Jerry Brown Jumps Into Kaleidoscopic New World Politics

For a guy who can't get out of his own way long enough to get things done in Washington besides cheap regulatory rollbacks and some conservative judicial appointments, Donald Trump sure has proved to be quite effective on the world stage. In less than five months as President of the United States, Trump has managed to undo much of the Western alliance system that created and maintained an often stable and prosperous world order since World War II. It's doubtful that an actual KGB agent, which Trump almost certainly is not, would do more to disrupt troublemakers for the Rodina. He would scarcely dare.

The global construct envisioned by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill when they forged the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 and issued the Declaration by United Nations (named by FDR and building on Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” of expression and worship and from fear and want) on January 1, 1942 -- which prefigured the entire set of international arrangements which led to widespread post-war prosperity and unprecedented European peace and cooperation for more than 70 years -- has been seriously disrupted by the advent of Trump. The tyro president's preposterous decision to pull the U.S. out of the hard-won global accords on climate change is just the quintessence of his know-nothingism spray-painted across the world stage.

That he does all this under the blatantly witless rhetoric of "America First," the notorious isolationist slogan of Charles Lindbergh, who did so much to frustrate not just Roosevelt's but all of the allies' preparations for World War II with his isolationist domestic campaign and fake intelligence about supposed Nazi air power, and whom history has revealed as an ardent Nazi advocate in his not-so-private dealings with the Third Reich, just increases the black humor which surrounds Trumpism.

With Trump era America on the skids -- the man has thoroughly ineffective plans, to the extent he has any at all, on America's post-9/11 security challenges and, if anything, is making the Middle East even more unstable -- potential new world orders are already emerging. Not that America's long troubled media culture, now dominated by the toxic symbiosis between Trumpism, cable news, and social media, can begin to make sense of it all. The rise of political violence is simply another dramatic indicator of a devolutionary America.

Contrasted against our self-devouring disarray is a crafty Russia, an ascending China, a corrosive and increasingly unstable Middle East, a defiant Western Europe with reinvigorated France and steady Germany taking the helm of the Free World -- each a yeasty tendency in the chaotic new world disorder that may also be an emerging kaleidoscopic new world order.

Into this witches brew, four-term California Governor Jerry Brown, two-time runner-up for the Democratic nomination to eventual Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, is steering the Golden State into some of the world's most crucial matters. California, the world's sixth largest economy (a hair behind Britain) -- home of the super "soft power" of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and some of the world's greatest universities, as well as arguably the world's most successful multi-racial/multi-cultural society -- was already a global leader on fighting climate change and, as Brown puts it, "repowering the economy" with renewable energy and new vehicles.

So as soon as Trump churlishly announced his petulant decision to abandon the Paris Accords on obviously threatening climate change, Brown was off to China for an already-scheduled week-long trip.

Brown heads the Under2 Coalition, the international alliance of cities, states, regions, and some nations he founded in 2015, which is committed to limiting the increase in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius, threshold for catastrophic consequences, by either reducing their greenhouse gas emissions from 80 percent to 95 percent below 1990 levels or by holding emissions to less than 2 annual metric tons per capita by 2050. Under2 now includes 176 jurisdictions on six continents representing some 1.2 billion people and $28.8 trillion in gross domestic product. That is one-sixth of the world's population and 40 percent of the global economy.

Brown signed up two more big Chinese provinces before hitting Beijing. There he co-led the global summit of national and subnational energy ministers he hosted last year in San Francisco and met for nearly an hour with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Not surprisingly, Xi had praise for Brown and additional hopes for a burgeoning alliance with the Golden State.

Xi praised Brown and California for their leading role in promoting cooperation on sustainable development technologies and techniques and urged more bilateral exchanges. He also invited California to join China in its global Belt and Road Initiative, which includes clean infrastructure development.

Brown had previously held his own parallel summit with President Xi when then President Barack Obama summited with the Chinese head of state at California's Sunnylands in 2013. This followed Brown's lengthy tour of China.

In fact, California's energy and environmental officials have been working with China for the past several years, bringing PRC counterparts along on techniques and technology to counter climate and other environmental perils.

Once back in the U.S., Brown met in San Francisco with German Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks. Indeed, it was with the German state of Baden-Württemberg that Brown first launched Under2.

