The return of imperial politics in the twenty-first century is often misread as nostalgia: a relapse into great-power rivalry by leaders who read too much Thucydides and too little climate science. But the number of people who truly believe that pursuing empire for its own sake is small.
Commentators reach reflexively for analogies—the Cold War, the Scramble for Africa, the Concert of Europe—hoping that history will supply a usable script. All fall short of the mark.
What we are witnessing in the territorial aggression of Russia, the infrastructural reach of China, and the resource securitisation of the United States is not a revival of imperial confidence but a late-stage imperial panic: a scramble to stabilise accumulation in a world where growth is no longer environmentally, politically, or temporally guaranteed.
Empire no longer arrives draped in civilisational destiny or moral uplift. It comes instead with spreadsheets, climate models, and national security assessments.
Its language is logistical rather than ideological. Pipelines matter more than flags; ports more than populations. The objects of concern are shipping lanes, energy chokepoints, mineral deposits, data cables, and grain corridors.
The animating fear is not humiliation but irrelevance. Not the loss of prestige, but the loss of value. Beneath the rhetoric of national interest lies a quieter terror: that vast reserves of wealth, buried in the ground or embedded in carbon-dependent infrastructure, may never be realised at all.
One expression of this fear is the growing prominence of discussions about asset stranding—and its potential political consequences—in global finance.
Oil fields, gas reserves, coal seams, internal combustion supply chains, suburban housing stock, coastal real estate: these remain assets only so long as they can be insured, utilised, and monetised. Climate change threatens to convert them into liabilities, remnants of a system whose operating conditions no longer exist. Even modest decarbonisation policies introduce the possibility that what was once booked as future profit might remain inert matter. From the standpoint of capital, the rational response is not restraint but acceleration.
If the future cannot be secured, the present must be exhausted.
This logic explains much of what otherwise appears incoherent in contemporary policy. Governments pledge to reduce emissions while approving new drilling leases. Energy companies rebrand themselves as green innovators while expanding fossil fuel production. Banks announce climate commitments while financing pipelines and liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals designed to operate for half a century.
These are not contradictions. They are attempts to outrun obsolescence.
Climate change has not disciplined capitalism into sobriety; it has driven it into liquidation, a global going-out-of-business sale. Nowhere is this clearer than in the renewed rush toward fossil fuel infrastructure since 2020. The war in Ukraine did not create Europe’s energy vulnerability, but revealed how little slack remained in the system. In response, governments scrambled to reopen coal plants, secure long-term gas contracts, and fast-track LNG import terminals.
Germany’s sudden construction of floating LNG facilities—completed in months after years of rhetoric about the need to combat climate change—was hailed as pragmatism. It was also a confession. Energy transition would proceed only so far as it did not threaten systemic stability. Climate policy, when confronted with geopolitical pressure, yielded instantly to security.
Climate change has compressed geopolitics.
As environmental instability accelerates, so too does competition over means of buffering its effects. Retreating Arctic ice opens new shipping lanes and access to hydrocarbons; military deployments follow. Drought destabilises agricultural regions from the Sahel to Central Asia; food prices spike, governments wobble, proxy conflicts ignite.
Lithium brine fields in the Andes, cobalt mines in the Congo, and nickel deposits in Indonesia—materials essential to electrification—become strategic assets, subject to nationalisation drives, export controls, and quiet intervention. The energy transition itself becomes a site of imperial contestation.
Russia’s imperialism is the most openly territorial and the least rhetorically coy. Its wars are often explained in terms of nationalism or historical grievance, but these accounts obscure the material substrate. Russia is a petrostate confronting demographic decline, technological stagnation, and the slow erosion of hydrocarbon rents. Climate transition threatens not merely export revenue but regime stability.
Control over pipelines, ports, and arable land offers leverage in a world where energy is weaponised, and food insecurity looms. From this perspective, Ukraine matters less as a former empire’s lost province than as a transit corridor, breadbasket, and geopolitical hinge between rival systems of accumulation.
China’s imperial posture is quieter, more infrastructural, and more contemporary. It does not seek territory so much as embeddedness. Through ports, railways, power plants, industrial parks, and fibre-optic networks, China inserts itself into the circulatory systems of global capitalism.
China’s immense Belt and Road Initiative is often framed as development assistance or geopolitical outreach. But it is better understood as an attempt to displace internal pressures—overcapacity, environmental degradation, surplus capital—onto a global field.
