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My wife and I recently celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary, and we believe we have a strong marriage and positive relationships with our three post-adolescent children. President Trump’s actions on the Paris Agreement reminded me of a lesson I learned being a husband and father. The lesson is that it is a mistake when we allow ourselves to relegate our relationships to the category of “unintended consequences.”
The decision made by President Trump to have the U.S. leave the Paris Agreement produced several outcomes. First, it removed us from obligations that the U.S. set in our first Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) submission to the U.N. under the Paris Agreement that Trump and others claim are detrimental to U.S. jobs and our economy. Second, it removed us from the U.N. group negotiating all of the details of the Paris Agreement and will allow other countries, notably China and Russia, to take the lead in setting the details of the Agreement to terms they find beneficial. Third, it damaged our relationship with our allies and our reputation in the international community.
Taking an optimistic view, I believe the first result was the intended one, and the other two were unintended. I say this is the optimistic view because it means that Trump did not want to hand an advantage to China and Russia by allowing them to lead the specifying of the financial arrangements, measurements & reporting process, market mechanisms, implementation, compliance, or mitigations for international environmental relations. It is also optimistic in that it means Trump did not intend to tell our allies – those countries whom Trump wants to improve their actions in relation to us – that we do not care about our alliances with them or the things that they believe as a group are important.
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The details of the Paris Agreement are still to be defined & negotiated. All of the details, including how the agreement & NDCs will be implemented and compliance governed, will be determined through negotiations planned to take at least through 2018. The United States had the opportunity to simply participate in the upcoming U.N. negotiations and use that process to get what we want. If we were unable to get what we wanted (including the ability to change our NDC submission to something acceptable to the current administration), we could always leave the Paris Agreement at that point.
Since we had other options available that would have accomplished the intended result without the unintended ones, the actions of President Trump on the Paris Agreement were a mistake. It is possible for the optimistic view to be true and for Trump to make this mistake if he wanted to make a point and he either didn’t think about or didn’t care about the unintended consequences.
It is always a mistake to treat relationships as if they do not matter. Relegating a relationship to an “unintended consequence” is telling someone that your relationship with them is not worth your attention. This is true for relationships with your spouse, children, family, friends, and even your co-workers. It is just as true for our country’s relationships with other nations.
Yes, there will be many decisions you have to make that will be disappointing to someone else. Personally, you may decide that you can’t miss or reschedule a business meeting to attend your daughter’s violin performance. Professionally, it could be as large as deciding that your country must drop its commitments to environmental regulation in favor of your citizen’s jobs and national economy. These things happen, and those that you have relationships may not be happy, but they will understand as long as you treat the relationship as important.
When you make a decision that impacts your relationship, and you ignore that relationship – or even worse, when you berate the other party for putting you in that position – you damage that relationship.
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The music school where my daughter was taking lessons had scheduled a concert, and my daughter was scheduled for her first solo with the orchestra. She had worked hard and was counting on my wife and I being there for her in the audience. Unfortunately, a week before the concert a client scheduled a meeting that I could not afford to refuse and could not get rescheduled. When I sat down with my wife & daughter and told them I would miss her performance, I could see that both of them were disappointed and that made me feel really guilty. At that point, I had (at least) three options. One option would be to dismiss the performance as no big deal, especially compared to the importance of the client meeting; after all, the music school put on a concert at least four times a year and my daughter would have plenty of other performances for me to go to. Another option would be to put the blame on my wife & daughter: they were selfish and wrong to make me feel guilty; they knew I had to travel often during the week for business and it’s not like I asked the client to schedule the meeting! A third option would be to explain how important my daughter was to me, how much I appreciated the hard work she put in, and how difficult it was for me to have to travel instead of being with her.
All three options would produce the same intended result – I would be traveling for work instead of being at my daughter’s performance. It’s the other consequences of this choice that we need to remember. Dismissing her recital as unimportant would tell my wife & daughter that my daughter’s activities & feelings were not important to me. The second option would tell them that I viewed our relationship – the intersection of my life with theirs – as a disruption or even a negative in my life. The third option would tell them that even though I made a choice that was not optimal from their point of view, I valued my daughter and my relationship with my family.
The harm that choices can do to relationships can take a lot of time and effort to repair. In announcing his decision on the Paris Agreement, Trump told our allies that they were laughing at us and celebrating the U.S. being in a bad situation; essentially, that they were selfish and wrong for wanting us to be in an environmental agreement with them.
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Trump didn’t have to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement now to prevent the problems some claim will occur if we strive to meet the NDC submitted by the Obama administration. Taking an alternative approach would have shown our allies that we did not see our relationship with them as a negative. It would have saved us the time and effort we will need to spend in the future to recover from this decision.
Damaging the relationship between the U.S. and its allies unnecessarily is a mistake. It is one that could have been avoided, and it’s the kind of thing we should try to avoid in our personal lives as well.