President Trump built his 2024 re-election bid, in large part, on ending the border crisis and reversing mass migration. On the first front, external enforcement, he has unquestionably succeeded, as even Democrats grudgingly admit. Yet his broader efforts to reduce illegal and legal immigration have encountered resistance, often in unexpected places. Some of the fiercest opposition has emerged in areas of policy not obviously connected to immigration, while some of the most successful has come from within his own coalition.

This owes to the paradox of mass migration: as the share of foreign-born newcomers swells, voters become more determined to shrink it, while governments become less able to do so. Reversing mass migration, in other words, is hard. Really hard. Because migration entrenches itself and remakes recipient societies in indelible ways.

Public opinion in the late Biden years reflected the mounting frustration. In early 2024, Americans cited uncontrolled immigration as their no. 1 or no. 2 priority for three consecutive months — the first time they’d done so for multiple consecutive months in Gallup’s monthly trend assessment. Later that year, in June, Gallup found that 55% of Americans wanted immigration decreased, the highest share in more than two decades.

Trump took such polling as his new mandate. Immediately upon taking office, the president handed down sweeping executive orders to shut down the border, boost interior arrests of illegal and criminal immigrants, and (less concertedly) restrict legal immigration. 

Nearly two years later, the results show Trump partially delivered on that mandate. Illegal crossings at the southern border have dropped by more than 90%, while legal immigration has slowed considerably. Fewer visas are being issued, and immigration processing has slowed considerably, with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services completing 74% fewer naturalizations in July 2026 than at the same point a year earlier. 

But nowhere has Trump’s agenda been more aggressive, or more controversial, than in interior deportations. The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, estimates that interior deportations surged to roughly 120,000 in 2025, up about 150% from the 47,732 immigrants Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed from inside the homeland during Biden’s final full fiscal year.

These results have been obtained despite serious opposition from Democrats in Congress and Democratic-controlled states and cities, where many of the administration’s most intensive ICE operations have taken place. The administration’s aggressive interior enforcement tactics in particular have triggered intense media scrutiny and street-level backlash, contributing to public concerns over how arrests and deportations are being carried out. 

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A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that around 60% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Yet disapproval of Trump’s enforcement tactics doesn’t appear to translate into broader opposition to his effort to curb immigration. The same annual Gallup survey that tracks Americans’ immigration preferences found earlier this year that a whopping two-thirds of Americans favor either maintaining today’s much lower levels of immigration or reducing it further. Americans may be uncomfortable with some of Trump’s hard-line tactics, but they appear to quietly favor the result.

By the standards of Western politics, Trump’s achievement — partially translating voters’ long-standing demand for lower immigration levels into actually lower inflows — is something close to a miracle. Across Europe, voters have for decades demanded less immigration, and elected governments promising to deliver it, only to watch as more and more newcomers flooded the system, squeezing workers’ bargaining power, straining social services, and contributing to social incohesion.

Spain’s case is instructive. In 2024, a national poll commissioned by the El País newspaper found that a clear majority of Spaniards believed the country already had too many immigrants. Yet mass migration persisted and in early 2026, the government launched an extraordinary regularization program initially estimated to convert roughly half a million illegal migrants into legal residents. By the time applications closed in June, nearly 1.2 million people had applied. 

Then there was Brexit and its aftermath — perhaps the clearest example of the betrayal of voters’ desire for lower immigration levels. In 2016, a majority of British voters took the extraordinary step of rejecting the political and economic order that had governed their country for decades. Regaining control over immigration was at the center of the Leave campaign. 

Yet even exiting the European Union, it turned out, wasn’t enough. The Tory governments ostensibly charged with overseeing the implementation of Brexit did the opposite. The annual number of people immigrating to Britain surged to 1.3 million in 2023, up from 589,000 in 2016. 

The truth is that since the current era of mass migration began more than a decade ago, no other major Western country has yet managed to reverse the trend and sustain substantially lower levels of immigration despite widespread public demand to do so. Trump’s partial success in sustaining substantially lower immigration for nearly two years remains, for now, an anomaly in the Western world. And even that effort is partial, tentative, and vulnerable, as we will see.

