Editor’s Note 10/23/24: Since this story was first published, officials in Buncombe County, North Carolina, home to Asheville, have reported they overcounted the death toll in their region by as many as 30. Some of the death toll figures in this story are no longer accurate.
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.”
Key US Navy bases in low-lying areas like Norfolk and Virginia Beach in Virginia are threatened by the rising waters caused by climate change, and the Pentagon is working to mitigate its impact.
It’s also triggering an exodus of climate refugees who add to the chaos of conflicts around the world, for instance, in Sudan, where one of the most lethal wars on the planet today is taking place.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a broader conception of American national security than its present, more narrow conception of freedom from attack from outside forces, according to a recent book by the historian Peter Roady, titled “The Contest Over National Security.”
Roosevelt saw national security as securing the lives of all American citizens, which is why Social Security — a program that Roosevelt signed into law in 1935 — is called Social Security rather than, say, Social Welfare. Today, Social Security is one of the most popular US government programs.
As the Nazis were conquering great swaths of Europe on January 6, 1941, Roosevelt spoke about his broad view of national security during his State of the Union address, emphasizing the need for “freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.”
It was the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union that produced a change in how national security was conceptualized, and it took on its present narrower meaning of freedom from an attack by a competitor, according to Roady.
This framing of national security also endured after the 9/11 attacks. The George W. Bush administration’s 2002 national security strategy said, “We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants … Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government.”
Now, reframing what constitutes national security should be a top priority and it’s not just climate change that represents an existential threat. Consider that the Covid-19 pandemic killed around the same number of Americans — 1.2 million — that had died in every war since the American Revolution.
Politicians are under pressure to get serious about planning for the next pandemic enabled by the ease of global travel. According to the non-partisan COVID Crisis Group, which released a detailed report last year, the US remains quite unprepared for the next pandemic.
The devastating impacts of this fall’s hurricanes may also cause American politicians to start seriously planning to mitigate the risks from climate change by, for instance, restricting new construction in flood zones.
After Hurricane Milton, Americans should ask themselves: Are they safer now from threats like climate change and pandemics? And if not, isn’t it time for a real discussion of what truly constitutes national security to begin?
