Episode 121: Climate Change and National Security
Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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Peter S. Rashish
Vice President; Director, Geoeconomics Program
Peter S. Rashish, who counts over 30 years of experience counseling corporations, think tanks, foundations, and international organizations on transatlantic trade and economic strategy, is Vice President and Director of the Geoeconomics Program at AICGS. He also writes The Wider Atlantic blog.
Mr. Rashish has served as Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he spearheaded the Chamber’s advocacy ahead of the launch of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Previously, Mr. Rashish was a Senior Advisor for Europe at McLarty Associates, Executive Vice President of the European Institute, and a staff member and consultant at the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, UNCTAD, the Atlantic Council, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the German Marshall Fund.
Mr. Rashish has testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia and has advised three U.S. presidential campaigns. He has been a featured speaker at the Munich Security Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Salzburg Global Seminar and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Jean Monnet Institute in Paris and a Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre in Brussels. His commentaries have been published in The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, and he has appeared on PBS, CNBC, CNN, and NPR.
He earned a BA from Harvard College and an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University. He speaks French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Sherri Goodman
Woodrow Wilson International Center
Sherri Goodman is the author of Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership and the Fight for Global Security. She is a Senior Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center’s Polar Institute and Environmental Change & Security Program and Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security (IMCCS).
Sherri chairs the Board of the Council on Strategic Risks and chairs the External Advisory Board on Energy and Homeland Security for Sandia National Laboratories. Sherri is a Board Director of the Atlantic Council and a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Sherri is the former President and CEO of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. She served as Senior Vice President and General Counsel of CNA (U.S. Center for Naval Analyses). She is the founder and Executive Director of the CNA Military Advisory Board, whose landmark reports include National Security and the Threat of Climate Change (2007), and Advanced Energy and US National Security (2017).
Sherri served as the first Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security) (1993-2001), where she was responsible for environmental, energy, safety and occupational health for the U.S. Department of Defense. Sherri served on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee where she was responsible for oversight of the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex.
Sherri has received an Honorary Doctorate from Amherst College in 2018, the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Award in 1998 and 2001, the Gold Medal Award from the National Defense Industrial Organization in 1996, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Change Award in 2000, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Environmental Peacebuilding Association in 2024.
Sherri has appeared on CNN, PBS NewsHour, BBC, NPR, and other major media. She has testified before many congressional committees as a leading authority on sustainability, energy, and climate security. She has taught and delivered lectures at numerous universities and has appeared in several films, including The Age of Consequences, Journey to Planet Earth, Carbon Nation, and From Paris to Pittsburgh. Sherri has degrees from Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, and Amherst College, where she was co-founder of the Women’s Ski Team.
Climate change can create national security risks, test military resilience, and redefine how countries pursue their geopolitical interests. Sherri Goodman, author of Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security, joins The Zeitgeist to discuss how the Department of Defense is addressing and adapting to the challenge of climate change and the role of allied military cooperation. She also offers perspectives on the role that climate change is playing in the Trump administration’s approach to Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guests
Sherri Goodman, Senior Fellow, Polar Institute and Environmental Change & Security Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center; Secretary General, International Military Council on Climate & Security (IMCCS)
Peter Rashish, Vice President and Director, Geoeconomics Program, AGI
Transcript
Jeff Rathke
Well, I’d like to welcome all of our listeners to this episode of The Zeitgeist. We’re speaking on February 5, 2025, with Sherri Goodman. Sherri, thanks for being with us.
Sherri Goodman
It’s a pleasure.
Jeff Rathke
Sherri Goodman is a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Cente’s Polar Institute and Environmental Change and Security Program. She’s also the Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate and Security, and she’s the author of a book called Threat Multiplier: Climate Military Leadership and the Fight for Global Security, which was published just last year. And she is one of the foremost thinkers on climate change and national security. And so we are going to talk about that today. And where I want to start is, we are just a couple of weeks into a Trump administration, which has a decidedly different view than its predecessor on things like the role of climate change in international security. How is this going to matter now and in the coming years, Sherri? Is this something that can disappear from the thinking of an American strategist and foreign policy practitioner?
Sherri Goodman
Well, thank you, Jeff, and it’s a pleasure to be with you and the listeners on The Zeitgeist. There’s Trump’s rhetoric, and then there’s the reality. Even in his first term, when he considered climate a four-letter word, there was a lot of climate action that occurred in the Department of Defense and in a bipartisan way in Congress on the major defense bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. So in Trump’s first term, the Department of Defense created the Defence Climate Assessment Tool, which was first developed by the Army to screen military facilities for climate vulnerabilities like sea level rise, wind, flood, heat, and other perils and other risks. That tool’s since been adopted by the entire Department of Defense, and it’s even been shared with some of our allies and partners. So that work is going to continue.