The reason is straightforward. Immigration at sufficient scale doesn’t merely add people to a country. Over time, institutions and industries adapt themselves to their presence. Businesses — especially in sectors like hospitality, food, construction, and personal services — become dependent on migrants’ cheap labor. In parallel with this, government agencies and nonprofit contractors build programs around migrants, which these days generally means poorer populations from the Global South. 

Those dependencies eventually create political pressure of their own, as employers, service providers, and local governments push national elected officials to protect the economic arrangements that have developed around migration. Immigration restriction therefore comes to mean more than stopping a flow of people. It means disrupting interests that have grown dependent on that flow.

Trump’s second term offers revealing examples of how this works. His immigration agenda has faced the resistance one expects from Democrats, including mass protests and federal lawsuits. Yet the greatest obstacles to his efforts to restrict immigration have not come from efforts to protect migrants themselves. Instead, they have come from federal elected officials in both parties seeking to protect the industries, labor markets, and government programs that have grown dependent on their presence.

Consider the 2025 government shutdown. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained plenty for Democrats to oppose on immigration, including tens of billions of dollars in new funding for ICE and the administration’s enforcement agenda. Yet when Democrats chose to force their most consequential confrontation with Trump, immigration enforcement wasn’t at the center of it. Health care was. Democrats blocked government funding for six weeks in what became the longest shutdown in American history, demanding that Republicans abandon the health-care provisions of the bill and preserve enhanced Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) subsidies that were scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

Here the paradox begins to reveal itself. The Biden-era immigration surge had become intertwined with the enormous expansion of government health subsidies. The CBO estimated that by 2024, the Biden surge had added roughly 600,000 migrant recipients of heavily subsidized, and sometimes free, private health insurance through ObamaCare. That was on top of another 300,000 foreign nationals receiving full Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) benefits. 

The CBO projected that the insurance-premium tax credits for the surge population would add $66 billion to the federal deficit over the following decade, while Medicaid and CHIP spending would increase by another $40 billion. Much of that government spending ultimately became revenue for private health-care companies. ObamaCare subsidies pay premiums for plans sold by private insurers, while much of Medicaid coverage is administered by private firms. As migration increased the number of people eligible for subsidized coverage — aided by the Biden administration’s expansive use of parole and other humanitarian statuses that moved migrants into categories eligible for welfare benefits — it also expanded the market for the companies paid to insure them.

Here Trump’s immigration restriction efforts encountered an indirect kind of resistance. The fight wasn’t directly over migrants themselves, but over the flow of federal funding to private markets that had expanded alongside the growth of the migrant population. By the time Trump sought to unwind the enhanced subsidies, only four years after their creation, insurers had already adapted to the enormous market they created. Cutting them meant removing millions of subsidized customers and billions in revenue — a disruption significant enough that Democrats were willing to sustain the longest government shutdown in American history to prevent it.

In blue cities, meanwhile, mass migration — legal and illegal — functions like a permanent jobs bill for various groups, including public-school teachers amid otherwise declining enrollment; lawyers and other laptop workers in the NGO sector facing AI and automation; Left activists looking for a streetfighting cause to compete with the pleasures of Netflix and legal weed; and public functionaries struggling to justify their salaries amid out-migration from blue cities to suburbs and exurbs, and from blue states to red. 

Put another way, as UnHerd’s Michael Lind has argued, mass migration provides a subset of the urban professional classes with a reason to maintain and expand the government agencies and NGOs that keep them employed.

Which brings us to the Right. Republicans’ resistance to portions of Trump’s immigration crackdown reveals the same paradox from the other direction. Where Democrats faced pressure from industries that had come to serve migrants as federally subsidized consumers and program enrollees, Republicans faced it from industries that had come to depend on them as cheap labor.

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When workplace enforcement raids increased in 2025, Big Ag — one of America’s most forceful cheap-labor lobbies — warned Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that farmers and ranchers risked losing workers. Rollins took their concerns to Trump, who briefly directed immigration authorities to pull back enforcement at farms, hotels, and restaurants. 

More recently, even as it has removed temporary protected status for Haitians and others, Team Trump held off terminating protections for more than 170,000 Salvadorans, apparently following intense pressure from the construction industry. In both cases, Trump found himself caught between the populist voters who elected him to enforce immigration law and Republican-aligned industries that had spent years building their businesses around the wage arbitrage made possible by inviting what Marx called a “reserve army of labor.”

