"The Diplomatic Deadlock" - By Upcoming CWP Fellow Eyck Freymann

The Chinese delegation “rat-f––ed” the negotiations, fumed Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, after yet another day of gridlock. It was a Friday afternoon in December 2009, and the COP-15 climate conference in Copenhagen was going off the rails. U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and dozens of other world leaders had assembled in a last-ditch attempt to salvage a deal. They sat cheek by jowl in uncomfortable straight-backed chairs. The conference table was strewn with empty espresso cups and large leafy plants, piles of dog-eared papers, yellow highlighters, and soggy mozzarella sandwiches. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was absent. In his place, he sent an underling, He Yafei, to sit opposite Obama — but did not authorize him to negotiate. The sleep-deprived world leaders were insulted. Most eventually lost patience and walked out.

With U.S.-China tensions exacerbating the climate crisis, a new category of great power rivalry is emerging — not a Cold War but a Warming War.

BY EYCK FREYMANN — JUNE 19, 2022 - https://www.thewirechina.com/2022/06/19/the-diplomatic-deadlock/

Eyck Freymann is a doctoral candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, where he researches the geopolitics of climate change. He is Director of Indo-Pacific and global pandemic coverage at Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

In the 2022–23 academic year he will be a joint Fellow at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program.

Freymann’s first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard UP 2020), is assigned as required reading in Harvard’s “United States and China” introductory course for undergraduates. He also writes on a range of other current affairs topics, including U.S. politics and foreign policy and COVID-19. Freymann’s writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic. As a reporter and columnist for The Wire China, he is the author of “The Warming War,” a series of investigative reports about the breakdown in climate diplomacy and its implications for the planet and global security.

Freymann holds two masters degrees in China Studies: the first from Harvard University and the second from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Harvard-UK Henry Scholar. He earned his bachelors degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.

Photo Credit: By Berkeley Earth - https://showyourstripes.info/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102904671 - 

image is of Warming stripes of China between 1901 and 2019