From America’s revolutionary war to resource wars: Climate change and global security

As the United States marks the 249th Independence Day, US President Donald Trump is undoing the US leadership of the world.

For decades, from terrorism to climate change, the United States served as the world’s leader. But, under Trump, the United States is not just retreating from its leadership roles but ditching some causes altogether. Nowhere it is more visible than climate change.

Trump is a climate change denier and calls it a hoax. Even as more and more countries are factoring in climate change in their national security strategies, Trump is going all-in on fossil fuels under his ‘drill baby, drill’ approach.

On his first day in the second term, Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. He has also reversed the previous Joe Biden’s policies for the promotion of green energy and has promoted unrestrained extraction and usage of fossil fuels.

The reality is such that there are currently around 9.8 million people were internally displaced by climate disasters, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Separately, the United Nations (UN) has estimated that there could be more than 200 million climate refugees by 2050.

How climate change poses security threats

Climate change does not just create security problems of its own but also acts as a ’threat multiplier’ to worsen existing problems.

For example, the flow of refugees from West Asia and Africa has destabilised Europe for more than a decade. It has led to national security concerns as several extremists are understood to have reached Europe with refugees. The management of these people has also strained host countries’ resources and led to internal tensions and political crises, such as in Germany where far-right, neo-Nazi party AfD has capitalised on the problem.

While the refugee problem has traditionally been driven by armed conflicts like wars or ethnic cleansing, climate change has now started to create waves of refugees. In the Sahel region, tens of thousands of people have been displaced from clashes over competition for scarce water resources.

In several island nations and communities, people have been forced to migrate because of rising sea levels, such as in the case of Kiribati in the Pacific where more than half of the population has been forced to move to the capital. People are also increasingly moving to New Zealand or Fiji to escape rising sea levels that are making several areas uninhabitable.

“Mass migration leads to a lot of political and social tensions as well as border issues. That could affect national security, because it could destabilize an entire region,” Karen Seto, a professor of geography and urbanisation at the Yale School of the Environment, told Time.

Separately, Scott Moore, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, told the magazine that climate change “takes things that we were already worried about, like extremism or terrorism, and exacerbates the scale or nature of those threats”.

Moore further said, “If you have these intensified climate change impacts, they place stress on things like food systems, and worsen already existing tensions within countries…If you have, for example, a really extreme and intensified drought in a country in which extremist ideologies are percolating, these climate change impacts may make it more likely that people are going to stop farming, or might migrate to cities where they may face difficult employment prospects, be socially dislocated and may be more vulnerable to extremism or engaging in some type of violence.”

Trump seeks profits from climate change

Melting icesheets in polar regions from climate change is allowing adversarial states like Russia and China, and possibly non-state actors like smugglers, to find new ways to reach the United States and threaten national security. Instead of keeping these natural barriers alive by countering climate change, Trump is looking forward to exploiting natural resources that melting ice is revealing, such as oil and rare earths.

Profiting from potential rare earths and oil reserves in and around Denmark’s Greenland island is considered to be the main reason behind Trump’s stated objective of annexing the island — forcefully if needed.

The melting ice and rising sea levels also potentially threaten military bases as they might come under the risk of being submerged, but Trump does not recognise such concerns.