Story highlights Stewart Patrick and Megan Roberts: A chaotic populist wave has rocked Western democracies

Experts give the world poor grades for international cooperation in 2016 -- and predict even fewer breakthroughs in 2017, they write

Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger Senior Fellow and Director and Megan Roberts the Associate Director of the International Institutions and Global Governance program at the Council on Foreign Relations. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors.

(CNN) Today US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is in Fairbanks, Alaska to attend the Arctic Council's tenth ministerial meeting. The meeting comes amid new research that climate change is reshaping the arctic much faster than expected, and as Trump administration officials engage in an unusually public debate about whether the United States will remain in the Paris climate agreement. After pledging to 'cancel' the agreement during his campaign, Trump has now softened his tone, noting that he had an open mind about the global agreement to limit the effects of climate change. Rival factions within the administration are pitted against one another as President Trump closes in on a decision expected later this month.

Stewart Patrick

Megan Roberts

The administration's waffling on US climate commitments illustrates two important lessons that the global turbulence of the past year has taught us. First, the biggest threats to an open, liberal world no longer come from adversaries abroad (though those threats exist), but from skeptics at home. From Britain's epochal "Brexit" decision to Donald Trump's "America First" election to the political mainstreaming of Marine Le Pen's hard-right nationalism, a chaotic populist wave has rocked Western democracies. The storm surge is propelled by anxiety that globalization has not brought citizens shared prosperity, just dangers to their doorsteps.

Second, when America fails to lead, the world becomes less predictable and more conflict-prone. Once upon a time, the United States managed and defended global order. President Trump, however, has staked out a far more insular, transactional and sovereignty-minded posture, and the consequences have already reverberated globally . Longstanding alliances are adrift, international organizations are moribund, and Russia and China seek to fill the vacuum, advancing authoritarian alternatives to liberalism. In this new world, injustices will go unanswered, and pressing challenges such as climate change go unaddressed.

Against this depressing backdrop, it's little wonder that prominent global experts give the world poor grades for international cooperation in 2016 -- and predict even fewer breakthroughs in 2017. These are the sobering findings of the third annual Report Card on International Cooperation , recently released by the Council of Councils (CoC), a global consortium of 29 think tanks from 25 countries founded by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The CoC's Report Card reveals a deep-seated pessimism about the state of the world: overall international cooperation earned a barely-passing C-, a steep drop from the B conferred just a year ago. Global performance across ten specific issue areas also plummeted. Asked to rank these same ten challenges in terms of their importance, global experts identified preventing violent conflict between states and combating transnational terrorism as the world's top two priorities. Coming in third and fourth, respectively, were the challenges of reducing internal violence and (with a nervous eye on North Korea) reversing nuclear proliferation. In only one of these areas -- combating transnational terrorism -- did the world's grades improve.

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