Boris Shoshitaishvili is a science studies scholar working on planetary thought, collective identity and Earth sciences. He was a 2022–2024 USC-Berggruen Institute fellow.
Lisa H. Sideris is a professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara who teaches on environmental ethics, science and religion.
In 1823, worried that Spain would seek to reconquer its colonies as peace returned to Europe following the Napoleonic Wars, George Canning, the British foreign secretary, put a proposal to the U.S. ambassador in London. Britain and the U.S., Canning suggested, should jointly issue a warning to Spain and its allies not to meddle in North and South America. Hearing of the proposal, U.S. President James Monroe was initially keen to agree. But then his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, suggested that the U.S. go it alone — issue the warning to Spain without Britain’s backing. As Adams later put it, he didn’t want the U.S. “to come in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”
Monroe’s eventual declaration would become one of the foundational foreign policies of the young United States. Though largely symbolic — at the time, the U.S. didn’t have the power to resist Spain without Britain’s help — it asserted sole U.S. influence over an entire planetary hemisphere. Eighty years later, President Theodore Roosevelt extended the Monroe Doctrine to emphasize that U.S. military force could be deployed in the Americas not only to prevent European meddling but also to maintain order more generally. This was the beginning of America as “an international police power.” Together, these policies effectively became a national assertion of dominance over an area extending well beyond the nation’s actual sovereign territory.
More than a century after the Roosevelt Corollary, President Donald Trump established the U.S. Space Force as an independent branch of the U.S. military. In the Space Force’s founding documents are statements that seek to establish a sphere of influence in a noticeably similar way to Monroe’s and Roosevelt’s foreign policies: “The formative purpose of the Space Force is to achieve Space Superiority, ensuring freedom of action in space for our forces while denying the same to our adversaries,” the “Space Force 101” reads. “Guardians” — as the force’s personnel are known — “secure space superiority for the nation, which ensures that the United States always has access to the benefits of outer space for security, commerce, and exploration.”
It’s notable how the focus here is not just on shielding satellites from attack but also on the need to establish control in some form over an entire planetary domain — geosynchronous and low- and middle-Earth orbit. This echoes a nationalist tendency to seek unrivaled power in a sphere of influence, only now the extent of this sphere is the literal envelopment of near space around our planet. In other words, in the U.S. Space Force’s self-presentation, we find the kernel of a Monroe Doctrine for the planetary age.
“The political resonance of planetary mindsets often manifests in domestic politics and international relations as forms of exclusionary techno-nationalism”
The expansion of nationalism to planet-scale phenomena is not limited to the militarization of outer space, nor solely an American action. It belongs to a growing global trend we identify as “planetary nationalism.”
This trend includes far-right parties in Europe yoking concerns about humanity’s impact on Earth’s environmental systems to ideas of “green nationalism”; Russian government officials forecasting that more of the country will become arable and habitable in a warmer world; the drive to develop AI because it could become a form of distributed planetary intelligence aligned to any value system; and explicit appeals to planetary concepts by nationalists like Steve Bannon, who has voiced an attraction to the idea of the “noosphere,” or the planetary sphere of entwined human and technological activity.
The consequences of this trend are potentially seismic: Recognizing that we are all mutually and inextricably embedded in Earth’s systems does not inevitably create a cosmopolitan politics oriented toward the well-being of humankind as a whole. It is becoming clear that the political resonance of planetary mindsets is fraught and variable, often manifesting in domestic politics and international relations as forms of exclusionary techno-nationalism in tension with the realities of shared human embeddedness in natural systems at the planetary scale.
Yet if planetary politics now appears to be splintering, with planetary nationalism existing alongside or even in opposition to cosmopolitanism, what about the prospects of planetary governance? If planetary themes are spreading politically, why haven’t we seen a corresponding development of viable planetary institutions oriented toward planetary challenges, from human impact on the Earth system to the rise of AI’s potential expressions of intelligence?
A third aspect of the planetary condition, planetary technoscience, helps explain this decoupling between intensifying planetary politics and stagnating planetary governance. A number of influential technologists and entrepreneurs — those shaping planetary technoscience — have increased their support for planetary-oriented nationalist movements while paying considerably less attention to fostering equitable planetary governance.
“In the U.S. Space Force’s self-presentation, we find the kernel of a Monroe Doctrine for the planetary age.”
The emblematic figure here is Elon Musk. Of Silicon Valley’s elite, Musk has the most self-consciously “planetary” personal brand, having styled his companies as ventures oriented toward either helping our planet (Tesla) or facilitating our interaction with other planets (SpaceX). He has now linked his extraplanetary aims (going to Mars) with a nationalist movement (MAGA) that is resistant to planetary institutions, such as the Paris Agreement, which would equip us to collectively govern our expanding planetary agency.
