In the surreal dénouement of a recent episode of the New York Times podcast ‘The Daily’, Doug Hurley, one of three us astronauts currently orbiting 250 miles above the Earth aboard the International Space Station, suggested that civilian space travel might prove a balm for global ills like ‘the pandemic and the strife in the cities’ following the police killing of George Floyd:

When you look out the window, when you see the planet below, you don’t see borders. You don’t see the strife. You see this beautiful planet that we need to take care of. And hopefully, as technology advances and as this commercial space travel gets going, more people will get that opportunity. Because I think if you get the chance to look out the window from space and look back on our planet . . . you’ll realize that this is one big world, rather than all these different little countries or cities or factions that we have on the planet. And I think it will make it a better place.footnote¹

If this startling plug for the utopian promise of space tourism—its commodified experience of sublimity prompting epiphanies about the artifice of territorial divisions and activating a latent eco-consciousness, thus saving the planet one cosmic sightseer at a time—represents an extreme version of one kind of environmentalism, which envisions the transcendence of national boundaries through an enlightened recognition of our collective embeddedness in the ecosphere, Anatol Lieven takes the diametrically opposite view. His latest book Climate Change and the Nation State argues that the self-interest of nation-states should not be suppressed in pursuit of global solutions to anthropogenic climate change, but doubled down on.footnote²

That nation-states, rather than intergovernmental bodies or some emergent supranational sovereign, will—if anyone will—be the vanguard of response to the climate crisis is not the central claim of Lieven’s book; their ongoing centrality as political units and global actors is assumed rather than lengthily argued for. The question animating Lieven’s contribution to green strategizing is rather about what will compel nation-states to act, and what will motivate their increasingly polarized electorates to rally behind some version of a Green New Deal (gnd), of which Lieven is firmly in favour.footnote³ The way Lieven formulates his version of this cardinal climate question—what is to be done?—is conditioned by his diagnosis of the current impasse. Nation-states’ negligence hitherto, Lieven argues, proceeds not from a lack of capacity, financial or technological—an uncontroversial claim, given the immense resources mustered by governments in response to the pandemic—but ‘the lack of mobilization of elites all over the world, and of voters in the West’.

Climate Change and the Nation State is thus an appeal to ‘sensible and patriotic policymakers’ everywhere but is ‘mainly directed at audiences in the Western democracies’—and the us in particular, which is predictably the nation-state with which Lieven is primarily concerned. This bias is in some ways justified—aside from its hegemonic status and outsized influence on global affairs, the us emits more carbon per capita than any other country in the world—but also seems a contingent effect of timing: the book is palpably inflected by the looming us presidential election. In Lieven’s view, one of the reasons climate change has remained lethally low on the official political agenda in the us and elsewhere is that environmentalism has become excessively associated with ‘cultural liberalism’, alienating the conservative voters who most need to be won to the planetary cause.footnote⁴ Particularly in the us, the climate crisis has become an identitarian issue, which precludes its emergence as a bipartisan one. According to the Pew Research Center, in the us ‘partisanship is a stronger factor in people’s beliefs about climate change than is their level of knowledge and understanding about science’; a 2018 Pew survey found that 83 per cent of Democrats regard climate change as a major threat compared to only 27 per cent of Republicans—a 56-point difference.footnote⁵ As Lieven puts it, disbelief in or disregard for the devastating consequences of burning fossil fuels has become a matter of conservative ‘communal culture; like owning guns or attending church’. The climate-sceptic right says ‘Not “We are not convinced by the evidence of climate change” but “We aren’t the kind of people who believe in climate change”’. This partisanship is a major impediment to the creation of ‘a new national dispensation in national politics akin to the original New Deal’, which Lieven believes will be necessary to deliver green parties ‘sweeping majorities’ in ‘repeated elections’.footnote⁶

What, then, does Lieven propose to overcome the liberal ideological monopoly on ecological concern? His first concrete proposal for transforming the climate crisis into a solid national priority in the us and other Western democracies is to discursively reframe global warming as an imminent threat to national security: ‘the us military needs to throw its full weight behind the Green New Deal’. ‘Securitizing’ global warming would at once depoliticize the issue—‘remove it from the natural sphere of politics’—and render it more consonant with conservative political cultures, since enlisting military figures in the rhetorical detoxification of the topic would, Lieven hopes, have particular influence with Republicans, military functionaries being among the few experts who command respect across the political spectrum.footnote⁷

Lieven worked for the ft and The Times in the mid-80s and 90s, covering first Afghanistan and Pakistan—the subject of his Pakistan: A Hard Country (2011)—and then the former Soviet Union. In the early 2000s, he began writing about international relations and security for us research centres; since 2006, he has taught at Georgetown’s Qatar campus.footnote⁸ Lieven’s ‘securitization’ idea has its origins in a minor professional crisis, narrated in the introduction, which confers on the ensuing book a winning atmosphere of sincerity. Reflecting on the full meaning of the climate crisis prompted him to realize ‘the comparative irrelevance of most of the issues on which I have been working in the areas of international relations and security studies’. Researching the escalating tensions between the us and China over the atolls of the South China Sea, the thought dawned on him that in the long term ‘these places will be meaningless for both sides’, since ‘rising sea-levels and intensified typhoons will have put the sources of these tensions under water again’. Noting the absurdity of such territorial spats and geopolitical rivalries, as well as their ‘destructive effects’ on ‘international co-operation against climate change’, not to mention the environmental havoc wrought by militarization more generally, Lieven appeals to political elites to realize that ‘the long-term interests of the world’s great powers are far more threatened by climate change than they are by each other’. This sounds straightforward—a policy shift prompted by a sober consideration of the terrifying consequences of unchecked carbon emissions—but it would involve a radical reboot of national priorities. For one of the primary techniques for protecting national security as it is currently conceived is pursuing energy self-sufficiency or ‘resource independence’ by using increasingly invasive technologies to unearth domestic fossil-fuel reserves.