The Trump administration and some congressional Republicans, moreover, have moved to expand guest-worker presence in migrant-heavy industries, most notably agriculture. A subset of the GOP, in other words, is prepared to tolerate high migrant flows in some regions, so long as the newcomers are tied to specific employers, can’t organize or vote, and continue to do jobs “Americans won’t do” (which is just cheap-labor-lobby speak for: jobs Americans won’t do at poverty wages).

The upshot is mixed. Trump’s first two years have demonstrated that it is possible to end the age of mass migration. They also show the extraordinary political effort required to do it — and the multidirectional resistance. His most difficult battles have not always been with the liberal opposition, but with businesses, government programs, and other institutions that spent years adapting themselves to high immigration and now have an interest in its continuation.

Understanding this paradox matters as Western societies are at a breaking point after years of governments failing to respond to the growing demands of their people. A politics focused narrowly on reducing immigration numbers misses much of what sustains mass migration once it has taken hold. The more important target may be the sectors that have come to depend on migration. Industries, nonprofit agencies, and other institutions often play a quieter but more influential role in frustrating the changes voters demand. Reducing mass migration therefore requires more than changing immigration law. It also requires voters to elect governments willing to confront the domestic interests that have grown up around it, forcing them to adjust to lower levels of immigration.

There is a cost to waiting. If these interests grow powerful enough to completely prevent governments from translating public demands into policy, the consequences will extend beyond immigration itself to the very legitimacy of representative government.

So, where is he taking me? I wonder, as we cross the Potomac. He’s also behaving erratically — jittering in his seat, changing lanes without turn signals, and aggressively honking at the car in front of him. I check my Uber app to make sure I got in the right car. I tell myself that a 5-foot-5-inch-tall college student wearing a polo shirt probably won’t be murdered underneath an interstate overpass in Northern Virginia, at least not tonight. 

Everything turned out fine with my Uber. I made it to Alexandria, and had a long and pleasant dinner with a friend. Later that evening, though, I was checking my phone on a street corner when I saw three men approaching me. Something about them seemed off — the way they walked, the look on their faces, the possible bulge of a gun holster on one of them. “You OK?” one asked me, with suspicion, in a strong Southern accent, a menacing grin on his face. “Yeah, how about you?” I replied, in my best, high-pitched, safely-American-sounding voice. 

This, in a nutshell, is mass-migration society. On the same day that I — an ethnic-Iranian, with skin as brown as ever in the 90-degree heat and the last name Mohammadi — am upset by a rude foreigner who seems not to know where to take me, I’m also on the receiving end of what, in days of peak woke, we would have all agreed was a “microaggression.” 

Mostly, such experiences are uncomfortable and annoying, but obviously not life-threatening. Increasingly, however, they define a global reality plagued by “diversity stress,” as UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari has written. And this reality has now been captured by the thriller Citizen Vigilante, a low-budget, 89-minute movie directed by the relatively unknown German independent filmmaker Uwe Boll and released last month. This obscure film has received attention in large part due to Elon Musk, owner of X, promoting it on his platform. It is artistically lacking — little more than Right-wing slop, akin to a Dinesh D’Souza production. But its celebration of violence and the chaotic society it portrays is useful in thinking about our own mad predicament. 

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Citizen Vigilante, then, is not the mass-migration society movie I want, but it might be the one we deserve in our moment of online edgelording, heightened and extreme political rhetoric, and self-interested hyper-individualism. The movie is the story of a former US soldier (Armie Hammer), turned angry vigilante against migrant violence, and it distills the persistent chaos and apprehension of mass-migration society — by appealing to people’s baser instincts, and triggering their increasing fear of the Other.

Hammer’s character, Sanders, has inherited his estranged father’s fortune and finds himself in “Europe” — we aren’t told where in Europe, though the movie is filmed in Croatia — assuming the mantle of a wealthy landlord. In the opening scene, a young mother and her son are in a supermarket, all lovey-dovey, only to exit onto the street — where a black man suddenly stabs the mother in the neck, and she falls to the ground, blood gushing out. Clearly, Boll is pulling no punches with the racial fear-mongering. 

