Climate Change Is the Superpower Competition This Century
In a world of North-South integration forced by climate chaos, superpowers will triumph by focusing on resilience and security -- not containment and defense
Great piece from The Diplomat (hat tip, Rich Suttie) entitled “Centering Climate Change in the China-US Competition.” The argument previewed in the subtitle (“Climate change in the Indo-Pacific will have a very real impact on the outcome of any potential great power conflict within the region.”) is essentially the same as my book America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse.
The difference? The author Matt Holbrook is more circumscribed in his analysis, both in terms of causality and geography.
To me, climate change provides the essential venue for superpower competition — doing far more than impacting it. In my view, Taiwan, for example, impacts but does not define the superpower competition between the US and China — a competitive and co-dependent relationship that has grown far beyond Taiwan’s capacity, as a conflict scenario, to shape their collective future (crazy talk, I know, to the balance-of-power types who see the world along military lines). That’s because climate change is a truly global phenomenon that will reshape wealth, growth, networks, trade, investment, security all over the world.
In other words, Holbrook moves a number of chips to the center of the table while I pretty much push forward everything I have.
Why?
Back to your Jared Diamond and his Guns, Germs, and Steel: starting with the Holocene Epoch (since the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago), the “wide” Eurasia landmass was advantaged environmentally over the “tall” parts of the world (Africa, New World). That advantage determined who was conqueror and who was conquered for hundreds of years following the onset of the Age of Discovery (Eurasia discovering the rest of the world).
But now consider climate change: those regions “wide” in lower latitudes (within 30 degrees north and south of the equator) will see a far higher proportion of their lands rendered un-farm-able and unlivable this century — thus impacting a far higher proportion of their population (over half of humanity lives there). Thus, “wide” Eurasia and the upper half of Africa (wider portion) will suffer disproportionally from climate change while the super-tall (15,000km) and far more narrow (5,000km at widest and 50km at thinnest) Americas (North, Central, South) will see a far smaller fraction of their population/landscape suffering displacement and force migration.
In others words (and as I argue in the book), climate change is “why tall now beats wide”(p235). In effect, “the Americas stand tall” (p251) when it comes to climate change.
Holbrook justifiably concentrates his analysis on the Pacific island nations because it gives him a new vector for defining a China-US influence competition across the wider Indo-Pacific theater — the “hot” theater for the Cold War revivalists in ascendancy right now. My argument just elevates and expands that logic to the planet as a whole.
To be fair, Holbrook’s start here is as on-target as anything I say in America’s New Map:
The world is at a strategic inflection point between devil-may-care industrialization and sustainable survivability. The same era that led humanity to previously unimaginable heights and technological advancements beyond our forebears’ wildest imaginings have come at a cost: post-industrial age climate change.
I make that argument throughout my book, and come to a very similar conclusion with regard to superpower competition as Holbrook does when he writes:
The power that places the most emphasis on long-term climate resilience for itself and its partners will have the best recipe for long-term strategic success.
I just couch my argument on a grander scale, pulling in the simultaneous reality that, what China and the US are really competing over is the soul of the emergent global majority middle class (a good portion of which resides inside China). That global middle class wants protection from the future: it has achieved new levels of consumption heretofore denied them throughout human history and they will pretty much do anything and side with anyone who can prevent their return to abject poverty.
THAT is the competition we wage with China: who better exports security to that global middle class and effectively socializes the truly existential threat (to that newfound standard of living) posed by climate change, which will hit worst along those very same “wide” and lower latitude ranges where the vast bulk of future global middle class consumption will unfold.
To me, that reality says that the superpower most adept at offering North-South integration schemes will win the day and rule tomorrow. This is how I couch the threat posed by China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its associated social-control technologies (Huawei’s Safe City offering right out of Orwell). Beijing has a very concrete (pun intended) offering while America and Europe offer pale imitations and mostly scheme to deny China’s success — a losing strategy in my opinion.
In my mind, the stakes cannot get any bigger: win the middle (e.g., markets, political model of rule by the middle and for the middle, network centrality in a digitalized globalization) and win thrld.
My definition of Middle Earth (that band stretching 30 degrees north and south of the equator) is my version of Mackinder’s “heartland theory” for this century: figure out how to effectively manage Middle Earth — where we witness the collision of climate change’s worst impacts, a youth bulge of two billion souls, and the future consumption-growth engine of the global economy — and you are the superpower integrator of note in globalization’s ongoing evolution.
Accomplish that and it is your century … America … or China … or India.
I was very happy to come across this excellent article because it is so reinforcing of my book’s logic. Thanks again to Rich Suttie for passing it along.