Then on Tuesday, Brown hosted the president of this year's UN Climate Summit, Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama at the historic Executive Mansion in Sacramento. Also on hand were Brown's fellow West Coast governors, Washington's Jay Inslee and Oregon's Kate Brown. (Along with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Brown and Inslee formed the U.S. Climate Alliance of states to follow the Paris Accords shortly after Trump announced the U.S. pull-out.)

At the Sacramento event, Fiji joined Under2 and Bainimarama, in his role as president of the UN climate summit -- which Germany will host for the Pacific island nation, in Bonn from November 6th through November 17th -- announced a new role for Brown.

Brown is now the UN special advisor and envoy for states and regions on climate change issues.

As the leader of Pacific island nations especially threatened by the rising seas of climate change, Fiji's Bainimarama is if anything a belated choice to preside over the UN climate change conference. But with a third of Fiji's gross domestic product wiped out by a massive monsoon, the former British colony needed help putting on the first global climate summit of the Trumpocalypse.

In the past, it would have been London to pick up the slack. But post-Brexit British politics is so disordered -- the recent snap election oh-so-cleverly called to fatten the Tory majority actually resulted in a hung parliament -- that Britain, not unlike the U.S., no longer has its act together.

One senses Roosevelt and Churchill rotating in their graves given the current spectacles in Washington and London.

So instead it is Berlin graciously picking up the slack, with both funding and the setting in former West German capital of Bonn for the global climate summit itself.

Which is probably just as well for Brown, who boasts German ancestry along with his storied background in one of America's foremost Irish-Catholic political families.

"When I though about the one leader needed to help mobilize the states and regions as a critical pillar of our grand coalition," noted Bainimarama, "the choice was obvious." ... "I will lean on Governor Brown to continue the great leadership he has demonstrated time and time again to mobilize a strong contingent of like-minded leaders from around the world."

Brown, as longtime readers know, does have a very long history championing renewable energy and climate change issues, not to mention international diplomacy on such issues.

And his predecessors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis, played crucial roles in developing California leadership, about which more in a moment.

In June 1992, on the morning after his last presidential primary, I met with Brown at his sister's home in LA, where we both staying, to discuss his next steps.

The story of Brown's '92 presidential run, one of unfulfilled promise, is too complex for this accounting. After missing an excellent opportunity for a defining victory in the pivotal New York primary, and under criticism for being too harsh about eventual President Bill Clinton, Brown had waged an eased-off campaign against Clinton in California, running no TV ads despite ample funds to do so, content to win enough delegates to underscore his runner-up position in the Democratic nomination race and have a strong presence at the national convention in New York.

Brown was quite chipper as we discussed my giving his private phone numbers to Warren Beatty, who wanted to facilitate a more positive relationship between Brown and Clinton. (Which did not work out.) But he was especially enthused by the first ever Earth Summit, then upcoming in Rio.

Less than two days later, Brown flew to Rio for a week at the events where he endorsed the Rio Declaration on sustainable development as well as the establishment of the present framework for the UN climate summits.

A more expansive Earth Charter did not emerge from the Rio summit, however, and Brown's push for a Global Conservation Corps of hundreds of thousands of underprivileged youth from around the world, as well as greater recognition of indigenous peoples, also did not emerge from Rio as official UN positions.

Brown's activism at the first Earth Summit was all of a piece with his early pioneering of renewable energy and conservation and warnings of climate change during his first two terms as California's governor in the 1970s and '80s.

After a 16-year interregnum of rather conservative Republican governors, Brown's former chief of staff Gray Davis won the governorship in 1998, the same year Brown was elected mayor of Oakland. A more cautious figure, Davis nonetheless ended up moving aggressively on renewable energy and climate change.

First Davis agreed to push and enact America's first big renewable energy requirement in early 2002. Then, a few months after laying out his concerns in a discussion on his campaign plane, Davis came on board with respect to climate change, pushing and signing America's first major law cutting greenhouse gas emissions, in this case from vehicle tailpipes, at a suddenly sunlit ceremony with Robert Redford on a knoll overlooking a fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge.

Though Davis was recalled, for a complex set of reasons, the following year, his successor Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom he rather quickly became friendly, did what he told me he would do more than a year before he ran, i.e., not only uphold Davis's moves but actually significantly expand on them.