Sanders sets himself up as an avenger for the native-born population, fighting both the migrants (portrayed as murderers and rapists) and the liberal, stereotypically Euro-institutionalist judges who decline to prosecute them — by just going ahead and killing everybody. Think of him as the strong and silent but easily irritated type. Hammer — yes, the same Armie Hammer who has texted women that he was “100% a cannibal” and wanted to cook and eat their ribs (10/10 pillow talk) — plays him, in his comeback attempt to film, as a righteous, anti-social lone wolf who repeatedly says: “I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself.” 

In one outlying instance, Sanders also defends two young women against two white men who are attempting to roofie them. But overwhelmingly, the movie presents the migrants as the problem, and the anti-migrant crusade as justified. Its protagonist also has the predictable populist, almost-anarcho-libertarian streak. “What if everything they taught you was utter nonsense?” he asks the people of Europe at one point, to whom he speaks in blurred-out videos by hacking the main news station. Referencing Nietzsche — never a good thing, coming from a violent man — he declares: “We can change history, the state, the court, the police…. They only exist to control you.” 

Many half-baked scenes follow: Sanders frequents a brothel, where the prostitute says she’ll charge 30 “bucks” per sex position (“bucks,” as in dollars, are not used in Europe); actors, confusingly, speak in a mix of European and American accents; the vehicles Sanders uses all have “EU” license plates (those don’t exist), whereas the cars in the background clearly have Croatian ones; scenes switch fast and with little plot development — in one instance, the Interpol investigator tracking Sanders for his vigilante-crimes manages to get his DNA off of a bar glass, and seconds later, we see a SWAT team entering Sanders’s temporary residence, where he is in a (somehow) impenetrable metal box, from which he manages to shoot the entire armed team and escape.

In the movie’s most viral scene, Sanders enters the home of a Syrian family whose son, alongside a group of others, took turns raping a young girl. While he is interrogating the family, the daughter, in order to justify the rapes, says that European girls “dress wrong and just make boys horny with their miniskirts — they show their legs and breasts.” The rapist himself says that he thought “she wanted it.” And the father argues that he’s teaching his kids “values from Quran.” Sanders gets the kid to call his friends and co-rapists, who aren’t in prison, thanks to a woke, liberal judge who argued that they were just having trouble assimilating, and invite them over. 

Our hero shoots the entire family dead, and then shoots each and every one of the rapists as they enter.

Finally, in the last scene, Sanders calls the Interpol investigator and tells him that “Islamist extremists and the blind-sided woke Left” are taking over Europe, and that things must change. The investigator then gets hold of the prime minister, and we are led to believe that he has been convinced by Sanders’s argument, which is Right-wing slop in the sense that it makes broad-brush-stroke reference to “woke,” and sees “Islamists” as the problem. 

Ultimately — unlike the better-directed and incomparable vigilante story, Taxi Driver — the viewer isn’t left rooting, not even uncomfortably so, for the lone man who takes justice into his own hands. This wasn’t Boll’s intention, but it is hard to see Sanders as anything other than a freak of nature: someone who is using social chaos for moral license to kill. To the sane viewer (i.e., not Elon Musk), it will be clear that Sanders himself is the gone-mad product of mass-migration society. 

Much as Citizen Vigilante itself is an artifact of mass-migration society rather than a critique of it, the reaction to the movie, too, indicates the confused, constantly warring state of a society plagued by diversity stress. 

As Mehdi Hasan correctly noted in his debate last week with Boll on Piers Morgan’s show, the fact that the film is set in just “Europe” has the effect of flattening Europe — crime, migration, and social attitudes differ among individual European states — while reinforcing American conservatives’ beloved narrative of Europe having devolved into a Third World hellscape. Anyone can exit Frankfurt’s Main Station and conclude that something has gone deeply wrong, but to portray all of Europe as if it were Mogadishu is just incorrect. Hasan had facts on his side. Boll, while he poorly articulated and defended himself — at one point saying he couldn’t hate Muslims because he has Muslim friends — had vibes many people are feeling. So they spoke past each other, each man angry about his own parochial issue. 