When you think of climate risk as a risk, and militaries are all about managing and reducing risk: risks of instability around the world and also risk to troops and forces and bases. When you think about the fact that sea level rise, floods, fires, storms, all the climate perils that we experience today, many on an almost daily basis now, affect how we operate our forces around the world and affect how our bases are stationed and our troops are trained, that work has to continue, and indeed much of it is already baked into the Department of Defense directives and into guidance documents that will continue in this administration. It may be reframed as climate resilience rather than climate change, but the effect of the climate on the forces will continue.
Now, the other piece of it is how far will the Department of Defense go in actually measuring and managing greenhouse gas emissions? I think that is perhaps less likely to continue in a direct way, in a transparent way. Nonetheless, as our forces work today to become more ready to fight in the new kinds of warfare we will face, there is a coherent, and if you will, an alignment between the advantages we get from such things as better batteries and more flexible energy sources and our agility and even our lethality on the battlefield.
Jeff Rathke
So I’m joined today as well by AGI vice president and the director of our Geoeconomics Program, Peter Rashish. And we’ll come to Peter’s thoughts in a second. But before we turn to Peter, I wanted to ask you also, Sherri, you’ve served as a Defense Department senior official as well as being in the analytical and nonprofit sector. The things you’ve just described, the fact that climate peril is something that you can’t ignore if you are setting policy or planning for military engagement, whatever the ideological characterizations of climate change might come from an administration. But can you tell us a little bit how you effect change within large institutions, especially within a government institution, because when you were first talking about these things, they were not the dominant paradigm they were probably, I would guess, dismissed by many people as not central to the strategic challenges the United States faces.
Sherri Goodman
Yes, it’s such a good question, Jeff, and yes, institutional change occurs over many years. Now at the outset of Trump’s second term, we’re seeing the onslaught of perhaps a very massive, different type of institutional change to dismantle many of the institutions of the U.S. federal government—we could get to that more if you would like—but in the sense of the environmental cultural change that’s occurred over the last quarter century in the national security community and particularly in the Defense Department at the time that I served as the Department of Defense’s chief environmental officer in the 1990s, environment was seen as a sort of constraint on military action and an additional cost, often. A cost of cleaning up pollution that had occurred in the past or the cost of protecting the endangered species and fragile ecosystems on military bases. Now those costs were imposed, often by law, by statutes that had been passed by Congress, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund Act, the Endangered Species Act. And so you had those what we call legal drivers directing that action be taken at the risk of criminal peril. So commanders could go to jail, and in fact, some did. Some military did go to jail for Clean Water Act violations in the 1980s. So base commanders and other senior leaders really took that very seriously and they took the legal risk seriously. And then they learned that they could actually begin to improve environmental and natural resource protection and at the same time align it with military training and readiness. Now that took some work. It didn’t happen overnight. It took a process of many years. But nonetheless, it’s occurred to the point where in fact, often protecting natural resources on military bases is seen as a way of improving military readiness by complicating the battle space in which the troops have to train, and when they deploy, it’s always a very complicated battle space. When they had to protect the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, which lives on many military bases in the southeast United States and makes it home in the longleaf pine tree, instead of cutting down the tree, which was putting the birds’ nests at risk and therefore reducing the population, they decided they could leave the tree in place and make it a realistic training obstacle for marines and soldiers who are doing maneuvers around the range. And by leaving that tree in place they actually enhanced the readiness and the training of the troops at that particular location. So that’s just one example.
Now, I’d say today that has more from being seen as not just a legal requirement, but now we see the climate risks that we face today in addition to these other environmental security risks, if you will, as being also a security requirement, not just a legal requirement. Because you ignore those higher sea levels, the changing salinity in the oceans, the higher temperatures in which troops have to train and operate, at your peril, because you might not be prepared. Already our troops face more heat stress and more heat stroke when they train at bases in the southwest United States, where it’s often over 100 degrees, or we think about deployments in the Middle East and in southwest Asia, where the where the temperatures also are regularly at times of the year well over 100 plus degrees Fahrenheit, that puts lives at risk.
Peter Rashish
Sherri, great to have you with us. I wanted to ask you, to what degree climate change is going to determine how the U.S. sees its geopolitical interests in the future. We have just recently seen President Trump, very early in his second term, express his desire to extend U.S. influence in Greenland. This could be because the Arctic has become a higher security priority for several countries, not just the United States. It’s a source of critical minerals that can be used for the energy transition, but also we have the fact that climate change is opening up the navigation channel. To what degree do you think we’re going to see more of this kind of thing?
