Storming the Wall. Todd Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ it sounded as though Watson, who spoke with a soft voice, may have personally felt sympathy for the people killed crossing borders and their mourning loved ones, he focused instead on migration as a threat, how it increased conflict. “Just last week there were incidents of violence in Southern Africa,” he said, “because the local residents were concerned that migrants were taking economic opportunities away. . . . Migration definitely creates friction internally and externally.”

      As Watson spoke, I noticed that most in the audience had a blank expression. There were government officials, Washington insiders, private industry reps, and representatives from the Army, Navy, and Marines. There were chief scientists from private companies and senior analysts. There were people from the Department of Energy. Watson’s emphasis on the connection between global warming, immigration, and conflict was accepted almost without question. Perception of the migrant threat now goes much deeper than the usual nativist intolerance; driven by escalating climate crises, it is now perceived by corporate America as a threat to a much broader socioeconomic political system and the military financed to protect and perpetuate it.

      It might seem counterintuitive that a national security establishment known for its deep-seated conservatism would embrace the notion that human-induced environmental crises are increasingly shaping the future of civilization. This view was shared by at least one attendee in the audience, who spoke up at the end of a later panel titled “Nexus of Water, Energy and Food Impacts on National Security.” He said with full confidence that the panelists were ignoring the “elephant in the room.” The military, he said, was entrenched in climate denial. Awkward looks shot across the room, as if the man had missed the memo. But he was just repeating a commonly held perspective found outside the conference, the dominant narrative that the U.S. government is still debating the science of whether or not catastrophic global warming is real, caused by humans, preventable or not, and that in the meantime we should just keep using cheap fossil fuels and living it up.

      This was even more pronounced as President Donald Trump took office. On the very day he was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, the Trump administration’s quiet deletion of all climate change information from the president’s website recalls the Reagan administration’s removal of solar panels from the White House. With Trump, all signs point to a radical shift from Obama-era policies around climate change. Just the appointments of renowned climate skeptic Scott Pruitt and former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson augur a hotter world and a revved-up fossil fuel economy. Slated to head the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of State, respectively, both arrive at their positions with vested interests.

      However, behind the scenes the military and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will continue to prepare for the future dislocations of people, global instabilities, and threats to U.S. political and economic interests due to climate destabilization. Indeed, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, according to Politico, may “turn out to be the greenest person in Donald Trump’s cabinet.”³ And DHS secretary John Kelly, in charge of policing U.S. borders, is also a climate security hawk. On top of that, the Trump administration already works under the the climate security doctrine’s core assumption, that migration is a threat.

      Two questions I wanted to address by going to the conference were how did business as usual continue in the United States as climate change came to be identified as a top national security threat, and how did acknowledgment of this threat impact the border enforcement and homeland security regime? As I sat in meetings and workshops for two full days, it became quite clear that while military analysts were superb risk assessors who regularly do threat projections well into the future, their findings were not being used to ensure that the necessary changes would be made to prevent large-scale ecological crisis. Instead, as the world became shaken to its core with potential catastrophe, the security apparatus worked hard to keep things the same in terms of economic, political, and social centers of power.

      Indeed, the massive adjustments were like a climate adaptation program for the rich and powerful. Those enriched by the politics of fossil fuel, money, and weapons seemed to want solutions, first and foremost, for how best to keep a world of more and more impoverished people either working for them or out of sight altogether. As environmental destabilization wields tremendous pressures on these people to survive, investments pour into weapons and surveillance systems as a way of perpetuating the current economic-political order (even as the order attempts to “green” itself).

      To understand how ingrained the climate security nexus is—in the context of fringe, yet powerful, climate denialism in some Washington circles—it is best to turn to Brigadier General Stephen Cheney—a panelist at the same conference as Watson. In response to the man who earlier accused the military of climate denial, Cheney said, “The lance corporal in the forward operating base doesn’t really care much about the wind or the sun or the drought. He wants his bullets and he wants his food and he wants his water. The mid-level guys and gals—the majors—go to West Point, and the lieutenant colonels go to the War College, and they all are learning about climate change and understand the impacts . . . and how it’s driving international conflict.”

      And it is generals like Cheney himself, the higher-ups who implement policy and strategy, who most directly impact climate security. In January 2016, the U.S. Department of Defense issued Directive 4715.21: “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience.” According to Foreign Policy, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work signed “one of the potentially most significant, if little-noticed, orders in recent Pentagon history. The directive told every corner of the Pentagon, including the office of the secretary of defense, the joint chiefs of staff, and all the combatant commands around the world, to put climate change front and center in their strategic planning.”⁴ And now, with “Mad Dog” Mattis at the helm of the DOD, this not-widely-known yet game-changing directive has not been, and is unlikely to be, removed—even as the Trump adminstration attempts, including via a marathon of executive orders, to roll back Obama’s legacy on climate.

      Climate change, according to analysts Caitlin Werrel and Francesco Fermia of the organization Climate and Security, has reached a level of strategic significance that “can no longer be ignored.”⁵

      THE OVERWHELMING WINNER

      “I want to explain up front I’m a Marine,” said Brigadier General Stephen Cheney as soon as he stepped up to podium. “Thirty years of experience. Marines like pictures. They don’t like PowerPoint. So I’m going to show a couple of pictures up here. And we like to talk about war fighting.” On his right a slide flashed on the screen that said “Hot Spots: The Middle East.” To his left, up on a stage, his fellow panel participants sat at a table from which hung a banner that read “Defense, National Security, Climate Change Symposium.” Cheney, who was CEO of the American Security Project, a nonpartisan national security think tank formed in 2005 by then-senator John Kerry, said, “I’m going to walk around the world a little bit. Talk about conflict and climate change.”

      Cheney’s gruff, confident voice fit the portrait of a soldier who had spent years on distant battlefields. “No surprise to anyone here: extreme weather presents a direct threat to U.S. homeland security. Around the world this has a tremendous effect on our forces and our allies. And definitely our enemies.”

      Everyone in the audience seemed intent on Cheney’s words. He came across as a straight shooter. At one point during his talk, a younger man from Lockheed Martin, the Fortune 500 military manufacturer that was on the “cutting edge” of climate change, spilled coffee all over himself and the white tablecloth on the round table where he sat with four colleagues. Lockheed Martin had long ago leaped into the middle of the climate battlefield. In 2015, its CEO, Marilyn Hewsom, after winning an award for business management, said that the company “will continue its endeavor to create an environment-friendly world by combating the security and stability threats generated through climate change.” Also, as the Washington Post reported, the 112,000-employee corporation known for unleashing “cataclysmic fury on America’s enemies,” СКАЧАТЬ