Environmental Regime and Conventional Security Issues in the US Politics

Abstract

Historically, environmentalism has not served the US long-term objectives and goals to advance its influence and hegemony in the world. From the Post-cold war period onwards, US politics took war interventions as a top security issue and denied the non-traditional threats such as climate change to be a part of its national security agenda. On the other hand, many countries have included the threat of climate change in their national security domain. Meanwhile, in the US, climate action has never been a central part of its national security and foreign policy objective. The first section of this paper aims to critically evaluate the US domestic policies and foreign policy from the Nixon administration to Trump’s administration. It shows that the US has a promising start in addressing nontraditional threats but soon became a laggard in the subsequent years. Secondly, this paper tries to answer a very pertinent question that why does the US remain a laggard to consider environmentalism to be part of its national security agenda?