Further to the Right, there has emerged a theory that Citizen Vigilante is “Jewish.” The nutty Candace Owens, in her recent appearance on Shawn Ryan’s show, linked Armie Hammer to a bizarre Jewish-Bolshevik plot: Armie’s great-grandfather was Armand Hammer; Owens says this means “arm and hammer,” i.e., the hammer and sickle, and is not a coincidence. The content of her theory doesn’t matter; what does is that she’s tapping into a widespread feeling that people need to defend their group interests against an “adversary,” however real or imagined.  

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In actuality, that adversary is not the individuals who hail from different lands, but the overarching system that has bred this chaos in the first place. In a US context, the mass importation of illegal immigrants who work below minimum wage and compete with Americans for jobs is not solely bad policy — it’s also indicative of capitalism’s cynical tendency to extract profit at any social cost. The H-1Bs whose hiring by corporations, in effect, amounts to an American Kafala, are not just here by mistake; it’s because the state actually doesn’t represent its people over a stream of easy-to-control labor. Without limitations, job protections, and proper protocols for assimilation, both migrant and native become strangers; sometimes, violent strangers. 

At one point last week, Citizen Vigilante was trending number one on Amazon Prime. Although it has a Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 6%, the production has a shockingly high audience approval rating of 93%: a sign that Right-wing slop may indeed sell. Meanwhile, Boll’s native Germany has essentially banned the movie. And Musk, who may well have a role in the creation or distribution of the film, has promised that “Citizen Vigilante 2 will be even better.” Still more, an anonymous source told Puck that Hammer was “in tears” when he first saw Boll’s final cut: “Fuck. This is hateful, disgusting,” he supposedly said. If the measure of a good film were buzz-to-cost ratio, Citizen Vigilante would be among the best ever.

The reality is that it is wrong to have a strong opinion one way or another on Citizen Vigilante. Really liking it probably means you buy the argument that Muslims are culturally and religiously obligated to kill you; or that Muslims, as individuals, inherently foster places filled with rape, filth, and danger — and a visit to Istanbul or Doha or any number of Muslim-majority cities would easily shatter that view. Really despising the movie, by contrast, probably means you neglect to see the issue at hand. The insanity might end if we were able to not talk past each other about it, which shows no indication of happening. There are legitimate Left reasons to be disappointed with mass-migration society, as are my own, without any need to concede to (segments of) the Right’s race-religion absolutism.

Until then, we will just have to deal with the annoyances of unbalanced job competition, large groups of people not being invested in the national project, the isolation of migrants and non-migrants alike — and the annoyance of Uber drivers named Mohammed smirking at the fact that they don’t know where to take you. Everyone loses.

Surely one of the starkest ironies of environmental politics is the mismatch between the ideology of those who take climate change most seriously, and the likely outcome if their prophecies come to pass. Green activists make dire warnings of the catastrophe to come, while also advancing a random assortment of ultra-liberal causes as part of their electoral platforms; yet if the predictions of the climate scientists are correct, the forthcoming age of blood and fire will surely not advance the ideals of liberalism, but bury them entirely.

In a troubling book aimed at political conservatives and the security establishment, the eminent International Relations scholar Anatol Lieven addresses these dark realities head on. Lieven observes that despite the UK’s 2008 National Security Strategy declaring climate change “potentially the greatest challenge to global stability and security, and therefore to national security”, almost nothing has been done since to prepare for the seemingly now-inevitable storm heading our way.

Aiming to not just shift the Overton Window of green politics, Lieven smashes it, then demolishes the wall containing it, kicking the rubble and broken glass in all directions with wild abandon. Greens, liberals and conservatives all become targets of his ire in succession, as he argues that all must be forced to abandon their most cherished political beliefs in the face of the coming catastrophe.

The threat is such that both liberals and conservatives must abandon their political hobbyhorses just to survive: “if the Greens and the left continue their blind ideological commitment to open borders,” Lieven argues, “they will feed white chauvinism, tear their societies apart, and make effective action to limit climate change impossible. If Right-wing parties allow aversion to Left-wing ideologies to blind them to the existential dangers of climate change, they will betray the vital national interests of their countries and doom them to eventual extinction.” 

