In a manner of speaking, the democratic primary debate in Iowa on Tuesday was all about security — specifically, the national security policies envisioned by the narrowing field of democratic presidential hopefuls. At first blush, the visions speak to the fundamental rift within the Democratic party’s left, center, and right wings.  

Joe Biden, a corporate democratic of the party’s rightmost flank, spent much of the debate feigning contrition for his decades of support for the invasion of Iraq. Only belatedly did Biden’s positive foreign policy vision emerge on stage: a resuscitation of the Obama doctrine entailing sweeping covert actions and targeted killings — but with the support of international coalitions, lest the U.S. “end up being the world's policeman again.” Biden sagely noted: “there's no way you negotiate or have been able to negotiate with terrorists. You have to be able to form coalitions to be able to defeat them or contain them.”

Far from repudiating ill-founded wars — with slight allowances for the ones he participated in — the aloof technocrat Pete Buttigieg argued that a new AUMF is needed. However, he added that new authorizations should sunset after three years (no word on how a President Buttigieg will decide how or when the U.S. should actually undertake these new wars in the first place). Ominously, however, Buttigieg noted that “our security depends on ensuring that Iran does not become nuclear.”

The centrist Elizabeth Warren reiterated her intention “to get our combat troops home” — a vow that sounds as vaguely promising as the Obama-era Iraq withdrawal plan, which was guided by no less a steady hand than the self-styled Iraq wonk Joe Biden. 

As the party’s only major true left-wing candidate, Bernie Sanders, touted his long-standing view that the invasion of Iraq was “criminal.” Even Sanders, however, had to reckon with the fact that as a member of the House in 2001, he voted to authorize the war in Afghanistan. 

From the first question of the night (CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Sanders why he was “prepared” to be commander-in-chief — tantamount to asking the senator to justify his willingness to solve America’s problems by wielding America’s military power), the debate was dominated by talk of national security. Lost in the dust kicked-up by panic that the killing of Qasim Suleimani would instigate World War III, however, was meaningful debate over the far greater threat to virtually every form of meaningful human security: climate change. 

Climate crisis in the background

It’s not that the candidates failed to speak to climate change. All did, in fact. Of course, not all of their pronouncements were inspiring. Warren stated, blandly, that “we have to think about climate.” Buttigieg came a little closer by placing climate change within a basket of concerns, including “stateless terrorism” [sic.], cybersecurity, and conventional warfare. 

The real problem, however, is the candidates’ seemingly reflexive tendency to isolate climate change as a niche concern. This framing obscures the utterly unavoidable nature of climate change’s effects. Bernie Sanders is right when he says “climate change is right now the greatest threat facing this planet,” and there is no doubt that climate change amounts to a legitimate national emergency, as his campaign suggests. As a single-issue candidate, however, Tom Steyer came closest to getting climate action right, because he was the only candidate who used the stage to unequivocally link the ‘blowback’ of climate change and the need to combat it by redirecting the political and material capital now being spent on the military. Steyer said: “there's a gigantic climate issue in Australia, which also requires the same kind of value-driven coalition-building that we actually should be using in the Middle East.” 

This is not merely a question of politicking or political strategy, it is a budgetary reality. 

Unless the left doubles down on its positive climate vision, the military establishment will continue to use the emerging environmental cataclysm to grow its position as the indispensable frontline actor in the U.S.’s overall climate response. 

The $738 billion 2020 National Defense Authorization Act is among the growing body of defense literature that accounts for the realities of climate change. Perversely, however, the military endorses a neutered vision of climate change, primarily as a means of soliciting additional funding, either to increase the military’s core wartime functions in anticipation of the fact that climate change will increasingly become a driver of conflict, or to mitigate the effects of climate change at defense installations. (To this end, the NDAA includes $420 million in disaster relief for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska due to damage caused by a “500-year flood.”) Congress also appropriated $1.8 billion for repairs to military sites damaged by natural disaster. 

Although precise figures are difficult to establish, the U.S. military may already represent the largest single recipient of appropriations made to combat climate change. There is a certain irony in this, given that the U.S. military, as a whole, is the world’s single largest polluter. 

 The reality, of course, is that a Green New Deal — like all signature policy priorities of the left — cannot be realized without tapping a peace dividend. It is now becoming apparent, however, that the left will not only be forced to fight the military over funding on a holistic basis, but also for the appropriations that are available for explicitly climate-forward policies. 

Among the greatest shortfalls of spending in this way is that it distracts from root-and-branch solutions by focusing on expensive mitigations. If nothing else, events such as the wildfires ravaging Australia demand a reckoning with the increasingly apparent truth that consequence-based responses and half-measure environmental clauses embedded in multilateral trade deals will not solve the climate crisis. The challenges we face are structural, and they require structural reforms that will lessen the actual impact of climate change and mitigate the effects of changes that can’t be averted. 

For the left, the necessary links between security policy and climate change presents an opportunity to emphasize the urgency of a holistic policy portfolio that benefits the working class in the U.S. and abroad.