For the oil and gas industry, foreign policy is supremely important. Companies working internationally have clear interests in effective relations between countries where they’re based and where they work. Even oil and gas companies that never work abroad share the interest because they participate in markets reactive to international developments.
But traditional practices of global relations have come under siege. The oil and gas industry can help by recommending refinement of a foreign affairs disposition needing work.
Outburst and coercion
Under US President Donald Trump, diplomacy and multilateralism have given way to outburst and coercion. Maybe Trump will be proven right. Maybe everything about past foreign policy was wrong. Maybe arm-twisting will succeed where compromise failed. Maybe it will bring peace to the Levant, coax Iran away from terrorism and nuclear development, turn North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un into a model global citizen, and make Russia stop invading neighbors and meddling in the politics of others. History will judge. For now, worry seems justified that the US has lost international credibility and will face growing trouble pursuing its interests abroad by means other than the threatened use of force.
Political support for Trump and his disruptive approach to global affairs derives partly from swelling impatience with powerful elites, prominent among whom are foreign policy professionals. Highly educated and influential yet unelected and often anonymous, experts in international relations make easy targets for resurgent populism. In a different age, political concern would be high for conditions at the US State Department, which is hobbled by vacancies and reeling from the president’s tendency to ignore expert advice and tweet policy in conflict with positions expressed by the bureaucracy. Now, marginalization of the foreign policy establishment is greeted by outsiders with a shrug—or, from some quarters, applause.
In at least one area, the profession has aggravated this erosion of its repute. It has gulped the simplistic approach to climate change and regurgitated support for internationally negotiated, centrally planned response. To most foreign-policy experts, the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was a glowing triumph that Trump was wrong to abandon. Indeed, agreement on anything among representatives of 174 countries plus the European Union represents diplomatic achievement. But its prescriptions are unpopular and won’t help the climate much.
The agreement based ambitious temperature targets on certain assumptions about uncertain relationships between warming and greenhouse gases and called on national governments to impose economic pain for indistinct precaution. Predictably, compliance is low. Many governments that have introduced costly climate responses face political backlash. Climate rebellion feeds modern populism and contributes to the drooping confidence in traditional practices of international relations.
The oil and gas industry can help by urging foreign policy professionals to disengage from climate absolutism. The politics of climate now offers only two policy options, neither acceptable. One is energy revolution directed by governments. The other is inaction. The former is futile and the latter, irresponsible. Both are dangerous.
This stalemate reflects political discourse snagged on vapid moralizing against supposed “deniers”—which means anyone resisting hopelessly authoritarian remedies. The foreign policy establishment would help itself and humanity by denouncing extremism in favor of strategies pragmatic enough to survive politics yet sophisticated enough to work. Climate policies, for example, must be affordable. They should attach to measures able to yield parallel and immediate benefits. They should include measures beyond emission control, such as capture-and-storage and adaptation to geophysical change. And for policies that do address emissions, performance metrics should focus on emission rates, which are measurable with reasonable precision and clearly linked to causes, rather than globally averaged temperature.
Possible progress
By embracing climate progress grounded in the possible, global affairs practitioners might regain the confidence of political factions now dismissive of their expertise. And by encouraging the effort, oil and gas companies might gain an ally in pursuit of reasonable energy policy.
The industry and foreign policy experts need one another. The world, contrary views notwithstanding, needs them both.
