Climate Change and the Nation-State: The Realist Case
by Anatol Lieven
In the early days of the pandemic, liberals and conservatives began sorting their ideological responses into camps that turned out to be the polar opposites of their later positions on the virus. Since the initial message about coronavirus suggested that it had something to do with China, liberal politicians began going out of their way to show how open-minded they were by encouraging people to patronize their local Chinatowns and not show any possibly-racist concern about the virus. Conservatives, on the other hand, were all about triple-masking and calling for the exact policies that they now criticize as hysterical overreactions, including mass lockdowns and quarantines. Both sides abruptly reversed themselves without explanation en masse as soon as the cultural signals changed. The time-capsule tweet from when the crisis was starting perfectly summarized this:
Americans’ response to the coronavirus exemplifies the harsh truth that mass politics has nothing to do with Enlightenment reason and is really just about the effective manipulation of crowd psychology. It’s naturally the same with climate change, which has come to be coded as a left-wing issue for reasons that are basically arbitrary. Conservatives were historically important environmental conservationists (it’s in the name) but somehow they have transformed into radical libertarian progressives when it comes to the natural world, because the messaging about it is seen as catering to liberals.
Anatol Lieven is best known these days as a Quincy Institute analyst on Russia (he wrote a good book about Pakistan as well), but he’s actually just a realist foreign policy scholar who applies a similar lens to many different issues. This book makes the provocative argument that if we’re going to defeat climate change we are going to have to start portraying it less as a progressive crusade to rebuild a morally broken world and more as a mainstream centrist conservative issue. More to the point, since nationalism remains one of the strongest ideologies in the world today, we’re going to have to start using avowedly nationalist arguments and tactics to mobilize people against it.
Lieven argues that nation-states are the only powers on earth today capable of steering us away from the approaching iceberg of environmental collapse. To that end, we need to do everything we can to make these states as strong and internally united as possible rather than weakening or dividing them. If climate change is really the most important issue on earth, and Lieven argues compellingly that it is, other priorities, even dearly held ones, that hold back or even delay action on this issue need to be put aside. To their great, credit progressives have led the charge against climate change in Western countries. But they have also done so while wedding the issue to a broader raft of progressive goals related to wealth distribution, race, and gender, that make it unlikely that conservatives will come on board quickly. It seems logical that progressives have to stop tacking other agenda items onto climate proposals if they want to get them to actually pass in a divided electorate. As much as the idea may cut against the grain, they also need to employ nationalist messaging and symbolism to get the average conservative voter on board with the program. Enlisting the military to help with messaging around climate could be helpful, particularly since the Pentagon is one of arms of the government that is most convinced that climate change is a serious problem.
If progressives had unlimited time they could perhaps win a war of attrition over climate change without making other compromises. But, unfortunately, they’re actually right that the problem of CO2 emissions is very time-sensitive and needs to be addressed ASAP. Lieven calls for using a civic nationalism to mobilize against climate change rather than an ethnic one. He isn’t an "eco-fascist," like some on the far-right have taken to calling themselves. But he is clearly exasperated with the trench warfare of progressive identity politics, given that, by their own admission, climate change is an existential threat to humanity. No progressive future is going to be possible anyways in a world of armed conflicts over water, coerced mass migration, endemic drought, and the breakdown of food supplies. The dream of abolishing capitalism, sometimes mentioned implicitly along with future-facing climate policies, is a huge obstacle to actually tackling the subject. The reality is that most people are against abolishing capitalism (no one even seems clear what this means) and the harsher reality is that past socialist regimes have also had horrible environmental records, little better than capitalism. Lieven argues that we need to be pragmatic and take whatever combination of policies, maybe even fiscally or socially conservatives ones, that reduces CO2 emissions quickest.
There is a clear subtext to this book which is that Lieven is an ideological critic of liberalism. He blames the liberal-individualist ethic for breaking down the links between generations that would normally shame people from dooming today's children to an adulthood of climate-driven apocalypse. Moreover, rightly or wrongly, he is very blunt about what he thinks will be necessary to achieve the medium-term nationalist cohesion necessary to stop climate change: Detente with conservatives on divisive issues like migration and culture. This book is about getting conservatives on board as soon as possible, not eradicating them as a political force, which most on the Left assume to be a necessary goal of any future political program. In the course of making this argument about politics and climate, Lieven also makes an excellent point about “residual elites,” – people who have aged into certain ways of viewing the world and who keep applying those frameworks to new situations even when circumstances have changed. You can see this today in the case of European Green Parties with their inexplicable opposition to nuclear energy as hangover from their experiences during the Cold War. We really need peaceful regime change in the West if we’re going to get the elites we need to tackle our present set of problems.
This book is a great polemic. That said, I don’t know if nationalism will really defeat climate change, particularly since nations will experience the crisis differently and might try and calculate their individual advantages on that basis. That said, ideas for getting major emitters like the United States culturally aligned on the subject are welcome if we’re going to tackle it anytime soon. If people act politically based on herd mentality, let’s do what it takes to get that herd moving in a productive direction.