In an address this week to U.S. military forces at the Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England, President Joe Biden tried to convince troops climate change is “the greatest threat facing America.”
“You know, when I went over in the Tank in the Pentagon, when I first was elected Vice President, with President Obama, the military sat us down to let us know what the greatest threats facing America were — the greatest physical threats,” Biden said. “And this is not a joke: You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was? Global warming. Because there’ll be significant population movements, fights over land, millions of people leaving places because they’re literally sinking below the sea in Indonesia; because of the fights over what is arable land anymore.”
While some might be shocked at such a claim — one that ignores a whole host of legitimate foreign and domestic threats facing America today — Biden’s rhetoric aligns with his prior remarks, as well as the sentiments from his administration.
In October 2020, in an interview with Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor in the Obama administration, Biden said climate change is the “number one issue facing humanity.” Forget Russia, Communist China, the U.S.-Mexico border crisis, the Black Lives Matter organization, Antifa, Islamic terrorism, or the nation’s suicide and mental health crisis. There is no shortage of items more threatening than an issue both highly politicized and steeped in ambiguous science.
Vice President Kamala Harris noted in her May commencement speech at the Naval Academy that there are three notable threats our military will be tasked to deal with: COVID-19 and preventing pandemics, intelligence hacking, and — you guessed it — climate change. Of course, Harris has yet to take seriously her role as a world leader, and America eagerly awaits her presence as border liaison.
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testified Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee soon after Biden’s address. Foreseeably placed in an odd position by the president, Milley was unwilling to take a firm stance against Biden.