To a lesser degree, other Big Tech figures who drive projects that engage planetary themes have aligned themselves more closely with nationalism in recent years. (A subset of this “broligarchy” sat prominently in the front row at Donald Trump’s second inauguration.) For instance, major Silicon Valley figures embrace the nationalist narrative that besting China in the A.I. race should be a primary U.S. focus. But positioning a transformative planetary technology like AI as a zero-sum contest between adversary nations impedes progress toward governing it on a planetary scale.
From a narrow, short-term perspective, planetary technologists’ growing openness to nationalism gives them a better opportunity to influence politics than they likely would have had in planetary governance bodies designed to regulate their technologies. Cozying up to nationalism may be a price some technologists are willing to pay for the ability to pursue and profit from their planetary projects with fewer constraints. (To be sure, other technologists in Trump’s circle may align themselves with nationalism for ideological reasons that go beyond, or complement, financial self-interest.)
But from a medium- and long-term perspective, what emerges is a lopsided form of human planetary activity: Planetary nationalist politics and planetary technoscience escalate in tandem, boosting each other while planetary governance lags behind. This combination increases the likelihood of driving the entire human community headlong into a more fractured political environment at a time of overlapping planetary crises that include but go well beyond climate change.
Early Expressions Of Planetary Politics
The relationship between technology and nationalism in the 20th century was considerably different than it is today. Politicians used new communications technologies to connect with constituents and sway national opinion, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats to the infamous radio broadcasts by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. These new technologies did not, however, consolidate influence among their inventors and innovators as much as they empowered politicians; those who developed technologies to amplify and broadcast the human voice never themselves achieved the far-reaching political impact that today’s technologists like Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg enjoy.
This was true beyond communications technologies. The two most emphatically planetary of 20th-century technologies — nuclear energy and spaceflight — were developed under the aegis and control of states in contexts of war or extreme geopolitical rivalry. The planetary techno-agency they afforded, while enabled by scientists, inventors and bureaucrats, was primarily directed by politicians, most of whom were oriented exclusively toward the survival or supremacy of their own nations rather than toward the meaning of these technologies for the global human community and more-than-human life.
J. Robert Oppenheimer and Wernher von Braun, in other words, never had the political clout or financial resources of contemporary technologists. Indeed, in a meeting with President Harry Truman after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, Oppenheimer lamented that he felt he had blood on his hands. After he had departed, according to one version of the story, Truman told his undersecretary of state: “Don’t you bring that fellow around again. After all, all he did was make the bomb. I’m the guy who fired it off.”
This asymmetry held across political systems. In democratic, capitalist countries like the U.S., fascist regimes like Italy and Nazi Germany, imperial autocracies like Japan and communist states like the Soviet Union, technologists sometimes prospered as a result of their discoveries, inventions and entrepreneurship, but they had little influence over the politics surrounding their technologies. The closest they got, in totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or in prewar Japan, was in the industrial and technological approaches applied to human affairs — the extreme “social engineering” mentality that laid the groundwork for atrocities ordered by politicians. They never became charismatic, politically powerful leaders in their own right.
In the second half of the 20th century, planetary politics appeared more prominently, at least rhetorically. When John F. Kennedy declared in 1962 that the role of the U.S. in leading space exploration “to the moon and to the planets beyond” was to make sure “space [is not] filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding,” he was framing a U.S. technoscientific venture as one pursued on behalf of both his nation and the planetary community.
“Cozying up to nationalism may be a price some technologists are willing to pay for the ability to pursue and profit from their planetary projects with fewer constraints.”
Similarly, Mikhail Gorbachev asserted that geoscientist Vladimir Vernadsky and his expansive vision of a shared noosphere had helped energize the “new thinking” underlying the massive reforms the Soviet leader was attempting, such as glasnost and perestroika. In this way, he linked his project of political change with a broader sense of a planet-wide community. (Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and his resignation, Gorbachev was inspired by Vernadsky’s noosphere ideas in his ecological work.)
Though these early expressions of planetary politics emphasized the importance of new technologies and ideas to national success, they also highlighted the potential impact on and responsibility for the human community at large. (And for Gorbachev, nonhuman life as well.) Unlike the planetary nationalism growing today, the plunge of nation-states into planetary matters was, at least symbolically, tied to more-than-national visions.
