The impact of two catastrophic hurricanes in the last two weeks has underlined that rapid climate change is a threat that can do far more damage to American lives than traditional antagonists such as terrorists and authoritarian states.
The monster Hurricane Milton has left parts of Florida reeling and climate scientists are in no doubt that the strength of such storms is increased by rapidly warming oceans.
This comes two weeks after Hurricane Helene significantly damaged communities like Asheville, North Carolina, hundreds of miles inland, that were seemingly immunized from the worst effects of climate change. Helene killed at least 232 people.
Treating climate change as a national security problem is not a liberal position but a hardheaded realist one. Indeed, the Pentagon has explicitly said it is and “elevated” it up the lists of threats facing the US. Three years ago, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin could not have been clearer, “We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”