Keeping America Safe Means Acting on Climate Change

President Donald Trump signed 33 executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations after dinnertime on Monday, giving journalists, pundits, and concerned citizens plenty of material to work through after his first day in office. His Day One mandates included ordering federal workers to return to office full-time — never mind that the U.S. presidency is perhaps the most famous work-from-home job in the world — and formalizing his hatred of a two-inch-long fish. Trump also ordered an end to all wind permits, which my colleague Jael Holzman described as “the worst-case scenario” for the nearly $50 billion industry; paved the way to fire potentially thousands of civil servants; withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement (again); and followed through on his promise to wage all-out war on electric vehicles.

One more of the most significant implications related to climate, however, came buried in Trump’s sweeping reversal of 78 Biden-era executive orders: the overturning of Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” Biden had signed the executive order during his first week in office and, in doing so, declared that the U.S. “places the climate crisis at the forefront of foreign policy and national security planning.”

To fully understand the consequences of Trump rescinding this order, I spoke with Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate & Security, a nonpartisan think tank that specializes in the intersection of climate change and national security policies. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Last night, President Trump rescinded a Biden-era executive order designating climate change a foreign policy and national security priority. Why do you find that concerning?

Regardless of who’s in the White House, climate change continues apace — and continues to threaten U.S. national security and foreign policy interests. We just saw this in the past couple of weeks in Los Angeles with the wildfires there, which caused significant devastation to American lives and livelihoods, but also required the deployment of U.S. troops, threatened U.S. military bases, and interrupted other U.S. foreign policy objectives. President Biden had to cancel his last foreign visit to Europe, where he was supposed to meet with President Zelenskyy to talk about the war in Ukraine; he had to do the same thing during Hurricane Helene and cancel foreign visits that were about competition with China and the war in Ukraine. By sending the message that the U.S. administration is taking a step back from climate as a security issue, it creates a blind spot for the U.S. and creates risks.

When speaking to the press last night, Trump said his No. 1 foreign policy goal is keeping America safe. In your experience, how does climate change fit into that picture?

Keeping America safe means continuing to project military power and stand up to adversaries and competitors — and climate change is shaping all of that. It affects our military operations and our ability to deploy. It also affects Chinese national interests and the threat that China poses.

Our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, which are key to our military strategies for countering China in that region, are all threatened by climate change. Their airports, their economies, their military bases and structures, and the U.S. military facilities that are hosted in those places — they’re all threatened. If you’re not going to focus on that, or you’re not going to address it, then you’re creating a weakness. China’s overarching national security strategy includes environmental and ecological security. It is thinking about how climate affects its strategies.

In other words, our adversaries are acting on this, even if we’re not?

Exactly. And that’s the thing with stepping back from the Paris Agreement, as well: It creates a vacuum of leadership that China is more than happy to step into.

Would you expect the U.S. intelligence community or the Department of Defense to continue to act on climate change as it relates to foreign policy, just in less overt ways? Or do moves like this by the new administration hamstring those efforts?

The Department of Defense’s mission is still to be able to fight and win wars and to preserve its installations and operations. I expect that efforts to invest in resilience and adaptation will continue. There’s been bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for about a decade now to make sure that these issues are taken seriously. When Hurricane Michael decimated Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf Coast a few years ago, it was under the last Trump administration that they deployed money to rebuild that base. So I think that will continue.

The same will be true for the U.S. intelligence community, which remains independent from policy. It’s not the State Department, where you have to implement the president’s policies — you’re supposed to warn of risks. Your job is to give the president a decision advantage and warn of threats to the U.S., which means calling it like you see it.

Is there any particular region or conflict that could suffer from politicizing climate change in the coming years?

In Europe in the past year, Poland faced the worst floods in its history and had to deploy thousands of troops to manage those risks.

NATO has been a real leader in this space, partly because of the Arctic and the changes and challenges we see there. And so if the U.S. steps back, other leaders will continue to step forward. We’ve already seen that a bit from some European leader statements. Still, we risk U.S. resilience and dominance in the Arctic if we do not understand how climate affects our ability to operate there.

Speaking of national security in the Arctic, what do you make of the whole Greenland situation?

If the real concern is about U.S. security in the Arctic, there are a lot of other policies that the U.S. can pursue. I don’t think expanding our territory and threatening the purchase of other sovereign nations is the right way to go.