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| Who will invade Brazil to save the Amazonia ? Aerial view of the Transamazonica Road (BR-230) near Medicilandia, Para State, Brazil on March 13, 2019. |
Who Will Save the Amazon (and How)?
It's only a matter of time until major powers try to stop
climate change by any means necessary.
BY STEPHEN M. WALT | AUGUST 5, 2019, 5:31 PM
Aug. 5, 2025: In a televised address to the nation, U.S.
President Gavin Newsom announced that he had given Brazil a one-week ultimatum
to cease destructive deforestation activities in the Amazon rainforest. If
Brazil did not comply, the president warned, he would order a naval blockade of
Brazilian ports and airstrikes against critical Brazilian infrastructure. The
president’s decision came in the aftermath of a new United Nations report
cataloging the catastrophic global effects of continued rainforest destruction,
which warned of a critical “tipping point” that, if reached, would trigger a
rapid acceleration of global warming. Although China has stated that it would
veto any U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against
Brazil, the president said that a large “coalition of concerned states” was
prepared to support U.S. action. At the same time, Newsom said the United
States and other countries were willing to negotiate a compensation package to
mitigate the costs to Brazil for protecting the rainforest, but only if it
first ceased its current efforts to accelerate development.
The above scenario is obviously far-fetched—at least I think
it is—but how far would you go to prevent irreversible environmental damage? In
particular, do states have the right—or even the obligation—to intervene in a
foreign country in order to prevent it from causing irreversible and possibly
catastrophic harm to the environment?
I raise this issue in light of the news that Brazilian
President Jair Bolsonaro is accelerating development of the Amazon rainforest
(60 percent of which is in Brazilian hands), thereby imperiling a critical
global resource. As those of you
with more respect for science than Bolsonaro know, the rainforest is both an
important carbon sink and a critical temperature regulator, as well as a key
source of fresh water. Deforestation has already damaged its ability to perform
these crucial roles, and scientists in Brazilian estimate that increasingly
warm and dry conditions could convert much of the forest to dry savanna, with
potentially catastrophic effects. Last week, the pro-business, free
market-oriented Economist magazine’s cover story was “Deathwatch for the
Amazon,” which frames the issue rather nicely. To restate my original question:
What should (or must) the international community do to prevent a misguided
Brazilian president (or political leaders in other countries) from taking
actions that could harm all of us?
This is where it gets tricky. State sovereignty is a
critical element of the current international system; with certain exceptions,
national governments are free to do whatever they want inside their own
borders. Even so, the hard shell of sovereignty has never been absolute, and
various forces have been chipping away at it for a long time. States can be
sanctioned for violating international law (e.g., by defying U.N. Security
Council resolutions), and international law authorizes countries to go to war
for self-defense or when the Security Council authorizes military action. It’s
even legal to attack another country’s territory preemptively, provided there
is a well-founded basis for believing it was about to attack you first.
More controversially, the “responsibility to protect”
doctrine sought to legitimate humanitarian intervention in foreign powers when
the local government was unable or unwilling to protect its own people. And as
a practical matter, states routinely accept infringements on their own
sovereignty in order to facilitate beneficial forms of international
cooperation.
When push comes to shove, however, most states resent and
resist external efforts to get them to change what they are doing inside their
own borders. And even though destroying the Amazon rainforest presents a clear
and obvious threat to many other countries, telling Brazil to stop and
threatening to take action to deter, punish, or prevent it would be a whole new
ballgame. And I don’t mean to single out Brazil: It would be an equally radical
step to threaten the United States or China if they refused to stop emitting so
many greenhouse gases.
It’s not as if world leaders haven’t recognized the
seriousness of the problem. The U.N. long regarded environmental degradation as
a “threat to international peace and security,” and the former European Union
foreign-policy representative Javier Solana argued in 2008 that halting climate
change “should be in the mainstream of EU foreign and security policies.”
Scholars have already identified various ways the Security Council could act to
prevent it. As the researchers Bruce Gilley and David Kinsella wrote a few
years ago, “it is at least legally feasible that the Security Council could
invoke its authority under Article 42, and use military force against states it
deemed threats to international peace and security by virtue of their
unwillingness or inability to curb destructive activities emanating from their
territories.”
The question, therefore, is how far would the international
community be willing to go in order to prevent, halt, or reverse actions that
might cause immense and irreparable harm to the environment on which all humans
depend? It might seem far-fetched to imagine states threatening military action
to prevent this today, but it becomes more likely if worst-case estimates of
our climate future turn out to be correct.
But here’s a cruel paradox: The countries that are most
responsible for climate change are also the least susceptible to coercion,
while most of the states that might conceivably be pressured into taking action
aren’t significant sources of the underlying problem. The top five greenhouse
gas emitters are China, the United States, India, Russia, and Japan—four of
them are nuclear weapons states, and Japan is a formidable military power in
its own right. Threatening any of them with sanctions isn’t likely to work, and
threatening serious military action against them is completely unrealistic.
Moreover, getting the Security Council to authorize the use of force against
much weaker states is unlikely, because the permanent members wouldn’t want to
establish this precedent and would almost certainly veto the proposal.
This is what makes the Brazilian case more interesting.
Brazil happens to be in possession of a critical global resource—for purely
historical reasons—and its destruction would harm many states if not the entire
planet. Unlike Belize or Burundi, what Brazil does could have a big impact. But
Brazil isn’t a true great power, and threatening it with either economic
sanctions or even the use of force if it refused to protect the rainforest
might be feasible. To be clear: I’m not recommending this course of action
either now or in the future. I’m just pointing out that Brazil might be
somewhat more vulnerable to pressure than some other states are.
One can also
imagine other remedies for this problem. States could certainly threaten or
impose unilateral trade sanctions against environmentally irresponsible states,
and private citizens could always try to organize voluntary boycotts for
similar reasons. Some states have taken steps in this direction, and it
is easy to imagine such measures becoming more widespread as environmental
problems multiply. Alternatively, states that happen to govern environmentally
sensitive territory could be paid to preserve it, in the interest of all
mankind. In effect, the international community would be subsidizing
environmental protection on the part of those who happen to possess the means
of doing something about it.
The resignation of a State Department official is the latest
instance of a systematic suppression of evidence, former officials and
whistleblowers say.
This approach has the merit of not triggering the sort of
nationalist backlash that a coercive campaign might provoke, but it might also
give some countries an incentive to adopt environmentally irresponsible
policies, in the hope of obtaining economic payoffs from a concerned
international community.
This is all pretty speculative, and I’ve just begun thinking
through some of the implications of these dilemmas. Here’s what I think I do
know, however: In a world of sovereign states, each is going to do what it must
to protect its interests. If the actions of some states are imperiling the
future of all the rest, the possibility of serious confrontations and possibly
serious conflict is going to increase. That doesn’t make the use of force
inevitable, but more sustained, energetic, and imaginative efforts will be
needed to prevent it.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of
international relations at Harvard University.
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