The armed lifeboat
Militarised adaptation to climate breakdown is akin, as US journalist Christian Parenti argues, to the politics of the ‘armed lifeboat’ that seeks to secure the wealth of the few while training guns on everyone else.
geopolitics and military
China, 2049
One way or another, however, we can be reasonably certain of one thing: as the term makes all too clear, the old Cold War format for military policy no longer holds, not on such an overheating planet.
Fossil Fuel Empire: A World of Vulnerability
“It’s all about the oil,” many commentators said about the US assault on Iraq in 2003. Attributing a war to a single cause is almost always an oversimplification, but protecting access to the 20th century’s most important energy source has been a priority of US foreign policy since World War II.
Peak oil notes – Jan 31
A midweekly update…Oil prices continued to move higher this week with NY crude closing at $97.94 on Wednesday and London at $114.90. Optimism about the US and Chinese economies coupled with an announcement by the Federal Reserve that it intends to keep buying $85 billion a month worth of securities supported the move.
How it could happen, part four: crossing the line
This fourth part of a five-part series uses the tools of narrative fiction to explore some of the ways in which America’s global empire might come apart. As the multiple impacts of American defeat in the East African War come home to roost, a leadership vacuum made worse by partisan gridlock pushes the United States deeper into crisis — and efforts by the political establishment to evade that crisis without dealing with America’s systemic problems unleashes a backlash that might bring the American experiment to a sudden close.
How It Could Happen, Part Three: To The Brink
This week’s post is the third of five parts of a fictional narrative tracing out a scenario of American imperial defeat and collapse. As the war in Kenya reaches a climax, the action shifts to the United States—and to a president who has his back to the wall and very few options left.