In the White House’s telling, the United States “officially escaped” the Paris Agreement on Jan. 27. Washington also says it intends to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that undergirds Paris and provides the foundation for global climate diplomacy.
It’s not unusual for a country to stand aside as others seek to decarbonize. Iran, for example, has not ratified the Paris Agreement, while Russia is a party to the deal but has weak emissions targets. But the United States is going a step further—becoming a climate bully, as former U.S. Vice President Al Gore argued last year. That entails leveraging U.S. power to intimidate others into reducing their own climate ambitions.
In the White House’s telling, the United States “officially escaped” the Paris Agreement on Jan. 27. Washington also says it intends to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that undergirds Paris and provides the foundation for global climate diplomacy.
It’s not unusual for a country to stand aside as others seek to decarbonize. Iran, for example, has not ratified the Paris Agreement, while Russia is a party to the deal but has weak emissions targets. But the United States is going a step further—becoming a climate bully, as former U.S. Vice President Al Gore argued last year. That entails leveraging U.S. power to intimidate others into reducing their own climate ambitions.
The most dramatic recent example of U.S. climate bullying was the Trump administration’s October 2025 efforts to forestall the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO’s) proposed fees on emissions from the world’s most polluting ships. The U.S. State Department claimed the levies would have been the UN’s first-ever “global carbon tax.” By threatening to impose tariffs on supportive countries and strip diplomats of visas, the United States was able to kill the measure.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed the move put “America FIRST.” In a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal, Rubio then issued a warning: “Should this initiative or any other similar one emerge from the bureaucracy again, our coalition against it will be ready—and larger.”
It was not the first time that politicians in Washington—of both parties—have sought to block international climate policy. The United States has worked to prevent a global climate treaty with enforcement mechanisms from taking effect since at least 1989. It has also joined forces with others—both petrostates such as Saudi Arabia and major —to water down U.N. climate reports. In 2011, under then-President Barack Obama, the United States threatened the European Union with “if it failed to “reconsider this current course” to apply its domestic emissions pricing scheme to flights to and from Europe. The EU backed down.
Never before, however, has the United States gone to such lengths to prevent a large group of countries from putting a price on the fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis. Unfortunately, everything about President Donald Trump’s politics and personality suggests that we should expect more climate bullying going forward.
Trump styles himself as a master dealmaker and always seeks to maximize U.S. leverage, threatening other countries with everything from massive tariffs to the withdrawal of security guarantees to get his way. He has frequently called climate change a “hoax” and insists that “so-called green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world.” The result is an even more nakedly transactional approach when it comes to international climate regulations or agreements.
Also driving Trump’s climate bullying is his relationship with China. The country has solidified its position as the world’s green workshop. China has for years been the dominant producer of clean energy goods such as solar panels and permanent magnets. In the past few years, however, China has become the largest producer and exporter of electric vehicles. The more other nations around the world pivot to clean energy, the more China—and not the oil- and gas-exporting United States—will be their supplier of choice. For the White House, policies promoting green technologies are a “jobs program for China,” former Trump climate and energy advisor George David Banks said.
Competition with China also leads to U.S. bullying where the climate impacts are incidental. Just a few days before the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, Trump threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on Canada if it completed a trade deal with China. The threat came in response to Canada’s announcement that it would allow the import of 49,000 electric vehicles per year at a low tariff rate of 6.1 percent. When threatening the tariffs, Trump said he wanted to prevent Canada from becoming a “drop off port” for goods from China. But the effect could be to deter the arrival of affordable EVs to his neighbor’s shores.
The proliferation of climate policies with extraterritorial impact also creates more possible targets for U.S. bullying. One example is the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which took effect at the start of this year and raises prices on imported goods such as cement and steel. The United Kingdom is planning a similar measure, and Canada could follow.
Unlike the Paris Agreement, these aren’t nonbinding measures; they are laws with enforcement mechanisms that put a price on pollution. The Trump administration is unlikely to accept them without a fight. The EU will almost certainly fail to meet the fantastical promise it made in the August 2025 EU-U.S. framework trade deal to spend $250 billion per year on U.S. energy. When this happens, the White House may revisit its unmet request for “additional flexibilities in the CBAM implementation” to help U.S. exporters.