Sherri Goodman
Well, that’s absolutely right, Peter. I think Trump’s expansionist claims certainly have a component that has been influenced by the changing climate both in Greenland and even in Panama. In Greenland, you have a more open Arctic now because sea ice is retreating, temperatures are rising at four times the global average, and permafrost is thawing and melting. President Putin sees the Northern Sea route that hugs the shallow Russian coastline as a future toll road for transportation from ports in Asia to ports in Europe. China, meanwhile, has its own Arctic ambitions, has declared itself a near-Arctic stakeholder, has sought to conduct and pursue foreign direct investment in Greenland and other Arctic nations, which the U.S. to an extent already has rebuffed its request for ports and airports there and has spurred more investment by Denmark in those airports. The U.S., of course, has long had a very important military base in northwest Greenland that’s been upgraded recently. And yes, there are critical minerals in Greenland to a significant extent. Of course, Greenland is also still the great source of the Greenland ice cap. It’s very hard to operate there, very expensive. Whether it’s economic to seek rapid access to those critical minerals is unclear at this point. But certainly with the first nonstop flights set to start this year from New York to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, you can see a future where there’ll be more economic activity between the U.S. and Greenland, more tourism, certainly. I mean, you have the model of Iceland that’s occurred over the last quarter century. Now Iceland’s a different geography; it’s a different place. I don’t think that Greenland is going to as rapidly become a tourist Mecca as Iceland has, but nonetheless, Greenlanders themselves have said they’re open for business.
Now in Panama, it’s a complicated situation there. Of course, under the treaty that we signed, the canal was returned to Panamanians almost a quarter century ago. And because of drought, climate-induced drought, it’s been harder to move the double-wide tankers through the Panama Canal. And so you’ve got almost a set of climate constraints. There’s also the issue of Hong Kong-developed ports operating in parts of the canal and so there is a question of what is the Chinese influence there; that’s what Trump seems to be using as the hook to assert U.S. interest in that canal while the Panamanians say they can continue to operate it safely and in the interests of the U.S. and others.
But there’s no doubt that around the world climate risks are constraining maritime all types of operations, whether it’s sea lanes, whether it’s air traffic, certainly roads, bridges, rails, all are experiencing a set of stressors because either temperatures are rising or there are more floods or the infrastructure has not been designed to operate under the kinds of extreme weather events and heat stress that we now regularly experience.
Peter Rashish
If I could maybe drill down just a bit on that, whether it’s Greenland or Panama, in principle, are U.S. interests, Danish interests, Panamanian interests, Greenlander interests similar and complementary enough when we look at the issue of climate insecurity at least there could be a cooperative solution or is it somehow inevitable that we’re looking at conflict in the future?
Sherri Goodman
No, I don’t in any way think it’s inevitable. I think Greenland has been on a path to have greater independence from Denmark. Became a self-governing autonomous region within Denmark in 1979. They determine their economic, educational, and social future. They still rely to a significant extent on Danish security and foreign policy to provide homeland and defense security, maritime forces, and in fact, the Danish government has substantially increased its investment in Danish security as a result of Trump’s recent statements. But it’s also true that the expansion of the two major airports in Greenland are occurring because of Danish investment. Greenlanders themselves are at an important juncture. They want to determine their own destiny. I had the privilege of visiting Greenland this last summer, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful country. The center of it is mostly the great Greenland ice sheet, and it’s melting at a rapid rate. You see and you hear the changing climate on a regular basis very much so there. At the same time, Greenlanders want to determine their economic future. As the premier said, they’re open for more business with the United States. They say they want Greenland to be for Greenlanders, you know, there are 57,000 of them. They’ve worked hard to become more self independent while still being able to have the investment of the protection they’ve had from Denmark. If you think of NATO as a family, you might say this is a family spat that’s going on now. I’m still modestly hopeful, especially here as we’re talking on The Zeitgeist in the NATO family here, that this will be resolved. What we’ve seen recently with President Trump is he attacks his friends first, you know, going after Canada and Mexico on the tariffs, but then it gets resolved by the friends offering to make some changes. So he sets a fire, puts out the fire, and then claims victory for putting out the fire. So I think we may see more of that in more places around the world unfortunately.
Jeff Rathke
We’ll get to another aspect of the international dimension in a second, but the thing I wanted to ask you right now, Sherri, is, you know, my experience as a government official on the diplomatic side, it was often that the Defense Department, because it had such a massive disproportion of resources, even in an area where it might not have the official lead, it wound up dominating the way the United States government viewed an issue and the potential solutions, simply by weight of its resources and the people that it throws at an issue. So when you think about climate change and other agencies of the federal government, how do you see that interaction? Is there a benefit or perhaps a risk of the weight of the Defense Department and the U.S. defense establishment pushing climate policy in directions that suit its purposes?