China faces acute climate vulnerabilities: water scarcity in the north, flooding along the Yangtze, and rising seas that threaten coastal megacities. Its response is not to slow growth, but to diversify dependencies, ensuring that when shocks propagate through the system, they do so along channels Beijing can influence.
The United States practices a different kind of imperialism, one that denies it is one. It speaks the language of alliances and rules while fortifying supply chains, subsidising domestic industry, and expanding military presence along strategic corridors from the South China Sea to the Red Sea.
Energy independence, once dismissed as a fantasy, has become an organising principle. Not because it insulates Americans from climate change, but because it reduces vulnerability in a fractured world. Even decarbonisation is reframed as competition. The Inflation Reduction Act is climate policy, industrial policy, and geopolitical manoeuvre rolled into one—an attempt to anchor the energy transition within national borders and friendly jurisdictions.
What unites these strategies is not ideology but compulsion. Capitalist economies cannot simply stop expanding without triggering crises: unemployment, fiscal collapse, and political revolt. Growth is no longer a promise; it is a condition of stability. As the material basis for growth erodes, states search for substitutes. Territorial influence, coercive trade regimes, and militarised infrastructure step in where productivity gains once operated.
Empire becomes a prosthetic for an economy that can no longer move forward on its own.
This is where the revival of geopolitical realism takes on its contemporary tone. Realism today is less a theory than a disposition: a preference for force, leverage, and preemption over deliberation or reform. The moral language that once cloaked imperial projects has been worn down to transparency.
Neoconservatism, having burned through its evangelising phase, sheds its universalist ambitions. What remains is management: of risk, of scarcity, of populations on the move. Climate change enters this worldview not as a call for transformation, but as a destabilising variable to be controlled. Sea-level rise becomes a problem of where to locate military bases. Migration becomes border security. Wildfires and floods become insurance failures to be absorbed by the state.
The planet is treated as an adversarial environment rather than a shared condition. Planning gives way to preparedness; politics to logistics. This is realism emptied of illusion, but also of imagination. It cannot envision a world organised differently, only one defended more aggressively.
Empire, in this form, is defensive to the core. It expands not out of confidence, but fear. Asset stranding looms not only over fossil fuels but over entire ways of life: long commutes, cheap logistics, disposable abundance. Rather than reconfigure these systems, imperial states attempt to freeze them in place through coercion. Power compensates for creativity. Enforcement substitutes for planning.
The result is a brittle order. Militarisation is itself carbon-intensive. Resource conflicts destabilise supply chains. Sanctions fracture coordination precisely when coordination is most necessary. Each attempt to secure advantage amplifies systemic fragility. Empires feed on crisis, but the climate crisis does not respect borders. No amount of territorial control can stabilise atmospheric chemistry. The planet does not negotiate.
What emerges is a paradoxical imperialism: expansive yet hollow, dominant yet anxious.
It conquers without integrating, controls without governing, and extracts without investing. Influence is measured not in citizens but in chokepoints. Responsibility is externalised along with risk. This is empire without settlement, suited to a world where long-term stewardship has become a liability rather than a virtue.
Although this new imperialism calls itself realism, realism has rarely been so fantastical. It assumes that domination can substitute for adaptation, that exerting control over flows can override material limits.
What it really offers is delay, postponing the ecological bill by turning planetary crisis into geopolitical competition. The collective problem of survival is reframed as a contest over who will absorb the damage first. Borders become shock absorbers. Militaries become climate institutions of last resort.
Delay, however, is not durability. Every new pipeline, port, and base is an investment in a future that cannot arrive. Empire transforms stranded assets into protected assets, defended by law, debt, and violence. In doing so, it locks societies into pathways that narrow rather than expand their options.
The defence of the present becomes the foreclosure of the future.
This is the final confession embedded in the new imperialism. It admits that the existing order cannot survive without coercion, that its promises were built on borrowed carbon and borrowed time. Faced with this recognition, states choose not transformation but enforcement. They drill the future, fortify the present, and call it realism.
History is unlikely to be persuaded. Empires that mistake delay for strength rarely survive the crises they prolong.
Climate change will not be subdued by competition, nor growth resurrected by conquest. What lies ahead is not an imperial century, but a reckoning that will judge not who controlled the most territory, but who had the courage to imagine a world beyond expansion.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
