one can predict, Cheney’s rule should make him, on the subject of climate change, Al Gore’s soulmate.

In order to slow down the rate at which the earth is warming, the United States, the European Union, Russia, and nine other countries-the so-called “dirty dozen” that account for 80 percent of the problem-will have to accept mandatory cuts. Half are considered developing countries. Under the Kyoto Protocol, they get a pass on binding reductions. The Big Three are India and China (whose giant populations and thriving economies make them major greenhouse-gas emitters) and Brazil (the leading source of greenhouse gases produced by tropical deforestation).*

The Kyoto Protocol will expire in 2012. That means the next U.S. president will have less than four years to play a decisive role in the design of an effective successor regime. The United States will have to lead by both diplomacy and example. Only if America passes legislation to impose stringent limits on itself and offers other countries, especially developing ones, substantial incentives to be part of a global effort will Kyoto be replaced by an accord mandating universal reductions.

It is asking a lot of the world to grapple simultaneously with nuclear proliferation and climate change, but it is not asking too much given the stakes. Public recognition of the way in which these and other dangers are connected might help galvanize support for the necessary remedies, sacrifices, and tradeoffs.

For example, policymakers and publics alike need to recognize that climate change could exacerbate the perils-themselves connected-of pandemics and the political breakdown of whole countries and even regions. The warming of the earth is almost certain to have a cascading effect. Some experts fear that as the permafrost melts, long-dormant microbes, perhaps including virulent pathogens, will be released into the environment. Also, as farmlands turn to dust belts or deserts, and as heavily populated coastal areas are inundated, whole nations will be thrown into economic and political chaos, with all the potential that portends for internal and cross-border violence.

Projections indicate that the more onerous effects of climate change will be in poorer parts of the world, where soaring temperatures, encroaching sands, and rising sea levels are likely to cause or hasten the failure of fragile states. In failing, they will teach us the linkage between their misery and our insecurity: failed states are often outlaw states, sources of regional instability, incubators of terrorism, and thriving markets for lethal technology. [4]

There is also a connection between climate change and proliferation on the solution side of the equation: peaceful nuclear energy is coming back into fashion because it relies on available technology and produces no greenhouse gases. As the world increases its reliance on nuclear-generated energy, emerging nations will need assistance from advanced ones to build and fuel hundreds of new nuclear-power plants. In exchange for that help, they may accept tighter controls on the material and know-how that otherwise can be used for bombs and forgo efforts to acquire fuel-production technology, which can also be applied to making weapons. The result could be a twenty-first-century version of the Atoms for Peace plan of 1953 and a much-needed shot in the arm for the NPT.

Dwight Eisenhower chose to put his idea before the world from the podium of the General Assembly, and in the decades that followed, the system provided his successors with a mechanism for pursuing global arms control and nonproliferation. In a similar way, the UN can, in the years to come, serve as a forum for the diplomacy-in the first instance among the big powers, but involving the smaller ones as well-to strike the crosscutting deals that will be necessary to slow down climate change and stop nuclear proliferation.

If the story told in this book is any guide, it is an open question whether humankind is capable of responding adequately-and that means quickly and boldly-to proliferation and climate change. By and large, breakthroughs in the great experiment of nations learning to work together have come in the wake of explosions in the laboratory: it took the bloody stalemate of the Battle of Kadesh for Pharaoh Ramses II to parley with the Hittite king Hattusili; it took the Thirty Years War to bring about the Treaty of Westphalia; it took the Napoleonic wars to inspire the Concert of Europe; it took World War I to achieve what turned out to be the false start of the League of Nations; only after World War II did the world’s leaders try again, more successfully, with the United Nations.The most pertinent and encouraging exception to this woeful pattern was the maintenance of the nuclear peace during the cold war: it did not take World War III to spur the international regulation of national arsenals; the looming menace was enough.

With that precedent in mind, we can do more than hope-we can act on the hope-that the magnitude of the threats posed by proliferation and climate change will similarly concentrate our minds and political will on what needs to be done.

Moreover, if we take the steps necessary to fend off specific, imminent, and existential threats, we will be giving ourselves time and useful experience for lifting global governance to a higher level. By solving two problems that are truly urgent, we can increase the chances that eventually - perhaps by the time Lola has grandchildren of her own - the world will be able to ameliorate or even solve other problems that are merely very important. Whether future generations make the most of such a world, and whether they think of it as a global nation or just as a well-governed international community, is up to them. Whether they have the choice is up to us.

*The others in the dozen are Canada. South Korea, Mexico, Iran, Australia, and South Africa.

[3] See Ron Suskind, “The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s of Its Enemies Since 9/11” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

[4] See Nicholas Stern, “The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). This report by Sir Nicholas Stern, the head of the British Government Economic Service and a former chief economist of the World Bank, received much attention when it was released on October 30, 2006, especially because it made clear that the economic costs of inaction on climate change are many times larger than the costs of starting to deal with the problem right away.