This orientation may have merely been a tactic in the battle between the U.S. and Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the nonaligned world, or motivated by the ever-present possibility of planet-wide destruction through nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the idea that planetary nationalism should have a constructive and responsive relationship with all humanity, and even the biosphere, made it easier to imagine that major world powers would support and even lead the creation of transnational institutions helping to govern planetary impacts — in other words, to imagine forms of planetary nationalism that result in strengthened planetary governance and not just intensified planetary politics and technoscience.
Some notable planet-focused institutions that sprang up in this era were buoyed by nation-states. Julian Huxley, the first director general of the newly established UNESCO, and Edward Max Nicholson, the founder of the World Wildlife Fund, were both deeply inspired by the noosphere, the same planetary idea that animated Gorbachev. The launch of the International Space Station, with the inclusion of Russian cosmonauts in the 1990s, exemplified a smaller planetary techno-institution developed by nation-states yet oriented toward a more expansive view of the human community. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the International Atomic Energy Agency, aiming to regulate and check the most destructive capabilities of the atomic age, won the support of most nations. The mood of planetary nationalism in the second half of the 20th century was ostensibly non-zero-sum.
Not so today. Current U.S. space officials emphatically deny that space is a global “commons” or the “common heritage of mankind,” and the Trump administration frequently turns to rhetoric of manifest destiny to justify U.S. territorial expansion beyond Earth. As scholar Mary-Jane Rubenstein argues, references to the good of all humankind persist in the corporate space race, but the alliance between private corporations and the U.S. government to claim dominance in space is growing more technocratic, colonialist and capitalist. She calls this “cosmic nationalism” — reaching beyond borders to establish a nation’s influence in the domain of space.
Competitive Planetary Nationalism
The collective challenges at the planetary scale caused by advancing technoscience have only grown in number and acuteness since the turn of the 21st century. We are now feeling the consequences of the general human impact on the Earth system and biosphere due to energy and land use, and the Covid pandemic revealed how our elaborate, planet-spanning transportation networks double as vectors for microbial and viral organisms, a collective encounter with the very smallest scales of life enabled by technologically accelerated planetarity. Furthermore, AI systems have given ample cause for asking whether a new form (or forms) of planetary intelligence, like and unlike human thought, is now emerging through the algorithmization of a massive pool of digitized human expression. (As Ezra Klein recently put it, racing to develop AI is like trying “to build an alliance with another almost interplanetary ally.”)
Expectations that such shared planetary challenges would prompt leaders to connect national politics with the planetary imperative to develop responsive and responsible planetary governance structures — a more durable Gaiapolitik or noopolitik — have been tempered. Even if national leaders today acknowledge the planetary dimension of contemporary human activity, many of them resist the sense of expansive responsibility formerly articulated by Kennedy or Gorbachev.
Green nationalism and the prospect of “avocado politics” have shown how a keen interest in planetary-scale issues like climate change, migration, renewable energy and electric vehicles can fold into more narrow nationalist agendas. These are often spearheaded by right-leaning or autocratic politicians and result in competitive forms of eco-oriented nationalism, with no supranational governing bodies in view. Prioritizing climate change and adopting mitigation policies often appears to be a means to reduce migration and build national strength, to the detriment of other countries and the human community as a whole. (In other words, the result is essentially: If we win, they lose — but so do we all.) Consider the 2019 statement by Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s far-right National Rally party and protégé of Marine Le Pen: “Borders are the environment’s greatest ally. … [I]t is through them that we will save the planet.”
It is possible that these planetary nationalist scenarios, where nations compete with one another for various forms of climate-induced hegemony, might yet give rise to something that approximates a distributed form of planetary action (if not governance institutions). Each nation pursuing its interests in isolation could collectively result in something at least akin to planetary politics (or Gaiapolitik), even if these developments are not motivated by a quest for a unified planetary front. As Nathan Gardels, this magazine’s editor-in-chief, has suggested: “Though each [nation] may be going it alone, all are going in the same direction.” This is not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.
“Planetary nationalist politics and planetary technoscience escalate in tandem, boosting each other while planetary governance lags behind.”
And yet, some nations may see the planetary challenge of a rapidly changing climate not as a shared future to be averted but as a strategic opportunity. Russian officials noted in a 2020 national action plan that vast stretches of their country, which were previously impossible to farm, could become highly cultivable in a warmer climate in the coming decades and position Russia as one of the world’s largest producers of corn, soybeans and wheat. Meanwhile, other nations, including rivals like the U.S. and some European countries, may endure steep declines in agricultural productivity. An influx of migrants into a more temperate and habitable Russia would be challenging but could also bolster the country’s national strength and global influence.