After all, he reminds us, if temperatures rise by 5 or 6%, “all existing states will be overwhelmed and by far the greater part of the human race will be doomed”. But even if temperatures rise by a mere 2 or 3 degrees, he argues, Western societies will be overwhelmed not primarily by the changing climate here at home, but instead by the desperate waves of migration unleashed from the worst-affected regions of the Global South. Lieven, an accomplished journalist in the former Soviet Union and Pakistan before turning to academia, argues with no equivocation that the political products of mass migration on such a vast scale will be “political radicalization, polarization, and state paralysis in Western democracies”.

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Indeed, gliding briskly beyond any fear of cancellation, he argues that just such an outcome has already taken place in America, which he presents as a model of dysfunctional political order, “becoming reminiscent of the endless squabbles over names and statues that characterised the Habsburg Empire and Yugoslavia in their last decades”.

Here, Lieven seems to directly channel the work of the influential political scientist Donald L. Horowitz, whose 1985 book Ethnic Groups in Conflict characterised ethnically-divided nations as inherently unstable polities where “rather than merely setting the framework for politics, [group relations] become the recurring subjects of politics. Conflicts over needs and interests are subordinated to conflicts over group status and over the rules to govern conflict. Constitutional consensus is elusive, and the symbolic sector of politics looms large.”

The movement of hundreds of millions of people will make the integration of already-existing or new minorities simply impossible; the necessary societal cohesion to fight climate change, or indeed pursue any stable form of political activity, will be destroyed once and for all; the outcome will not be a multicultural utopia, but a world of total global conflict, chaos and disorder. 

Making this case, Lieven observes that Europe’s political stability was dramatically overturned by the movement of one million people during the 2015 migrant crisis. A modest rise in temperature is likely to lead to the movement of 400 million people northwards, the greatest movement in human history, vastly dwarfing the Age of Migrations attending the collapse of the Roman Empire. As crops fail and drinking water dries up, governments across much of the world will either collapse or become more oppressive just to survive, compounding their peoples’ misery and accelerating their flight.

The sheer numbers involved are almost unimaginable: the social scientist Chris Smaje, in his new book makes the argument that the UK alone ought to take in 25 million climate refugees as a matter of moral responsibility. This is no longer an idle thought exercise: as an alarming article revealed last week, the Ministry of Defence now believes that a global rise in temperatures by between 2.5 and 3.5 degrees Celsius is more or less inevitable by the end of the century. 

Will European nations, already turning sharply rightwards largely in response to the growing northward movement of peoples for primarily economic reasons, accept such a sudden and dramatic demographic change? Will China, or Russia, or the United States? Whether or not they should, Lieven’s book, which underlines that it presents the “realist case” for action, argues flatly that they won’t. 

A sobering vision of industrial civilisation as an embattled fortress, a redoubt of hard borders in an apocalyptic age of global death and disorder, this is also the cruellest and most amoral aspect of Lieven’s argument, given that it is the nations of the industrialised North who have created this catastrophe, and the largely blameless peoples of the global South who will be forced to bear the consequences. 

Many will rightly find this vision hard to bear, condemning it as a heartless form of “lifeboat ethics”, placing our own survival over that of the rest of the world. Lieven’s response is, simply: Yes. At this point, he argues, there is no alternative. If liberals don’t harness civic nationalism to preserve democracy within their own societies against the growing global chaos, ethnic nationalists will come to power pledging to defend the global North without any pretence of either democracy or of liberalism. The realistic alternative to liberal nationalism in this apocalyptic scenario is not universal socialism, but fascism. What we are asked to do is cruel, selfish and morally unbearable: but the alternative, total civilisational collapse and the final extinction of democracy, would be even worse.

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Instead of welcoming the climate refugees, our moral responsibility now lies, in Lieven’s view, in minimising the catastrophe heading their way as quickly and dramatically as possible. Greens will need to accept an immediate shift to nuclear power; conservatives to a politics of degrowth, on the basis that our current levels of consumption are already about to collapse.

Therefore, he insists that a Green New Deal — a total rebalancing of national economies, on something approaching a war footing, around halting carbon emissions — is urgently necessary, and — counterintuitively — that it should be led by the security establishment and the political Right. The dismissive attitude to climate change displayed by conservatives must be jettisoned immediately, otherwise they will lose everything they profess to hold dear.

