“Given the specific form American power has taken since the second world war – a global empire of capital – the significant thing about military emissions is not so much their magnitude as the reason they are generated in the first place: namely, the Pentagon’s need to maintain unparalleled supremacy in order to underwrite a much wider, ecologically ruinous regime of accumulation. Washington’s role as guardian of global capital – and the military’s role as coercive guarantor of that position – is conterminous with what environmental historians call ‘the great acceleration’. The advent of the ‘Anthropocene’ and the spread of American-led transnational capitalism are intertwined. As such, the Pentagon’s deadly atmospheric legacy far outstrips the effect of its own emissions. With the left in purgatory, it is understandable that scholars like Michael Klare should hope for Washington to take up the mantle of planetary rescue. The notion that there might be anything ethically palatable in
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51