The conventional balance of terror and ecocide

In late 2020, the Stop Ecocide Foundation, created by the late British jurist Polly Higgins, convened an independent expert panel as part of their ongoing efforts to amend the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to create a new, stand-alone international crime of ecocide. Chaired by international lawyers Dior Fall Sow and Philippe Sands, the panel published its proposed amendment defining “ecocide” in June of 2021, the full text of which is as follows:

Article 8. . .Ecocide

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.

2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:

a. “Wanton” means with reckless disregard for damage which would be clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated;

b. “Severe” means damage which involves very serious adverse changes, disruption or harm to any element of the environment, including grave impacts on human life or natural, cultural or economic resources;

c. “Widespread” means damage which extends beyond a limited geographic area, crosses state boundaries, or is suffered by an entire ecosystem or species or a large number of human beings;

d. “Long-term” means damage which is irreversible or which cannot be redressed through natural recovery within a reasonable period of time;

e. “Environment” means the earth, its biosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, as well as outer space.

(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5273187)

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It’s common enough today to recognize the huge environmental costs of the military (e.g. https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/entropy-economics-of-military-spending). Far less recognized are those ongoing discussions and debates over military strategies as if the environmental damages were irrelevant to the merits or not of the strategies.

Take a 2025 article published in Foreign Affairs by Andrew Lim and James Fearon, “The Conventional Balance of Terror: America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence” (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/conventional-balance-terror-lim-fearon). Here the authors argue for a US defense strategy of heightened deterrence similar to its USSR strategy in the Cold War but now with respect to the Peoples Republic of China’s military build-up in the Indo-Pacific:

[M]any of the United States’ conventional assets in the Indo-Pacific, such as its surface ships, are highly visible or heavily dependent on fixed facilities that could easily be targeted. If a crisis were to break out, the United States might have to threaten escalation to compensate for its lack of conventional response options—potentially up to the nuclear level. To remedy this problem, the United States should develop a “conventional triad” modeled on its successful nuclear strategy. Such a force structure would both increase U.S. combat credibility and decrease first-strike incentives on both sides.

Threats are mentioned, but the only occasions environment is referenced is with respect to the “threat environment” of China’s precision-strike missiles and related capabilities.

Not a scintilla–not a homeopathic whiff–of the massive environmental costs associated with this new balance of terror, let alone on the US side:

To build an effective conventional triad, the United States must invest in more submarines, bombers, and mobile launch vehicles. This would entail, for example, redoubling current efforts to increase the production of Virginia-class attack submarines; increasing the production of B-21 bombers; accelerating air force efforts to deploy a “palletized” munitions launch system, which enables transport aircraft to launch conventional cruise missiles; and expanding the range and capacity of the Marine Littoral Regiments and the U.S. Army’s Mid-Range Capability, a land-based missile launcher system that was recently deployed to the Philippines.

And so here we are, once again, in a world whose MOST BLISTERINGLY OBVIOUS FACT is that it’s no longer the 1960s and 1970s where military strategies can be debated as if ecocide were beside the point.