Synthesizing a Climate Geopolitics Strategy
By Dr. Nikolas Gvosdev
The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine mark the end of the post-Cold War era. The partial fracturing of the globalized system that both events have triggered has called into question some of the fundamental strategic assumptions of the last thirty years, especially that the strategy of enlargement of the liberal order from its two nodes in the Euro-Atlantic basin and the Far East would produce conditions of lasting security.
If “democratic enlargement” was the central organizing principle of U.S. national security for the last three decades, what replaces it in the context of the ongoing zeitenwende - the “change of the times” - will define U.S. global engagement for the coming years. The post-Cold War order has been shaken by two very distinct disruptions that pose simultaneous challenges.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the most dramatic manifestation of the growing willingness of the world’s authoritarian states to push for substantial revisions to the rules of the international system and the post-Cold War settlement. This challenge is fueled by the reality, as Ash Jain, Matthew Kroenig, and Marianne Schneider-Petsinger have noted, that “the United States, its European allies, and other democracies around the world have become dependent on China and Russia across a range of critical economic sectors.” From commodities like coal, iron, natural gas, and oil, to critical components like solar photovoltaics, pharmaceutical ingredients, and lithium-ion batteries, critical supply chains run through Moscow and Beijing. These supply chains not only help sustain their treasuries, but also augment how they exercise influence.
At the same time, the worldwide COVID-19 lockdown of 2020-21, which extracted enormous social and economic tolls on countries all around the world, was an unpleasant manifestation of what Sophie Eisentraut, Luca Miehe, Laura Hartmann, and Juliane Kabus describe as a polypandemic: “a multifaceted crisis that is confronting the world with more than just a health emergency” but which “has served to magnify serious pre-pandemic troubles.” From health and hunger shocks, to climate, energy, and environmental crises, the polypandemic erodes the abilities of countries to cope with challenges to national and human security. So, at a time when the United States and its allies are considering the benefits of partially de-integrating their economies from China and Russia, the polypandemic creates an imperative for renewed transnational cooperation.
Compounding the American response to these challenges is the domestic political reality that U.S. action on the international stage must now demonstrate how any foreign policy action contributes to “strengthening the middle class and enhancing economic and social mobility.” The Biden administration has attempted to put forward a concept that Nahal Toosi of Politico describes as “omnipolicy:” a more integrated approach where U.S. action at the international level, on climate or supply chain security for example, should generate concrete domestic benefits.
Crafting a coherent strategy (with accompanying policy propositions) that addresses the (partial) decoupling from the world’s authoritarian states with combating the polypandemic, within the parameters of an omnipolicy approach, is no easy task. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department during the Obama administration, has noted, the strategy places "global threats like climate change and pandemics [on] an equal footing with geopolitical competition and conflict.” The result of this approach is that “meeting both sets of threats is a tall but necessary order.”
A possible way forward would be to synthesize a consensus approach around the concept of “climate geopolitics," in which Western economies seek to become less dependent on authoritarian states for their natural resources. Such a reduction in dependence has the added benefits of spurring domestic technological innovation and galvanizing a green energy revolution. Simultaneously, this energy approach would reinvigorate Cold War alliances and shift them toward technological and economic partnerships that benefit their middle classes, rather than leaving them as relics of simple military cooperation.
In theory, a “climate geopolitics” approach is meant to solve several challenges simultaneously. For instance, despite a raft of major sanctions intended to cripple the Russian economy, Moscow banked nearly $100 billion in oil and natural gas sales in the first 100 days of its invasion of Ukraine. Depriving Moscow of that revenue stream, and thereby reducing Russia’s capacity to sustain its invasion, has been an American geopolitical imperative. Using the disruption caused by Western sanctions, however, also creates a pathway to jump-start the transition away from hydrocarbons toward green energy. Russia’s share of global energy sales is expected to drop to 13 percent by 2030, while sanctions, according to the International Energy Agency, are accelerating the green transition. This drop in Russian supply alongside new investment in green technologies could help put the major industrialized economies back on track to meeting their climate commitments and slow global warming. In turn, the technological boom generated by the energy transition as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as well as efforts to mitigate and reverse the environmental transformation, can connect a geopolitical foreign policy position (sanctions on Russia as part of aiding Ukraine) to domestic economic growth and development. Despite the overall economic slowdown, the green energy sector in the U.S. economy, both in terms of power generation as well as component manufacturing for green vehicles and transport systems, outpaced the general economy in terms of job and wage growth.
As this sector continues to develop, it in turn lays the basis for a renewal of U.S. global leadership by holding out the prospects of partnership with the United States. This new partnership has the possibility to move beyond a 20th century Cold War emphasis on military security guarantees. It can transition into a more holistic alliance that ensures the health, economic, energy, and technological security of a community of states in this century. Such a shift provides the transition that German Bundestag member Nils Schmid says will sustain the middle-class lifestyles of the industrialized democracies.
This synthesis could generate a broad-ranging consensus among Americans who might disagree on whether stopping Putin or saving polar bears is the priority. It sets out a temporal roadmap where short-term competition against the autocratic states will generate pressures that either induce reform or accelerate their collapse. At the same time, when the disruptive impacts of geopolitical competition are properly harnessed, they can regenerate the American technological and economic capacity for responding to crises, thus rejuvenating a U.S.-led coalition of states working on solutions to the problems posed by the polypandemic.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He holds non-residential fellowships with Foreign Policy Research Institute (editor of “Orbis”) and Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (co-host of the “Doorstep” podcast). He is a member of Loisach Group, a collaboration between the Munich Security Conference and the Marshall Center to enhance U.S. and Germany’s security partnership. He is a contributing editor for The National Interest. He has taught at Baylor, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard Extension and Brown universities. From 2016-20, he held the Captain Jerome E. Levy Chair in economic geography and national security.
Joe Biden is by Gage Skidmore and is licensable under CC BY-SA 2.0.