After having then Senator Barack Obama describe California's program as the model for his presidential campaign, Schwarzenegger hosted three well-attended Governors Global Climate Summits at the sites of his election victory parties, the Beverly Hilton and Century Plaza Hotels in LA, and at University of California at Davis outside California's capital.

While Brown, who had floated a North American energy common market, and Davis had both reached out to China and other Pacific Basin nations as governor, Schwarzenegger kindled serious early interest among large Chinese delegations to his climate summits. At each successive gathering, I could sense a progression from noncommittal friendliness to the beginnings of the very serious engagement which the renewed Brown administration has fully developed.

The California alliance with China, which also has an unacceptable claim on the South China Sea as I've written two or 30 times, is a good example of how complex and contingent things are in this kaleidoscopic new world order. Perhaps we can make progress in a state of creative tension.

So Brown's effort, ever more important in the wake of Trump's action, moves forward.

Brown has just made Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, who for six years directed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change which produced the Paris Accords but came up short in her bid last fall for UN secretary-general, global ambassador for his Under2 Coalition.

Brown is not the only American leader moving forward on this fundamental existential issue. There's Al Gore, of course, who has a new documentary film coming at the end of July. And, along with Brown's fellow governors, there's former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

One of the eight men who own more than half the rest of the world, Bloomberg has been for the past few years a UN special envoy for cities on climate change. He's offered to personally pay the U.S. share of administrative costs on the Paris Accords, some $15 million, and is doing other good work as well.

I remember him when he joined then Governor Schwarzenegger to study California's policies as the Big Apple was getting its climate program up and running. I also remember him coming here to campaign for fellow billionaire Meg Whitman when she ran against Brown in 2010. She was crushed by Brown, despite spending more money in a non-presidential campaign than any other candidate in American history.

Bloomberg is impressive, but having met him and four others among the ultimate elite eight of Earth's wealthiest, it's good that our leadership class remains broader than that.

Even if Hillary Clinton had won, this was likely going to be a difficult period in our history, a period in which we would be doing well to stave off the existential threats of climate change and geopolitical instability leading to the use of nuclear weapons.

It would have been difficult for Clinton, for whom these are not core issues but who is incomparably better than Trump, to get much of a program through a fractious Congress. Preserving the planet's habitability and maintaining inquiry and exploration in hopes of a better time would have been valuable goals. They are even more so now.

The assault on the Enlightenment, and hence on knowledge and the spirit of inquiry, which I began writing about five years ago while Trump was blithering about birtherism, is all too real now. But there are increasing signs here and abroad -- especially with recent European election results -- that the anti-Enlightenment assault can be staved off.

Preserving the habitability of the planet may be a closer call.

The Paris Accords, hard-won though they were, thanks in large part to Obama's leadership, were something of a bare minimum.

The reality is that most of America and the world struggled for years, long before the advent of Trumpism, to come to grips with long-term existential crises. Little was achieved, at least at the national level, during Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's presidencies on climate change.

Nor was the potential scourge of of nuclear weapons -- even a limited regional nuclear war could have devastating impacts on the planet -- addressed comprehensively and effectively.

Brown focused on the nuclear threat as a presidential candidate and has lately renewed that interest, forming an alliance and friendship with visionary former Secretary of Defense William Perry. One of the true longtime national security mavens, Stanford Professor Perry is crusading for new controls on the horrifying weapons. You can check out Perry's excellent Stanford course on nuclear weapons policy, which I took last year, at this link.

Unfortunately, the media mania of Trumpism militates against much sustained consideration of the long-term threat of nukes in an increasingly unstable world. Which means that few are educated and focused enough to deal with Perry's warnings.

Instead we get a series of seemingly ignorant statements from Trump and episodes of posturing on North Korea, followed by the next unrelated thing and the next and the next.

Ironically, the generals who serve as Trump's defense secretary and national security advisor -- both of whom wanted the U.S. to stay in the global climate accord -- are almost certainly well aware of the need to control if not abolish nuclear weapons. But they seem as caught up in the endless folderol as most Americans.

All of which makes what Brown and company are doing even more significant.

If we can get through these ill effects of our technological adolescence, and survive Trumpist instability and know-nothingism, "the life of the world may," as Churchill put it, "move forward into proud, sunlit uplands."

But those are some very big 'ifs.'

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