Sherri Goodman
Well, I think we’ve seen a lot of climate security engagement and cooperation in recent years, certainly under the Biden administration. It was on a path to be integrated into defense and foreign policy and our engagement certainly with our allies and even with our partners. To understand even in places like the Pacific, where China is increasing its influence across the vast region, particularly with small Pacific island nations, some of which are existentially threatened by sea level rise and loss of freshwater, that being able to address their climate risks, their need for infrastructure, their need for resilience is part of an engagement and strategic engagement tool very much in the interest of the power that’s offering it. If the U.S. sort of puts that on the back burner now, China is going to be right there offering those services. Already we see that it’s offering humanitarian assistance, disaster prevention, and protection. So particularly across the Pacific, but also in Latin America and Africa, even while it continues to make investments in minerals and infrastructure and expand the reach of its Belt and Road Initiative, which as we know has pros and a lot of cons as well for those on the receiving end. If we step back from engagement, we’re kind of ceding the field to the other team.
Jeff Rathke
And if you look at America’s close partners, our allies, Germany, one example that we focus on a lot here, of course, but there might be others, how do you see their foreign militaries’ approach to climate change and climate peril—I like the phrase you used at the very start—and also collaboration with them? Is this a field that is growing and is promising for international cooperation?
Sherri Goodman
Yes indeed, it has been growing. I co-founded the International Military Council on Climate Insecurity in 2019 with the former Dutch Chief of Defense General Tom Mittendorf. And certainly Germany, most of our NATO allies are members of it. Many countries from all continents have participated in its activities to raise awareness on climate risks and also to deepen engagement on that among militaries and national security professionals around the world. What I’ve seen happen over the years as the politics in the United States changes is that what we might call the demand signal from our allies and partners for environmental or climate security cooperation then becomes ever more important to enable that continuity. If the U.S. government is less engaged now, then having our allies and partners engage and make those requests when they come to the U.S. or engaging in the nongovernmental institutions and the international institutions becomes ever more important.
I also observed that there’s sometimes activities that occur sort of below the radar; it doesn’t all have to occur at the presidential level. Certainly, our combatant commanders in the Department of Defense, particularly in the Pacific, Latin America, Africa, and Europe through NATO or also through our European command, conduct a lot of activities related to environmental and climate security engagement. NATO itself has been very active. It has a climate security action plan under former Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who made this one of his. Indeed, he, of course, had been Norway’s climate minister at one point and prime minister, and he very much knew how to lead on this. NATO last year launched its first center of excellence on climate security, which the Canadians are hosting in Montreal, and I had the privilege of helping to launch that center at NATO’s Washington Summit last summer.
Jeff Rathke
So, Sherri, maybe a last question to wrap things up. If we look ahead to the future, we’ve seen that the U.S. investment in security and defense has often yielded long-term change in our economy, if you think about GPS, the Internet, and so forth, which have their origins in R&D with a security bent. Do you see the Department of Defense playing a similarly creative role in dealing with climate change and climate mitigation?
Sherri Goodman
Here’s how I think about it, Jeff. The Department of Defense and military has long been a technology leader in the U.S., everything, as you say, from the GPS to the Internet, stealth technologies now. That occurred starting at after World War II and throughout the Cold War, at a time when federal investment and Department of Defense investment in particular in our technology and R&D was at a high point and was really driving markets. So we talked about spinning out technology from the military into the civilian sector, like the Internet and GPS. Unfortunately, that has shifted and no longer is federal or even Department of Defense investment. A major share of total technology R&D today, most of it is in the private sector in tech companies, for example, in Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other companies. Now technology often spins in to the military and then is adapted for military purposes. So when we think about climate technologies or clean energy technologies, they’re being adapted, they’re coming into, let’s say, better batteries that we need for long-term storage. There’s an important demand for that in the Department of Defense. But there’s also a commercial and consumer demand. So it’s coming into the Department of Defense to be adapted more for specific military needs.
Jeff Rathke
Got it, got it. Well, Sherri Goodman, I want to thank you for this really enlightening conversation about the ways that climate policy and the changing climate affects international security. I encourage listeners to take a look at her book, Threat Multiplier, and we look forward to remaining in dialogue with you, Sherri, and keeping an eye on these important issues.
Sherri Goodman
Well, thank you, Jeff. I look forward to staying in touch with you and The Zeitgeist, too. I should just observe in closing that my parents were both born in Germany in the early 1930s and were among the fortunate few who were able to flee Nazi Germany. And so I grew up in the U.S., but I still feel very fond for the country and for what it is today and for the important connections that we have between Germany and the United States, which I hope will be a continuing source of strength and purpose for both of our nations.
Jeff Rathke
Great words on which to close. Thank you, Sherri Goodman. Thanks, Peter Rashish. And we look forward to having all of you listeners with us on the next episode of The Zeitgeist.
