| Summary: | President Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement,
and stated that the withdrawal was mainly to protect its national interests. The U.S. economic
ambitions, the China factor and the intricacies of U.S domestic politics had played a major
role in deciding the U.S. position on the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.
There are some who are skeptical on whether the Paris Agreement would successfully achieve
its expected outcomes in the absence of U.S. participation. The objective of this study is to
examine the factors that have discouraged the U.S. to partake in the international climate
change agreements. An analytical framework was employed for this study that examines
the insights and conceptions from the textual data, based on realism. The study concludes
that the U.S. outlook on climate change had more or less adhered to the realist stance, even
though realism is considered a theoretical approach with significant drawbacks, particularly
when dealing with issues of climate change. Nonetheless, this study also asserts that there is
a need for deeper engagement between the U.S. and the participants of the Paris Agreement
to effectively tackle the issues of climate change at this moment.
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