4 November, 2025.

There has been so much going wrong in international diplomacy since Trump2.0 was inaugurated that I have been driven into silence for want of knowing where to start commenting. However, having learned what happened at a recent IMO meeting I can maintain this Trappist posture no longer.

In April 2025 a ‘framework’ for the world’s first global agreement to cut shipping’s carbon emissions, which account for about 3 per cent of all such emissions, was agreed by a working group of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which is a UN specialized agency with 176 member states. It was also anticipated that this framework – which had a commendable degree of support from shipowners themselves – would be approved at a full meeting of the organization in London from 14 until 17 October, despite predictable and well-advertised opposition from the know-nothing, climate change-denying Trump administration. This featured threats that states supporting it could not only face tariffs, visa restrictions and port levies but also ‘sanctions on officials sponsoring activist-driven climate policies.’

What the last of these threats meant became all too real at the October meeting in London when – to the dismay of small states in particular – the working group’s proposal was kicked into the long grass by US pressure, assisted by the usual suspects, notably Russia and Saudi Arabia. According to a report in Politico of 3 November 2025 (that surfaced first in the Financial Times), US delegates went to the extent of making threats of ‘personal consequences’ to delegates from member states disposed to support the motion. Delegates were summoned to the US Embassy in London, and – whether there or in the wings of the meeting, or more likely both – ‘intimidation, threats of cessation of business, threats of family members losing visas’ were employed. This was not the kind of treatment that any diplomat attending an important multilateral conference was entitled to expect but the tactics of the mob enforcing a protection racket. IMO delegates were duly shaken. This was another low for Trump and Marco Rubio, the president’s poodle in the State Department.

Let’s hope that Zohran Mamdani’s fantastic victory in the recent New York mayoral election is a sign of the turning of the tide. It’s interesting that he calls himself a ‘democratic socialist’, a label with a noble heritage because it’s also the badge that was worn by George Orwell.

While I’m banging on, I might as well go off on another grey-beard tangent. How pathetic that UK, EU and Japanese car makers should have been bleating about threats to their production lines from a possible Chinese embargo on rare earth supplies. ‘Rare earths, in particular magnets,’ reported The Guardian on 29 October, ‘are used across the car industry for window, door and boot openings.’ They seem to have forgotten that it’s not that long ago that motorists used handles for each of those jobs. Physical controls are rightly making a come-back on dashboards, as on the Renault 5 EV; let’s maintain the momentum.