A Greening of National Security?

"Is the Environment a National Security Issue?" by Marc A. Levy, in International Security (Fall 1995), Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Univ., 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.

It's been argued by some that global environmental problems ought to be considered matters of U.S. national security. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Norman Myers, author of Ultimate Security (1993), believe that biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and other such problems ought to be treated with the same seriousness as Bosnia and Saddam Hussein. Levy, an instructor of pol- itics and international affairs at Princeton University, is skeptical.

Some global environmental problems have no connection to any vital national interest. Acid rain, for example, "would have to rank very far down on the list of threats to national security because the values threatened trees, sports fishing, and so on-are far from vital," Levy writes.

Two environmental problems come closest, in Levy's view, to being direct threats to

U.S. security: ozone depletion in the stratosphere and the possibility of catastrophic glob- al warming. But even in these cases, he says, applying the "national security" tag may not make sense. It wouldn't change the analysis of the problem, or the remedy. Indeed, the security alarm might draw more public and congressional attention not only to the problem but to the costs of taking action--and so make it harder to deal with the problem. One reason that the U.S. response in the late 1980s to the danger of ozone depletion was so effective, Levy believes, may have been that it was seen not as a "security" threat but as a straightforward "public health and chemical hazard problem."

Why are Mathews, Myers, and others so eager to make environmental degradation a national security matter? Because, Levy suggests, they want "to whip up greater support for global environmental protection." But this strategy could easily backfire, he says. Public perception of the relative seriousness of various environmental risks bears little relation to reality, as a 1987 Environmental Protection Agency study showed. A public convinced "that any problem that is international and ecological" is a matter of national security, Levy warns, would likely force pol- icymakers to gallop off in pursuit of the wrong enemies.