A new book by Yale historian Odd Arne Westad arguing that today’s great-power tensions resemble the lead-up to the First World War is attracting significant attention, but also criticism from scholars who say the work fails to adequately account for climate change as a driver of global instability.
The Coming Storm centres on Westad’s contention that the current pattern of relations between major powers carries uncomfortable parallels to the years before 1914 — a period of economic interdependence, competing alliances, and escalating regional conflicts that ultimately collapsed into global war. The book has been widely discussed in foreign policy and international relations circles as great-power competition between the United States, China, and Russia intensifies.
The criticism levelled by writer and academic Clive Hamilton focuses on what he describes as Westad’s “climate disavowal” — a framing in which climate change is either marginalised or treated as a secondary concern relative to traditional geopolitical rivalries. Hamilton argues this represents a significant analytical blind spot, given the growing body of evidence linking climate stress to resource competition, state fragility, and migration pressures that themselves feed into the kinds of tensions Westad otherwise chronicles. Hamilton introduces the concept of “resilience power” as a counterpoint — suggesting that a nation’s capacity to withstand and adapt to climate disruption is increasingly central to its strategic position, not separate from it.
The debate points to a broader tension in international relations scholarship between classical geopolitical frameworks, which tend to treat environmental factors as background conditions rather than structural forces, and newer approaches that place climate change at the centre of security analysis. Proponents of the latter argue that any account of coming great-power conflict that does not integrate climate risk is incomplete by design, potentially leading policymakers to misdiagnose the sources of instability they will face in coming decades.
The exchange highlights how climate change is increasingly becoming a contested variable not just in science and policy, but in the field of strategic history itself — with significant implications for how governments and institutions prepare for an uncertain geopolitical future.