Kerry expects Trump to give orders, hopes leaving Paris Agreement isn't one

With President-elect Donald Trump set to assume office soon, former US Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday suggested that he may issue "a series of executive orders" on day one itself, hoping that one of those will not be about pulling out of the Paris Agreement.

During an interactive session at the HT Leadership Summit 2024 here, Kerry also said diplomacy requires a ripeness to be able to solve a problem, and given the circumstances, he thought Ukraine is a place where "things are ripe".

Post the inauguration ceremony in January next year, Trump (78) will return to the White House for his second term after registering a resounding victory in the recently-held US presidential elections that paved the way for an extraordinary political comeback.

"First of all, I think everybody in the world has learnt that it is very hard to predict anything about President Trump. There is no way to know with certainty exactly what will happen. And that unpredictability is something that he actually cultivates and appreciates in himself," Kerry said.

Kerry was in a conversation with former Indian ambassador to the US, Navtej Singh Sarna, who asked what he anticipated would be Trump's immediate priorities after assuming office, different from his campaigns, and what will he push for.

"I think it is clear... He (Trump) is going to try to shake some things up. You will see a series of executive orders issued on day one. I hope one of those doesn't include pulling out of the Paris Agreement, but it probably will," Kerry said.

"And there is 'no good reason' to do that as the chairman of ExxonMobil said in Baku the other day; he did not advise it, because he thought it would be counter-productive and against the interests of the US," Kerry added.

He also said the Paris Agreement, which Trump "wants to pull out of", is a "monument to a common but differentiated responsibilities".

The former US secretary of state's comments came at a time when the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP29 is underway at Baku, Azerbaijan.

In June 2017, during his first presidency, Trump announced his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change and renegotiate the deal that was agreed upon by more than 190 countries during the Barack Obama administration.

Claiming that countries like China and India are benefitting the most from the Paris Agreement, Trump had said it was unfair to the US, as it badly hit its businesses and jobs.

The formal withdrawal happened in 2020.

However, in January 2021, on his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed the instrument to bring the US back into the Paris Agreement.

Biden also picked Kerry as the special presidential envoy for climate.

The Paris Agreement aims at substantially reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions to hold the global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (with a baseline of 1850-1900).

With the inauguration ceremony scheduled to be held in January and Trump having announced the names of several appointees, Kerry predicted the president to "do something on day one".

Trump will also have other executive orders that will probably deal with his deportation promises and the question of immigration, but "he will take some flagship issues and try to put them out there right away, you can count on that", Kerry said.

Asserting that the two biggest driving issues during the US elections were immigration and inflation, Kerry lamented that "my party, the Democratic Party, I regret to say, was somewhat tone-deaf to some of the cultural issues that were out there, floating, and there were people who did see and those who didn't see it".

"There were plenty of ways to address that but it wasn't. So, I think that's why we lost the place," he said, adding that the contests in the battleground states were "really close" and "things I just mentioned could have tipped it either way, had it been responded to then".

During his campaign, Trump broadly did what the challengers to Biden administration succession always do, which is to "scare the hell out of people, and play to the lowest common denominator of politics, fear", Kerry argued, adding that "disinformation" defined a lot of what people were perceiving.

However, Kerry also emphasised the other side of Trump's return to power in the current geopolitical situation.

"But I also think of the positive side. You know, diplomacy requires a ripeness to be able to solve a problem," he said.

Kerry also said he worked very hard for four years when he was the secretary of state to see if "we could advance the process" in the Middle-East.

"And in the end, the two leaders -- (Palestinian) President (Mahmoud) Abbas and (Israeli) Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu -- were just not ready to do it, they were not willing.... So it was not ripe. And there are plenty of places where things are not ripe," Kerry recalled.

"But I think Ukraine is a place where things are ripe," he underlined, adding, "And possibly, depending on the theory of the case, you can have a rapprochement that could take place in the Middle-East, where you have an agreement with Saudi Arabia and Israel, which is accompanied by some kind of an agreement on cease fire and how you are going to approach the reconstruction of Gaza, which is very complicated," the former US official said.

On the prolonged Russia-Ukraine conflict that began in 2022, Kerry said Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made his vision clear, "but I think the pressure is going among many European countries, in the US and elsewhere to find a way to not have this inflammatory situation just perpetuated".

Kerry also underlined that it is a "good time for some quiet, really effective diplomacy", while cautioning that if leaders use wrong rhetoric or if they get involved in the wrong kinds of claims upfront, it may get harder for people to go forward.

On the possibility of the US pulling out of this conflict, Kerry said, "If President Trump were just to pull out, I think he'd have some major challenges within his own party. I think that globally, the repercussions of that would be just as damaging as anything you could ever imagine."  To make his point, Kerry cited the concerns that Moldova, Georgia, Finland, and the Baltic states might be having in the context of the conflict.

On the situation in West Asia, he recalled the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, calling them "as egregious, as horrendous, as disgusting, as craven, as bestial as anything I have seen in a long, long time".