Imperialism has always come with a high body count. That remains true today with U.S.efforts to retain what is left of its hegemony. Sanctions, warfare (either direct or proxy), genocides, and exported class warfare all leave devastation in their wake.
In many ways US imperialism is similar to other colonial projects that came before it. Yet there is one obvious difference: our knowledge of climate change. Action to slow emissions was always going to be one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and efforts were slow in coming. Many have noted history’s cruel joke that at the moment global warming becomes widely accepted and as it accelerates, it is a hyper capitalist moment of human organization led by a nation dedicated to growth at any and all costs.
The US decision to go scorched earth as its empire crumbles is only making a bad situation worse.
Recent news items offer a stark reminder how the preoccupation of powerful factions in Washington with the destabilization campaigns of today are helping to guarantee the destabilization of the planet tomorrow.
The earth just officially passed its first climate tipping point with the die-off of global reefs, and more could be on the way as the Atlantic Ocean circulation is at its weakest in at least a millennium and evidence piles up that it’s approaching a breakdown.
Under hopeful conditions this news would be dominating coverage everywhere, and the five-alarm fire that is climate change would be leading to unprecedented moments of global cooperation to leave fossil fuels in the ground and rethink economic systems and social organization.
Sadly, we’re moving in the opposite direction. Climate tipping points are mentioned in passing —if they’re mentioned at all— and quickly pushed to the back pages by the latest nuclear brinkmanship in the New Cold War, approaching war in Venezuela and maybe Columbia too, US-Israel efforts to remake the Middle East through genocide. It’s not a coincidence that all these countries and regions being targeted by Washington also happen to sit on the largest known oil and gas reserves in the world as the US doubles down on a dystopian future filled with fossil fuels, climate chaos, and hierarchical class structures protected by a robust police state.
This path the economic elites are coalescing around not only precludes any action on global warming, but there are signs that they are actively embracing it as just another component of their imperial game.
As followers of the news, it’s often been a struggle to keep up in recent years as all the latest schemes, frauds, absurdities, bust outs, and incomprehensible violence accelerate along with the climate. I know I’m guilty of often missing the forest for the trees in my efforts to track Washington’s increasingly feral actions in the world.
So here’s an attempt to step back for a moment from all the micro-insanity and take in the macro, namely the destruction of the planet in the name of controlling it.
Rogue Empire
On October 18, Director of the Legal Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maxim Musikhin gave an interview to TASS discussing the ICJ’s recent advisory opinion on countries’ obligations regarding climate change. Musikhin draws attention to something often overlooked amid all the war maps and geopolitical impact of Arctic shipping routes: how an unnamed country’s illegal unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) make it impossible for world community to respond to the biggest threat facing humanity:
In the context of the obligation to cooperate, we drew the Court’s attention to the problem of illegal unilateral coercive measures (sanctions). We noted that such measures do not allow the world community to effectively respond to the challenges associated with adverse effects of climate changes. Unilateral coercive measures not only fail to contribute to the achievement of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement goals, but also, in fact, cause damage to the environment, as well as violate the very obligation to cooperate, for which the States introducing them must bear responsibility under international law.
I’m not here to make the argument that Russia would be some sort of savior on climate if not for the US, but that’s beside the point. Mushikin is making the entirely reasonable argument that it’s ludicrous for there to be any expectations of action on climate change when one of the world powers is weaponizing everything and running around like an out-of-control serial killer. What’s Russia to do when it faces unprecedented sanctions and all sorts of other efforts to destroy it? Naturally, it is going to do whatever is necessary to survive—even if that means leaning on fossil fuels for economic reasons. The same could be said for Iran, Venezuela, and others.
So instead of, say, paying countries to leave it in the ground, the US through economic warfare is incentivizing the extraction of these nations’ most valuable commodities, which also happen to be cooking the planet.
Climate Change as Wild Card in the Global Great Game
As energies are consumed by international rivalry, climate change becomes just another bullet point in global trade competition and destabilization games.
China achieved what’s being described as a major breakthrough in “supply chain speed” earlier this month when the containership Istanbul Bridge made the 7,500 nautical mile China-UK voyage via the Arctic Northern Sea Route (NSR) in just 20 days. The trip causes heartburn in Washington because the NSR doesn’t offer the same multitude of opportunities for sabotage and other roadblocks that other trade routes do. That’s because it passes only through Russian waters on its way to Europe.
And so think tanks and analysts pump out tomes on strategies in this New Cold War arena. The fact that the NSR is becoming feasible because of global warming, which is reducing the amount of ice in the Northern Sea is usually reduced to a footnote.
Should it not be the reverse? Who cares whether China and Russia win or whether the US can find some way to counter when in the long run the very fact the route is now being used is a sign that we are all losing.
