This chapter addresses climate negotiations and focuses on the deadlock of negotiations in The Hague in 2000, which led to the withdrawal of the United States from the Kyoto Protocol. Although the remaining industrialised countries decided to continue with the Protocol without the United States, and Kyoto eventually came into force in 2005, the protracted US withdrawal seriously compromised the chances of success of the regime and called its future into question. Therefore, the deadlock between the United States and the rest of the industrialized countries remains unresolved. However, since the Bali Conference it seems that the United States is re-engaging, as it agreed to the Bali Roadmap which specifies the negotiating mandate of the post-Kyoto agreement. This turn of events could mean that the United States will be willing to participate in a post-Kyoto agreement and even take up a significant reduction target. Although this will not be known until the Copenhagen Conference in 2009, the move by the United States to accept the Roadmap indicates a significant re-engagement with the climate regime.

I argue in this chapter that the main sources of deadlock between the United States and the remaining Kyoto countries were based on two major reasons: competitiveness concerns in relation to developing countries, and perceptions of a prohibitive cost of implementation. These essentially tie in with two of the main hypotheses on the causes of deadlock: the perception of a superior ‘BATNA’ and domestic preferences (Hypotheses 1 and 6).