The warmongers are at it again. In case you haven’t heard, the Pentagon has declared a global war on global warming. It’s our armed forces vs. the forces of nature, and we are the enemy. Those entrusted with protecting us from suicide bombers are now trying to protect the environment from us.
In mid-October, the Pentagon released its “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap,” which lays out the military’s plan to deal with the effects of global warming. “Climate change,” says the report, “will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the Nation and poses immediate risks to U.S. national security.” Among those immediate risks is “a projected sea-level rise of 1.5 feet over the next 20 to 50 years.” It is important to remember that 50 years from now is 50 years from now, which is hardly “immediate.”
The dangers do not end there. In a foreword to the report, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel asserts that climate change “has the potential to exacerbate . . . terrorism.” Another Pentagon report, released in March, claimed that climate change “can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.”
Others agree. The New York Times recently quoted Marcus King, “an expert on climate change and international affairs,” suggesting, in all seriousness, that ISIS might be the result of global warming. “Climate change and water shortages,” King said, “may have . . . triggered situations where youth were more susceptible to joining extremist groups.” The root cause of terrorism, it seems, is the weather.
“Weather has always affected military operations,” Hagel correctly observes. Indeed, one could go further and say that weather has always affected things people do outside. Hagel believes the threat posed by climate change requires “a comprehensive, whole-of-government approach,” otherwise known as President Obama’s plan all along.
This administration is not the first to redefine U.S. national security so broadly. It is the second. The end of the Cold War reopened the question of just what America’s national security entailed. With the Soviet Union no longer threatening our survival, the question arose: What, if anything, did?
The Clinton administration’s answer was multifarious. With no clear enemy in sight, the government began to look for oblique ones. It identified AIDS in Africa and global warming as threats to national security. An early draft of its 1994 national security strategy proclaimed, “American citizens and interests are increasingly at risk from complex transnational developments that threaten our security.”
Words like “complex” and “transnational” are hallmarks of incoherency in foreign policy. In this case, the attempt to complicate was an attempt to obfuscate. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright scoffed at the idea that “global issues” such as the environment were “soft issues that you do when you don’t have anything better to do.” Actually, that is exactly what they were—and are.
Not coincidentally, the environment became a matter of U.S. foreign policy precisely when the Soviet empire began to crumble. In 1990, Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said “the destruction of our environment” constituted a “threat to our national security.” That same year, Senator Al Gore called for a “Strategic Environment Initiative”—a play on Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—that would require “a mobilization of talent and resources usually reserved only for purposes of national defense.” Gore openly admitted he had “appropriated military jargon” to make his case.
Gore compared “beaches covered with medical garbage” to “Soviet behavior,” which over the course of seven decades had caused the deaths of tens of millions of people and the enslavement of hundreds of millions more.
In the 1990s, America’s inordinate fear of climate change displaced its inordinate fear of communism. “We have moved beyond Cold War definitions of the United States’ strategic interests,” Gore declared in 1997. He argued that “environmental problems such as global climate change . . . threaten the health, prosperity, and jobs of all Americans.”
Secretary of State Warren Christopher, meanwhile, stressed “the vast new danger posed to our national interests by damage to the environment.” The way to achieve “global peace,” he insisted, was by “safeguarding the global environment.” Secretary of Defense William Perry called this “defense by other means.” A more accurate description would be non-defense by any means.
Reluctant to confront actual security threats, the Obama administration is reverting to this approach, mistaking environmental challenges for security challenges. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said, “The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security.” Dramatic? Earlier this year, Secretary of State John Kerry declared climate change “another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” In September, he said it warrants as much “immediacy” as terrorism.
For all its potential perils, climate change is not a threat to America’s national security, much less an immediate one. A sea-level rise of 1.5 feet in 50 years is less ominous than a nuclear Iran next year—a point that should be obvious. Rather than declaring war on the weather, the government should focus on the people who have declared war on us.
Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism.