Going forward, any renewed U.N. efforts to advance binding climate measures would almost certainly see the United States respond with the same type of aggressive tactics that sunk the IMO deal, as Rubio already warned. Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently pressured the International Energy Agency into shelving a forecast that showed an imminent peak of global oil demand.
But the United States has plenty of tools to escalate its struggle against other countries’ climate efforts.
For one thing, there’s Washington’s dominance of the international financial system. Like-minded countries such as Argentina, which has flirted with quitting the Paris Agreement, could continue to receive bailouts and swap lines from Washington in exchange for following the U.S. line on fossil fuels. Meanwhile, climate pioneers such as Colombia, which is not currently awarding new oil and gas contracts and has sparred with the United States over U.S. aggression in the Western Hemisphere, could face U.S. sanctions for discrimination against certain energy sources.
The United States might also link climate policy to other policy fields, such as trade or security. Wright previously warned the EU that its plans for new green regulations beyond the CBAM, including a requirement that firms selling gas to Europe match EU standards for emissions monitoring, could cause trade talks between the United States and the bloc to “fall apart.”
Meanwhile, Trump has suggested to NATO allies that he might impose new sanctions on Russia if Europe stopped buying Russian oil. Instead, he wants the Europeans to step up their purchases of U.S. hydrocarbons. A more aggressive step could be for the United States to condition its protection of allies on support for U.S. views on climate and purchases of U.S. fossil fuels, in the same way that Trump has said he would only defend NATO countries if they “pay [their] bills.”
The most dramatic climate bullying tactic that the United States could deploy would be to impose sanctions on Chinese producers of green technologies or even threaten secondary sanctions against those who do business with such firms. These are the types of measures Washington typically uses to limit Iranian oil revenue to prevent the devaluation of U.S. oil and gas resources.
Trump is unlikely to take such a radical step and risk Chinese retaliation. But if it chose to, the administration could attempt to justify such measures with reference to security concerns over installing connected devices (such as EVs) made in an authoritarian state. Imagine a combination of the Biden administration’s 2025 rule cars from U.S. roads with the first Trump administration’s efforts to get U.S. allies to keep Huawei out of their 5G networks.
Countries threatened by U.S. climate bullying have limited options to deal with it. Small countries don’t want to risk U.S. tariffs on the entirety of their exports over a shipping levy—this was reportedly the threat that U.S. negotiators used at the IMO to get previously supportive Caribbean countries such as the Bahamas and Antigua and Barbuda to back down. U.S. officials also reportedly told a Filipino official that his country’s sailors would be banned from docking at U.S. ports if they voted for the carbon levy. Another island nation, Vanuatu, is now facing U.S. pressure to withdraw its proposed U.N. draft resolution, which supports a ruling by the International Court of Justice that countries have a legal obligation to protect the climate.
Meanwhile, larger U.S. allies such as the EU or Japan would rather make flashy promises to buy U.S. energy or defense equipment than get into a fight with the United States over any climate policy ambitions. In part because of U.S. and Qatari pressure, the European Parliament agreed to modify a due diligence law that would require firms operating in the EU to fix environmental issues in their supply chains or face massive fines.
Ideally, countries would insulate themselves from U.S. pressure through economic and political diversification away from the United States, including support for alternatives to dollar-based transactions. Countries could also hold more diplomatic meetings outside of the United States so that visa withdrawals, like those threatened against IMO negotiators, wouldn’t sting as much.
Yes, climate bullying can delay some climate regulations in the short term. But this U.S. behavior also makes putative allies like the European Union realize the risks of their dependence. EU energy commissioner Dan Jorgensen fears that by swapping Russian gas for American the EU “risk[s] replacing one dependency with another.” He mentions alternative gas suppliers like Canada and Qatar as short-term alternatives. The longer-term alternative is to replace gas with clean energy technologies produced in China or Europe. The climate bully in Washington loses either way.
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