Edward L. Rubin
(Brown Box Photography)
NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Among the many tragic consequences of the ISIS attacks in Paris is one that, understandably, has not received much attention but needs to be taken seriously. Paris is the site of the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference, to be held from November 30 to December 11. This widely attended conference was expected to be the most important one to be held in many years. Its announced objective is to reach a “binding and universal” agreement on the enormous threat that confronts our planet. Now the conference has been overshadowed by the terrorist attacks, and, with the stench of random death in the air, who knows how comfortable or focused the delegates will be.
But the geographic coincidence that has juxtaposed these two seemingly unrelated issues raises an intriguing possibility. The horrific effects of ISIS terrorism on the victims, their families and the communities where the attacks occur should never be forgotten or minimized. But these attacks bring with them an opportunity, one that appeared when the Soviet Union fell and went unrealized at that time. This is the possibility that the nations of the world might join together to solve their mutual problems, that cooperation might replace competition or enmity as the dominant motif in international relations. Of course, there will always be conflicts, distrust and jealousy. There are conflicts, distrust and jealousy within many families. But families — at least functional ones — work together to achieve their common interests, and it is far from inconceivable that nations might do so as well.
There are already indications that ISIS, with its indiscriminate attacks on just about everyone, is producing this effect. Egypt and Jordan, two of the three “confrontation states” that bedeviled Israel for so many years, have now made common cause with it in combatting ISIS. A bridge to more constructive relations between the U.S. and Iran, beyond the quid pro quo of ending the sanctions in exchange for suspending the nuclear program, is that Iran’s Shi’a government is as concerned about Sunni-based ISIS as we are. France, a reluctant ally of the U.S. in its previous military ventures, has become an enthusiastic co-combatant. And now, Russia, finally recognizing the modern airplanes don’t simply fall out of the sky, has shifted its intervention in Syria from propping up hideous Bashar al-Assad to attacking his ISIS opponents.
Popular fiction often provides a window into widely-felt sentiments, and the hope that we will be united by a common enemy has been a staple of this genre for many years. Quite often, as in Independence Day, the unifying event is an alien attack. Star Trek advances the more hopeful premise that we will unite to explore outer space, but then amplifies the effect through a conflict with the Klingons (with whom we then unite to combat the Borg). In Alan Moore’s The Watchman, mastermind Adrian Veidt fakes an alien attack, killing half the population of New York, to unify nations on the brink of war and “save Earth from Hell.” Ian Fleming, having pitted James Bond against the Soviet Union in his earliest books, soon shifted to the more satisfying premise that the two superpowers would join forces to combat an concocted terrorist group called SPECTRE. The Man from UNCLE adopted a similar conceit.
Perhaps the most of idiosyncratic creation all these imaginary enemies SPECTRE, has turned out to be the most realistic. Just add religious fanaticism to this shadowy international organization and you get ISIS. It seems clear that the only way to defeat ISIS is through international cooperation. As long as they can lurk, and rally, in a single country, they will have a base from which to launch their despicable attacks. It is only if the nations of the world can work together, joining forces and sharing information, that ISIS can be eliminated.
This brings us back to climate change. No issue is more dependent on cooperation between nations. A ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere has the same effect no matter where it comes from. Efforts to reduce it must overcome the parochial intransigence of many different nations. Americans insist that they will not alter their lifestyles on behalf of foreign nations, China and India demand the opportunity to strive for the prosperity that the US and Europe achieved in the nineteenth century, even if it requires burning vast quantities of fossil fuel. Smaller nations protest that they are only making miniscule additions to the overall quantity of carbon in the atmosphere. It seems at least possible that ISIS will teach the nations of the world to work together and think in more cooperative terms. Perhaps the effort to prevent the thousands of fatalities that this rebarbative organization can inflict will generate patterns of behavior that will also prevent the hundreds of millions of fatalities that will result from uncontrolled continuation of human induced climate change.
*
Edward L. Rubin is Professor of Law and Political Science at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Soul, Self, and Society: The New Morality and the Modern State and The Heatstroke Line, a novel about the decline of the United States in a future where global warming has taken hold. For more, see edwardrubin.com.