Forced Choices

Balancing Military Defense and Climate Defense

18 May 2025

As the previous Climate Defenders pointed out (4 May), Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal 2025 cuts education, health care, climate protection, national parks, the arts, and even the State Department in order to increase military spending and immigration control and to cut taxes on billionaires. The reason the Republicans in Congress have not yet coalesced around Trump’s proposal is the unwillingness of six Congressmen to accept the $4.5 trillion increase in the national deficit that Trump’s budget would cause. The only way Republicans can satisfy their far-right minority is to cut education, health care, and climate protection even more savagely than already proposed. That could happen next.

Climate defenders can learn three important political lessons from the Republicans’ budget proposal. One lesson is to craft a budget proposal that prioritizes what is most important to us and eliminates or diminishes what we care less about. Republicans do that. If one believes that world war is imminent, that climate protection is a hoax, and that private wealth “trickles down” to the working class, as Trump does [1] then savage cuts to education, health care, and climate protection, even if regrettable, are justifiable in order to enable the highest priorities. Budgets are the place to look if you want to understand what all the political verbiage really means.

The second important lesson environmentalists can learn from Republicans is the forced choices that one’s program priorities impose. Funds are finite. If you want to increase spending on something without increasing taxes or the national debt, both politically unpopular, then you must cut something else. This is a forced choice. The budget debate is a jungle in which only the strongest survive. In a nutshell, Republicans want their stuff fully funded so they must cut stuff that environmentalists want in order to get what they want. This they unhesitatingly do.

Third, the Republicans teach us that to get one’s priorities into the federal budget, one needs political allies. Some Republicans care most about increasing the military budget; some care most about tax cuts for business [2]; some care most about immigration control. None of these priorities has enough political support all by itself to get into the budget. By coming together as a bloc, the allied priorities acquire the power they need to benefit each member of the alliance.

All the above is preamble to the serious political requirement that climate defenders must learn from it. Military defense and climate defense are competing for slices of the same budgetary pie. Republicans know that. Their 2025 federal budget cuts climate defense to zero in order to fund a 13 percent increase in military spending. Climate defenders have a different priority. That is, given the political power in Congress to do so, climate defenders should cut the military budget in order to increase spending on adaptation and mitigation.

Wouldn’t that weaken national defense? No! On the contrary, from an environmentalists’ viewpoint, those funding alterations would increase national security because the Republicans’ allocation of defense dollars to military defense (100 percent) and to climate defense (zero percent) creates a glaring and giant hole in our overall defense posture. Think of it this way. If you have two enemies, A and B, and you devote all your resources to protection from A, then you are completely vulnerable to B. Given two equal threats, one from A and another from B, you should devote half your resources to each enemy. The United States has two enemies: an angry climate and foreign military threats. We must defend against both. That forced choice does not require pacifism from environmentalists. Even if one thinks that military defense needs serious funding, if one also thinks that climate defense needs funding, then one is compelled to ask what is the optimal overall allocation of defense funds to these two purposes (climate defense and military defense) and how well does the federal government’s actual allocation match that optimal allocation? The conclusion is unavoidable: A balanced national defense is an optimal defense.

Action Implication

Tell the major environmental organizations that climate defense is national defense. If that is so, then, hey, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, and NRDC, please say so out loud for all to hear. Come out of the closet and say that the lop-sided allocation of defense dollars to military defense creates a strategic weakness in national defense! Many Republicans will agree! Then you have gained enough allies to write your budget priorities into law.

References

[1] Lisa Friedman. “What’s the Cost to Society of Pollution? Trump Says Zero.” New York Times 10 May 2025.

[2] Richard Rubin. “Businesses Made a Big Tax-Cut Request. Republicans Said Yes—and Then Some.” Wall Street Journal 16 May 2025