And in the end it could mean absolutely nothing in the logistics wars. China might be the world’s engineering, tech, and manufacturing powerhouse, but on their current course the UK and Europe could be an impoverished (and climate-ravaged) backwater that is hardly worth the effort of Middle Corridors and Arctic routes.
War Kills The Environment Too
In September the UN published its second assessment of environmental damage from Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its US-backed rampage through West Asia. It paints a picture of utter devastation to air quality, soil, and water. Recovery might never come.
Such action only adds to the survival crisis facing populations in some of the harshest terrain on the planet. As Countercurrents notes:
The middle-east region with its long coastal area and its vast deserts is particularly vulnerable to climate change and its various forms of extreme weather and worsening disaster situations. There have been several serious drought and other disasters in recent times which have not attracted the attention these deserved because of the preoccupation with conflict issues. Sandstorms can be a much bigger problem in this area, as is further desertification. Water scarcity and depletion of water natural sources is already a very big issue in many countries, and this can worsen the problem of land sinking and subsidence in several areas. The heat can get much more extreme with the passage of time and the protection of air-conditioning will not always be available everywhere. The resource base can be threatened with other kinds of disasters including cyclones and coastal floods.
And with more wars instigated by the US-Israel on the horizon—and a Middle East ruling elite that largely supports them— the problem is only expected to accelerate.
Embracing the Heat
An increasing amount of signs point to the fact that the US geopolitics of submission not only distracts from the urgent need to address global warming, but that the accelerationists in Washington are openly embracing it as a force multiplier in their endless destabilization strategy.
Notorious for their short term thinking, the “intelligence” apparatus in DC seems to believe that climate change can be a US regime change ally. The thinking seems to be that even if the world, say, continues to run out fresh water in the process, well there are benefits to that. That’s because the spooks at the National Intelligence Council estimate that states like Iran and China will be hit harder than the US and this will present “opportunities.”
Here’s the NIC on how increased water strain:
…we judge that transboundary tensions probably will increase over shared surface and groundwater basins as increased weather variability exacerbates preexisting or triggers new water insecurity in many parts of the world. Forecasted climate change effects on local and regional weather—including loss of glaciers and more frequent and extreme droughts and floods—will make water management, resource allocation, and service provision more complex and difficult, and probably more contentious. Although scientific forecasts are not precise enough to pinpoint likely flashpoints, we assess that several areas are at high risk.
Anyone familiar with US imperial strategy will recognize similarities to long-utilized divide-and-rule practices. And with climate change, the US won’t even need to expend the considerable effort and expense for destabilization and installation of proxy regimes. And some of the US target nations conveniently coincide with spots estimated to be at the center of climate change struggles.
The NIC goes on to note how nations like China and Iran will be—and already are being— hit by climate change.
Iran probably will face more frequent droughts, intense heat waves, and expanding desertification that, combined with poor water management, will lower food production and increase import costs during the coming decades, increasing the risk of instability, localized conflict, and displacement.
These also create opportunities that the US and its proxies in the region could try to exploit in an effort to kill and displace millions. The Institute for the Study of War, run by the Kagan crazies, is particularly interested in Iran’s water supply
The American institute for the study of war ISW, has published a detailed map of Tehran’s water supply
They have to know: Water for Water.. pic.twitter.com/CRgg67qM35
— Soureh 🇮🇷🇵🇸 (@Soureh_design2) October 1, 2025
And here’s the NIS on China:
More variable precipitation is likely to widen China’s south–north water disparity, challenging its ability to irrigate agricultural areas in its water-deficient northeast and further drive its dam construction on rivers upstream from neighboring countries. However, it is likely to have the financial and technological resources to compete successfully in markets for solar and other clean energies and limit the damage from climate impacts, such as more intense cyclones and river flooding.
So full speed ahead!
She’s an icon
She’s a legend
And she is the moment✨ pic.twitter.com/MDkIj71JZf— U.S. Department of Energy (@ENERGY) July 31, 2025
Of course nobody knows with any certainty what havoc will be unleashed once more climate tipping points fall.
The US happens to be blessed with plenty of fresh water (as does the “51st state” to the north)—for now—but all of global warming’s other forces will do plenty of damage to America and cause destabilization there as well.
The problem here is that the economic elite in the US believe that their money will always allow them to buy a solution, and many are embracing a future in which they believe they can build an empire-by-contractor system where ruling clans do no more than oversee weapon systems, AI data centers, and mercenaries. Quinn Slobodian with a useful summary:
Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into … a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet.
While the US doesn’t have the hard power nor the economic clout to maintain a global empire, these nihilists believe it can do enough damage in order for them to rule over some Mad Max hellscape from the comforts of their Elysium. And they’re forcing their delusions on us all.