The idea of a conservative, even nationalist Green New Deal is an intriguing one, given the proposal’s current pigeonholing within a certain brand of Left-liberal politics. In recent years, the idea has moved from a fringe concern of the Left wing of America’s Democratic Party to a mainstream policy under Biden’s candidacy, with similar proposals being adopted by the European Union and the Labour Party.

Yet as a consequence of the all-consuming culture war, conservatives oppose the idea on the frivolous grounds of partisan political identity. Lieven insists the scale of the coming emergency is too great for such Culture War luxuries. Instead, he argues, the political right must harness the most powerful political force in industrial societies to deal with the challenge: that of nationalism, because only nationalism “can overcome one of the greatest obstacles to serious action; namely, that it requires sacrifices by present generations on behalf of future generations.” 

Indeed, by reframing the fight against climate change as a battle for the survival of nations, we are more likely to secure the cooperation of the non-liberal powers of Eurasia, currently deeply wedded to the exploitation of fossil fuels. Putin, Modi and Xi are “ruthless but sincere nationalists, dedicated to the power and survival of their nations. Convince them that something threatens those nations, and they will act.” 

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With some exceptions — that of Palestine, say, Kurdistan or Scotland — it is fair to say nationalism has not had a positive image in recent decades, with the concept having turned full circle over the last century from an idea actively promoted by liberals to enhance global peace to one seen as the greatest, darkest threat to the same.

Harnessing the power of nationalism to fight the climate war will therefore horrify Greens and eco-socialists, as Lieven observes, but he argues there is no other choice. After all, history shows that people will put up with any amount of discomfort, even death, to fight for the survival of their nations, whereas the fate of strangers on the other side of the earth remains an object of total indifference. 

If Greens truly believe the threat of climate change is as great as they claim, then they will have to jettison the utopian baggage they have appended to the environmental movement, like their wildly unpopular fantasies of open borders or of universal liberal governance. Progressives need to remove these “ideological luxuries,” Lieven argues, because “if we fail to limit climate change, the resulting world is extremely unlikely to be friendly to the causes they have tried to load onto the climate change bandwagon.”

The natural environment ought to be a point of political consensus between the Right and Left: after all, many conservatives, at least in Europe, feel a great emotional attachment to the survival of their nations as green and pleasant lands. Yet despite — or as the historian Anna Bramwell has observed, because of the historic origins of the Green movement in radical Right-wing politics — most modern Greens, with their idealistic preference for the universal over the particular, decry such powerful drives as eco-fascism.

But “to reject the entire tradition of attachment to local and national landscapes in the West is to throw out the bathwater, the baby and the entire municipal drainage system”, Lieven argues: “if action against climate change depends on the abolition of nation-states then there will be no action. Existing nation states may well eventually collapse due to climate change, but the result will be not world government but universal chaos.” 

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Lieven’s vision is stark and apocalyptic. It would be comforting to believe he is wrong. Perhaps it is not too late to avoid catastrophe, though science warns us it probably already is. Perhaps the hundreds of millions of climate refugees from the global South can be resettled in the industrialised North without inducing social conflict and collapse: liberals and leftists, committed to a fairer world than the one that exists, will argue that they can; conservatives, through comparison with human history up to now, that they cannot. 

Citing the work of writers like Yascha Mounk, David Goodhart and Paul Collier, Lieven argues that social homogeneity, by fostering solidarity, is necessary to concerted political action, and that in contrast a surfeit of cultural diversity brings only political division. It is an interesting reflection of the state of the climate debate then that, in a Guardian discussion last year, the main American figurehead of the Green New Deal and avatar of Twitter socialism Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez broached these issues with Greta Thunberg, observing that one objection against her proposal is that “because of the racial diversity here, and issues with immigration and so on, there’s no way we can come together in order to combat this”. 

Thunberg unfortunately does not answer the question — indeed, she seems not even to understand it, indicating she is perhaps an imperfect figurehead for the global climate movement. Yet as Lieven makes clear, Greens and ecosocialists will need to find answers for these questions sooner than they would like, before their opponents do. The central issues roiling global politics, of the battle between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, between the universal versus the particular, are not going away. Green issues are not a distraction from these questions: instead, within decades, the accelerating climate crisis will heighten the ferocious political battle over place and peoples to a level never seen before in human history.