Analysis by Rizwan Basir, re-published here in The Multiplural World, July 17, 2026
(This essay first appeared in the South China Morning Post on July 17, 2026. The writer Rizwan Basir is a a sociologist working as a Senior Technical Specialist at Climate Resourcing and Coordination Center (CRCC) in Islamabad, Pakistan.)
Introduction by The Multiplural World: This brief essay accomplishes what the near-entirety of the global environment movement, including its ‘ecosocialist’ (eco-utopian) component fails to accomplish, namely, describing the deadly connection between the global warming emergency and rising, imperialist war and military spending. The failure to understand this connection and the failure to campaign against imperialist war have condemned the global environment movement to the sidelines of world politics. A primary cause of this is ignorance and prejudices against the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China. These two countries are charting the path to a new, multipolar world that will prioritize social and environmental justice over all the waste and destructiveness that characterizes the global capitalist order.
Capital is finite, as is political bandwidth and public concern. So far, this year has asked all three to stretch further than usual, split between security spending, market volatility and now simultaneous disasters unfolding on opposite ends of the planet. Global warming has not waited for global crises to subside; it forced its way onto the front page anyway.
Last week supplied the clearest illustration yet. In southern Spain, a wildfire near Almeria killed at least 12 people and left 23 more missing, one of the deadliest fires in the country’s history. Some victims tried to outrun the flames along roads that turned into traps. It followed Spain seeing its hottest June days ever recorded, part of a blistering summer that has Europe on track for another brutal wildfire season after 2025 became the European Union’s worst on record, with more than a million hectares (2.5 million acres) burned.
On the other side of the planet, floods told the same story in a different register. Typhoon Bavi forced the evacuation of about 2.2 million people in China’s eastern province of Zhejiang alone, days after it killed at least 17 people in landslides across the southern Philippines and injured more than 130 people in Taiwan.
In the coastal city of Yueqing in Zhejiang , more than 1,300 trees fell and over 700 of those were uprooted entirely. Bavi was the second typhoon to make landfall in China in just over a week, arriving after Typhoon Maysak struck the country’s south on July 3.
Fire on one side of the world, floods on the other, arriving within days of each other. That is not a coincidence of timing so much as a description of what a warming planet now looks like most weeks.
The harder question is what happens when disasters like these have to compete for a finite amount of money and attention. That is the essence of what analysts have started calling a polycrisis: not one emergency but several of them arriving at once, each with a legitimate claim on the same limited pool of capital.
Markets have had their own difficult year to absorb. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to the U.S.-Israel war against Iran pushed the price of Brent crude oil above US$100 a barrel at the peak of the crisis earlier this year, rattling everything from airline ticket prices to fertiliser costs for farmers, before easing back below US$70 a barrel following a ceasefire in June. It rose to more than US$84 a barrel this week after US President Donald Trump reinstated the Iran blockade.
That kind of volatility pulls political attention and financial hedging capacity in its own direction before anything has been spent on military or on disaster recovery. The United States alone is set to spend just over US$1 trillion on its military in 2026, a jump of more than 17 per cent from the year before. The White House has already proposed going further, requesting US$1.5 trillion for 2027. If Congress approves the request, it would be the highest level of military spending in modern US history.
The U.S. is not alone in ramping up defence spending. Last year, NATO members agreed to increase their military spending to 5 per cent of gross domestic product annually by 2035. Poland is already spending close to five per cent of its GDP on its military, while Germany has amended its constitution to ease the debt brake that had constrained military spending for decades. Meanwhile, China plans to raise military spending by seven per cent this year while Japan’s cabinet has approved a 9.4 per cent increase in the country’s military budget for 2026.
None of this military spending is earmarked as an alternative to climate finance, but the contrast is instructive regardless. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, the main global mechanism for helping global warming-vulnerable countries recover from disasters had roughly US$250 million to distribute this year. The U.S. alone spends more than that most days just on its own military. This is what competing for finite attention and capital actually looks like in practice.
Not every country has had its own Almeria or its own Zhejiang yet, that is, the kind of natural disaster large enough to dominate a global news cycle for days on end. Many have already had smaller, less-covered previews of the same thing, such as storms and floods and heatwaves that stopped short of the headlines but pointed in the same direction. The difference between the countries watching this week’s disasters from a comfortable distance and the ones now cleaning up after them is mostly a matter of scale and timing, not immunity.
None of this is a prediction of doom, and it does not need to be. It is simply an argument about timing. The countries watching this year’s fires and floods from a comfortable distance still have a choice about how ready they want to be before their own turn comes.
That window narrows a little more with every disaster that joins the queue competing for the world’s attention. The sooner money and planning shift towards preparation and resilience rather than recovery, the smaller the bill becomes once the consequences of global warming stop being someone else’s problem.
Antiwar conference in Britain fails to condemn the NATO proxy war in Ukraine, says little of the U.S./Israel war against Iran, report and analysis by the editors of The Multiplural World, July 12, 2026 Of the three most deadly and illegal wars being waged by the imperialist powers in 2026, only one received central attention (as it should) at the June 20 London conference. That is the genocidal war being waged by the U.S./Israel against the people of Palestine…
