Goodman and Carlucci’s 1998 War Over Military Readiness

By Marcus Boone · September 14, 2026

A weekly briefing to President Clinton tracked a public clash between DOD officials over the Kyoto Protocol while the administration's policy hit a wall in Congress

The rise of global temperatures, fueled by a fifty percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution, is not a scientific curiosity but a slow-motion disaster for the world's most vulnerable populations. It is a cost measured in drowned coastlines and failed harvests, a debt that the political class has spent decades pretending they can refinance. In the summer of 1998, while the planet continued to trap heat, the machinery of the White House was preoccupied with the geography of a public relations fight.

Because the original pages are unavailable, this report draws from the archive's curated description of the memorandum. The record is a June 15, 1998, memorandum from Todd Stern, a lawyer and diplomat who later became the U.S. chief negotiator for the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, addressed to President Clinton. Stern was the President's dedicated climate change intelligence source, tasked with distilling the chaos of global diplomacy and domestic resistance into a weekly briefing.

The Washington Times Rebuttal

The memorandum spends significant space on a proxy war being fought in the op-ed pages of the national press. Stern notes a recent piece by Sherri Goodman, a DOD Assistant Secretary who later served as secretary general of the International Military Council on Climate and Security. Goodman had used the Washington Times, a daily newspaper based in the capital focusing on national politics, to launch a counter-attack. The record describes her op-ed as being "aimed at refuting an earlier piece by former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci on Kyoto Protocol’s effect on military readiness."

Frank Carlucci, a Reagan-era Defense Secretary and the first Italian American to hold that post, had argued that the Kyoto Protocol—the international treaty designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—would undermine the operational capacity of the United States military. The conflict between Goodman and Carlucci was not merely a disagreement between a current and former official; it was a strategic deployment of credentials. Stern’s decision to highlight that Goodman chose the Washington Times "rather than Wall Street Journal" suggests a deliberate attempt to penetrate specific media circles to neutralize Carlucci’s influence.

This is where the connections reveal the actual priority of the Oval Office. Stern was not reporting on the technical merits of military readiness or the specific tonnage of carbon emissions. He was monitoring the trajectory of a public argument. The line from Goodman to the Washington Times and back to the President's desk shows a White House that viewed climate policy as a series of narrative skirmishes to be managed.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

Bonn and the Binational Commission

Beyond the press war, the record lists several "process markers"—events that signify activity without necessarily promising results. Stern reports on "negotiations in Bonn," the Rhine-side city that served as the capital of West Germany until 1990. He also notes a meeting of the U.S.-Mexico Binational Commission, the body tasked with managing the border, including the construction of fences and walls to curb illegal immigration.

On the surface, these entries suggest a President being kept abreast of a global effort. In reality, the pairing of climate negotiations in Germany with border wall discussions in Mexico is a study in dissonance. One involves the survival of the biosphere; the other involves the fortification of a line in the sand. By placing these in the same weekly report, Stern provided a veneer of administrative momentum. The public record establishes that these negotiations were part of a broader effort to address the warming of the lower atmosphere, but the memorandum focuses entirely on the fact that the meetings occurred, not what they achieved.

The Perimeter Alarm

Perhaps the most telling detail in the record is the mention of a "largely adverse congressional response to proposed administration policy." The memorandum does not name the specific legislators or the specific committees. It simply notes the hostility.

The desk's reading is that this "adverse response" is a convenient placeholder for the specific influence of the energy and fossil fuel lobby. By scrubbing the names of the corporate stakeholders and industry groups that funded the opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the memorandum transforms a targeted corporate campaign into a generic legislative mood. It obscures the money and the lobbyists, leaving the President with a vague sense of political friction rather than a map of the interests paying for that friction.

Furthermore, if this file is shaped the way it looks, the memorandum functions not as a policy driver, but as a perimeter alarm. The heavy reliance on media monitoring—tracking op-eds and news coverage—suggests that Stern’s primary role was to prevent the President from being blindsided by the news cycle. The goal was not to solve the climate crisis, but to ensure the President was not surprised by the headlines. The pattern suggests that the White House was more concerned with the optics of Department of Defense unity than the actual technicalities of whether the Kyoto Protocol would affect the readiness of a carrier strike group.

The Siloed Truth

There is a glaring void in this record. For a document titled "Climate Change Weekly Report," there is a total absence of environmental metrics, temperature data, or scientific warnings. There are no mentions of ice melt, sea-level rise, or the warming of the lower atmosphere. There is only the noise of the political class: negotiations, commissions, op-eds, and congressional mood swings.

The pattern suggests that scientific intelligence and technical climate data were siloed in a separate reporting track, kept far away from this political-diplomatic stream. The President was being briefed on the politics of climate change, while the science of climate change was handled elsewhere. This separation allowed the administration to treat the environment as a diplomatic chip rather than an existential threat. The record shows a government that had successfully decoupled the reality of a warming planet from the process of governing it.

The desk's reading is that the withheld pages of the Clinton-era climate files would show this same pattern: a obsession with the "process" of diplomacy used to mask a lack of substantive progress. The references to Bonn and Mexico were not milestones; they were distractions designed to signal activity to a President who was more interested in the optics of leadership than the logistics of survival. While the administration tracked the public brawls between officials like Goodman and Carlucci, the atmosphere continued to accumulate the carbon dioxide that now threatens the very stability of the nations they were pretending to lead.

Who paid for this management of optics? The result was a lost decade of American leadership on the global stage, a failure to bind the world's largest economies to meaningful limits while the window for action slammed shut. The pattern of the 1998 reports—prioritizing the media cycle over the planetary cycle—became the blueprint for every administration that followed. The record establishes that the White House knew the opposition was "adverse" and the diplomacy was fraught, but they chose to report the weather of the Washington press corps rather than the weather of the world.

Goodman and Carlucci’s 1998 War Over Military Readiness

The Washington Times Rebuttal

Bonn and the Binational Commission

The Perimeter Alarm

The Siloed Truth

Sources