Comment on Hot Politics

We can get a sense of US realist approach from this video. One of the reasons why the US is reluctant to commit to the mandatory carbon cap is that the carbon cap will give a big advantage to China and India, if the two developing countries do not commit to the mandatory cut. The cost of committing to a mandatory cut is not only concerned with economic cost but also US position as a super power. The three administrations have to evaluate its political cost carefully before committing to a mandatory cost. Clearly, we can see that Mearsheimer’s realist assumptions in her book apply in this situation. Because the international community is anarchic and states can never be certain about other state’s intentions, so to survive, states have to gain as many power as they can. In this situation, despite the steadily mounting evidence and the increasingly warmer climate, the US is still reluctant to take actions and even resort to censorship.
Another point that I want to discuss here is that whether the ideology of the states matter. If it was not China and India, instead, it was a Japan, a country without any military power. Will US decision about a mandatory cut change in that scenario? If India and China adopted the same ideology system as US did, would US decision about the mandatory cut change? Answer to the second question is related to the democratic peace debate. I think it is hard for human to live in a world where major powers adopt similar democratic ideologies, for each country has its different history and culture. And trust can hardly exist between two countries when they have different ideologies, for two countries can claim respectively claim themselves to be democratic countries but neither of them are democratic in the other’s eyes.