Anne-Marie Slaughter writes about the challenge of climate change as a security challenge. She recalls how, last July, CIA Director William Burns told the Aspen Security Forum that climate change is the ‘biggest existential threat’ to the United States.
The issue, however obvious, is not just about the United States. The climate crisis is part of that de-generative megacrisis we have written about many times and which calls for critical, complex, systemic thinking and political visions in the future already present.
Slaughter reasons about measures for the US but the problem is planetary. It is very interesting to consider how the climate risk, classified as a threat by Burns, is now structural and already producing explosive impacts: forced migrations, water and food crisis, conflicts.
All this, inevitably, becomes matter for ‘new’ strategic decisions because it overturns the classical idea of security. To have security, in today’s world, we need ruling classes capable of understanding that the world risks spiralling into a very dangerous circle of ‘political unsustainability’. Already today, we see, the signs are not lacking.
