This is the talk I gave at the No Non Radical Futures Conference organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union group last weekend. This can be viewed here, but the subtitles are as inventive as those on BBC 24 hour news, so the actual text is clarifying.

That was the trailer for Abby Martin’s latest documentary on the US military – Earth’s Greatest Enemy.

I’d urge everyone to go onto her site, buy the film (because she’s got to make a living) and don’t just watch it but show it. Bottom line, invite some friends round. if you’re in an anti war or climate group, organise a showing and discussion. Parts of it are gobsmacking. No spoilers. Please watch it and share it.

I edit the Greener Jobs Alliance Newsletter and convene the NEU Climate Change Network, but what I’m going to say is my view, as there’s a range of opinions in both organisations and neither should be held accountable for my political idiosyncrasies.

Abby Martin’s film is called Earth’s Greatest Enemy not simply because the US military is so big – with over 800 bases on every continent and 12 nuclear powered Aircraft Carrier Task Forces capable of projecting devastating violence anywhere in the world – but also because of what its for; which is to defend the global US Empire.

I think its important to have a grip on the structure of global imperialism;m as the United States runs a system of military alliances – NATO, ANZUS, AUKUS etc, which between them account for two thirds of global military spending – that incorporates the smaller imperialist states – in Europe, Japan, Israel, the former British settler colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zeeland – in a subordinate role – and dominates the rest of the world through the dollar’s reserve currency role, the trade rules of the Washington consensus, policed by the World Bank, IMF etc, and also a worldwide web of NGOs financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, particularly in countries they want to target.*

All of this is designed to facilitate the extraction of additional profits from the Global South that amount to around $10 Trillion a year. **

No other state does that.

Euphemisms for this bloc of imperial states include “the Global North”, “the West” and, on the BBC, “the Global Community”, because no one else counts.

Its relationship to the rest of the world was put rather well by Anthony Blinken when he said “if you’re not at the table with us, you’re on the menu”.

Earth’s Greatest Enemy in a very immediate sense too – in that humanity faces two existential crises.

1. The breakdown of the conditions for human civilisation driven by climate change.
2. The threat of nuclear war.

And the United States is actively undermining the struggle to deal with the first and, in seeking to deal with its slipping global hegemony by increasingly reckless military interventions, is very much risking the latter.

This is structural not personal. Trump is often posed as a loose cannon – which implies that he is an aberration. But that begs the question why the dominant fractions of the US ruling class brought him back from the political dead – as it looked like he was on his way to prison in 2022 – and decided that a disruptive loose cannon was exactly what they needed.

I’d argue that this is for two reasons. Not Gaza. I think there’s a complete consensus in the US ruling class on Gaza – which they see as a salutary sacrifice zone to warn the Global South of what could be in store for it if it rebels – but Biden came unstuck on two issues.

1. His attempt at a truncated America First version of a Green New Deal – designed to suck green investment into the United States – was unable to compete with the state led strategic investment made by China over decades – so that, for example, last year China installed twice as much renewable energy as the rest of the world put together and currently holds half of the world’s total renewable capacity – and has a massive lead in EVs, batteries, and the tech that goes with them; and the mining and refining capacity needed. So, for the US, and elsewhere, to progress in the energy transition they’d need to cooperate in it. And China is up for that. They talk about “win, win cooperation” and Earth as “a common home for humanity”. But the US isn’t interested. Instead it is pushing for “global energy dominance” based on doubling down on fossil fuels. The US is the world’s largest Petro-state, by production and by export. So they are seeking at Federal level not only to sabotage the domestic energy transition in the United States – and avert any social transition that would go with it – but also globally to reinforce fossil fuel dependence. That includes support for political formations that back their agenda, like Reform or the Conservatives here. This is leading to a rise in US emissions and the US falling behind global trends in electrification. We’re also seeing a paradox in that Trump’s war on Iran, part of the global energy dominance agenda – is actually accelerating attempts by countries and individuals to get off dependence on highly expensive fossil fuels. The longer it goes on, the more that will be the case.
2. The second is Biden’s adventurist hubris in picking a fight with the Russian Federation through provoking the war in Ukraine. This came to grief because it was premised on the assumption that the Russian economy could be brought to its knees with sanction. But the Global South didn’t go along with them – so these have primarily blown back on the European economies that have; leading to economic stagnation and political crises. Trump’s recent attempts to cut losses and do deals are an attempt to break the Russian Federation from its bloc with China – to enable the US to apply nuclear blackmail to the latter. These have also not been successful, leaving the Ukrainian working class to suffer the consequences of the Oligarch’s ambition “to create a big Israel in Eastern Europe”, as President Zelensky put it. A further plank of Trump’s approach has been to lock the subordinate European allies into a faster increase in war spending than the European powers were making in the run up to World War 1 – up to 5% of GDP by 2035 – (3.5% directly on the military and munitions and a further 1.5% on related infrastructure – like hospital capacity to deal with “mass casualty events”, strengthened bridges so that tanks may safely pass etc. All this is premised on a war with the Russian Federation – sometimes as imminent as 1000 days, if you rely on Wes Streeting – sometimes longer. Germany, for example, projects having the strongest armed forces in Europe by 2039. There’s something about that date…This war psychosis (everyone got you baked beans in?) paradoxically uses Trump’s unpopularity to deliver exactly what he wants.

The push back against all this involves overlapping resistances to their dystopian future. The French students are an inspiring example. They show what happens when a generation is served up a future that is more of a threat than a promise – coming at them like a pyro cumulonimbus cloud – as France was the European country hardest hit by the wildfires this summer and is projected to take E230 billion in climate damage by 2030 – and also the country where the army chief of staff was reported as saying that France must “prepare for a war in which it would lose its children” at a conference for Mayors in May. Well, those children were listening.

They also face neglect in the here and now, with their schools crumbling, sometimes rat infested, and without enough tecahers to cover classes – because cuts have been made to pay for an expanding army.

Resistance is growing here too and to try to pull these responses together into a hegemonic stance across the movement the GJA has produced a model motion and statement – for a transformative response to the fossil fuel energy crisis – for debate in union branches, Party structures and student unions too. Apart from the three principles at the beginning, that:

• to end the crisis we have to end the war, so no complicity in it, 100% taxation on war profiteering and transfer of funds allocated to increasing military expenditure to be redirected to green transition
• the green transition is the solution
• all emergency measures must be social justice measures

the motion is not set in stone, so people can adapt it to their specific situation – CACCTU supporters might want to add an affiliation to CACCTU into the action points for example, and we welcome feedback.

This is the motion.

This is the statement that expands on it.

Footnotes after the event

*The specifics of this were spelt out just for journalism by ”a USAID fact sheet which has since been taken offline, in 2023, the agency funded training and support for 6,200 journalists, assisted 707 non-state news outlets, and supported 279 media-sector civil society organizations dedicated to strengthening independent media. The 2025 foreign aid budget included $268,376,000 allocated by Congress to support ’independent media and the free flow of information’ Ref here So, when you think about what you’re reading in the papers…

**This figure, which is from memory is almost certainly an underestimate; as in 2023, the poorer nations paid $25 billion more to their external creditors in debt servicing than they received in fresh disbursements, resulting in a negative net resource transfer. Ref here.