People Are Seriously Talking About Invading Brazil to Save the Planet
With the Amazon burning, some foreign policy experts foresee a new era of global conflict shaped by climate catastrophe
It started as a mere thought experiment, a little what-if: As fires raged in the Amazon basin — many of them intentionally set — Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, took to the pages of Foreign Policy to do a little thinking out loud in an essay entitled “Who Will Invade Brazil to Save the Amazon?”
The piece begins with a stab at speculative fiction, set six years in the future, in which President Gavin Newsom puts the Brazilians on notice: bring a halt to unchecked deforestation, or face a U.S.-led naval blockade and airstrikes against key government infrastructure.
“The above scenario is obviously far-fetched,” Walt quickly assured readers. Which was indeed reassuring, since it seems to presuppose a second term for Donald Trump. Besides which, Brazil is a major U.S. ally and trading partner and is one of the most stable democracies in Latin America.
As the angry tweets rolled in — “Come to Brazil with your idiot ideas to wonder[if] we could defend our land! Shut up your shit mouth and Pencil!”…
