“Pope Francis is not happy.” I’m pretty sure that was my first thought when I first read his apostolic exhortation on the ecological crisis, “Laudate Deum,” a somber follow-up to his 2015 encyclical on the topic, “Laudato Si’.” World governments had made little substantive progress addressing climate change in the eight years between the documents, and the tone of “Laudate Deum” reflects that. I thought about it again after learning that one of President Biden’s final foreign policy actions was to authorize Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied missiles to strike deeper into the heart of Russia.
Peace among nations is a necessary precondition for any solution to the climate change crisis. And peace must be more than just the absence of violence. It requires a pragmatic recognition of our shared vulnerability to the changing climate, which disproportionately affects the world’s poorest. That means sharing things such as greener technologies in our most carbon-intensive industries, as well as best practices in conservation and adaptation. Instead, we have renewed arms races, increased border militarization and a mad dash for exhaustible natural resources.
Unfortunately, peace was not on the ballot in this year’s presidential election. Perhaps no area of international relations demonstrates this more than the bipartisan antagonism toward China, the world’s second largest economy and the country best poised to create a multipolar world for the first time since the Cold War.
When it comes to foreign relations, Donald J. Trump’s G.O.P. does not have a monopoly on the “make America great again” ethos. America’s post-World War II economic dominance fuels a fantastical form of reasoning among lawmakers. They forget that greatness hinged on U.S. competitors suffering tremendous losses to both population and physical infrastructure. These idealized memories of past prosperity have shaped decades of expectations of control that make enemies out of competitors. Today it is China, a generation ago it was Japan.
The heating up of U.S. relations with China plays out in at least three policy areas: tariffs, export controls and the build-up of military installations in the Asia-Pacific region. Each undermines the cooperation between our two countries and increases the likelihood of war. Washington’s aim, broadly speaking, is to ensure that the United States remains the world’s lone superpower, by leveraging trade policy and war if need be.
Among Mr. Trump’s signature policies during his first term was placing tariffs on approximately $370 billion of Chinese imports to the U.S. annually, ostensibly to encourage U.S.-based businesses to buy more goods manufactured domestically. President Biden left this policy largely unchanged. Not only did this policy increase tensions between our two nations, it had mixed results for American workers and manufacturing. Some domestic industries competing with Chinese manufacturers benefited, but others whose products depended on imported components suffered. The former group made modest gains, with U.S. spending shifting to countries not on the tariff list. Vietnam, for example, has more than doubled its exports to the United States since the tariffs went into effect.
In October 2022, the Biden administration also launched an attempted blockade of exports of U.S. technology to China. The controls were principally aimed at the chips that make artificial intelligence possible, as well as the components needed to make the chips themselves. The measures have failed because the American business community refuses to leave profits on the table and is finding ways to sell technology to China anyway, according to an August 2024 investigation by The New York Times.
A military build-up in the Pacific
Most troubling of all is the ongoing build-up of U.S. military capacity in the Asia-Pacific region. There are over 375,000 military personnel, 2,460 aircrafts, and 200 ships stationed under the authority of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, including Kunsan Air Base just across the Yellow Sea from mainland China. The strategy has been to increase the footprint of U.S. bases and further arm regional allies. In 2023 the United States and the Philippines reached an agreement that gave our military access to five more airfields and naval bases on the archipelago. At the start of 2024, the United States armed Japan with up to 400 of the latest Tomahawk missiles.
China has also adopted a more aggressive posture. In the second half of 2024, it conducted a series of military exercises in partnership with Russia, meant to demonstrate the might of both nations in the face of the U.S. military build-up in the region. These actions climaxed in September with the “Ocean-24” exercise that brought 90,000 troops, 400 ships and 120 aircraft to the North Pacific. This is an unsustainable state of affairs. The joint Chinese and Russian military exercises are another reminder that no nation that can help it will allow itself to remain surrounded by a hostile nation, in this case the United States. As a great power, on the other hand, the United States does not always respond peacefully to challenges to the status quo. These are all the ingredients necessary to turn this cold war hot.
As our governments continue to fail us, social movements and nongovernmental organizations have a vital role to play within and beyond national borders in ameliorating our climate situation. In our globalized world, the conditions exist for what Francis calls “multilateralism from below” to pursue solutions to the ecological crisis: “The demands that rise up from below throughout the world, where activists from very different countries help and support one another, can end up pressuring the sources of power.”
Poor and working-class Americans are being battered by a climate crisis that increasingly outpaces our ability to adapt. They have more to lose if we abandon peaceful collaboration and instead make an enemy of a country that is 18 percent of the global population.
Shared interests do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are identified and cultivated within the field of political life. For everyday people this requires a commitment to relationship-building between both individuals and groups.
Along these lines, I think of organizations like Women Cross DMZ, which mobilizes women around the world to fight for a formal end to the Korean War and peace on the peninsula. In 2015, the group made international headlines when they organized a historic march of 10,000 women from both sides of the Demilitarized Zone that has divided North and South Korea since the armistice agreement was signed in 1953. Women Cross DMZ and groups like it remind us that it is possible for everyday poor and working-class people around the world to identify and establish shared interests with one another.
Francis put it well in “Laudato Si’,” saying that “our planet is a homeland” and “humanity is one people living in a common home.” Without these realizations, we cannot propel ourselves toward a just climate future. U.S.-China peace and the multilateral cooperation it can birth are not separate from the ecological crisis that affects all of humanity. In 2024 and beyond, militarism is a form of climate denialism.