This makes it evident that planetary nationalism is a much broader category than green nationalism: It can include an embrace of, and not just resistance to, swift anthropogenic environmental change.
A similar scenario is playing out in Greenland, as its rapidly warming climate creates enormously profitable opportunities for mineral extraction in places where the extremely harsh climate and high costs of mining have long frustrated ambitious prospecting endeavors. It has a vast store of critical minerals and fossil fuels — iron ore, lead, zinc, diamonds, gold, rare earth elements, uranium and oil. No wonder multiple people in the orbit of the current U.S. administration want to buy or control it.
Should such a takeover succeed, tech magnates like Zuckerberg and Bezos, who both have investments in a start-up that hopes to mine in Greenland for resources related to AI, could reap benefits. Meanwhile, Trump-Vance donor Peter Thiel has other potential interests in the territory: Along with investors like Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale and the Altman brothers’ Apollo Projects, he is helping fund Praxis Nation, which describes itself as the “world’s first Sovereign Network” or “network empire.” This “new form of nation — one that exists wherever its citizens gather, whether in physical space or across the digital expanse” — aims to “restore Western Civilization and pursue our ultimate destiny of life among the stars.” Dryden Brown, Praxis’s founder, is searching first on Earth for a place to establish a proof-of-concept, crypto-based, libertarian-minded dream city and sees Greenland as a potential site. (He traveled there last summer to try, as he put it half-jokingly, to buy the whole island.) To some, the rush to establish network nations, prototypes of gated “freedom cities,” outposts in space and similar “high-tech fiefdoms” are emblematic of an end-times prepperism exclusively for the ultra-wealthy.
The recognition of the planetary effects of climate change and the desire to capitalize on them by extracting newly available minerals converges with the rationale that doing so might facilitate technoscientific advances (or even, in Praxis’s case, novel efforts to build communities on “crypto-native economic infrastructure”) that themselves have or aspire to have planetary reach. Such entanglements between ambitious, influential tech figures and planetary nationalist politicians — a union of profit, power and technoscientific acceleration and experimentation — leave little opportunity for the parallel development of planetary governance.
Building A Planetary Politics
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel “The Ministry for the Future,” a catastrophic heatwave afflicts India, causing millions of deaths and driving the country to enact a controversial solar geoengineering scheme. The government releases massive amounts of sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere to reduce the sunlight reaching Earth and keep temperatures down to prevent the heatwave from returning. One message of the novel is that, when calamities reach new scales, previously unthinkable strategies can quickly become realities, and what might otherwise seem to be a radical decision — one made by a single nation but with ramifications for all human and nonhuman life — suddenly finds a clear rationale.
But in the book, it’s not only the disaster and the immediate response that are unprecedented — during and after India’s venture into geoengineering, new planetary institutions quickly coalesce to help regulate and structure our relationship to the Earth system in the wake of this desperate attempt to change the planet’s receptivity to sunlight. The calamity and the unilateral geoengineering scheme have made it abundantly clear to a critical mass of the human community that nations and technoscientific corporations alone can’t provide any semblance of stability and security. The titular Ministry for the Future grows from a smaller U.N. body originally founded to help enforce the Paris Agreement with the explicit mission of defending and protecting “all living creatures present and future.”
“Planetary nationalism can include an embrace of swift anthropogenic environmental change.”
It goes without saying that we should do what we can to avoid this harrowing path to catalyzing planetary governance. Perhaps Robinson’s fiction can stand as a vivid-enough scenario that we don’t also need to live through it. This would mean gathering the political will to cocreate planetary governance structures that are commensurate with our planetary impacts and politics, and cocreate them in time to avoid catastrophe. We should continue to remind ourselves that this task extends beyond climate and the Earth system. It includes all other planetary questions that humans now confront, from AI in its potential planetary intelligence to pandemics. We must now engage all of these at the same time.
In the U.S. context, this would mean that after these first months of the current administration, which has had the support or acquiescence of many leaders in the technoscientific community, a process of tempering the combination of planetary nationalism and planetary technoscience with greater efforts at planetary governance, diplomacy and coordination must begin. This is a project not only for intellectuals and activists but also for politicians and technologists themselves. It’s past time to put planetary politics into dialogue with not only technoscience but governance as well.
The Monroe Doctrine belongs in the 19th century. A 21st-century world — where billions of us act cumulatively as a planetary force, where new and unknown intelligences potentially emerge from our technologies, and where near and outer space influence our daily lives — calls for a more thoughtful planetary stance, one where politics, technoscience and governance maintain their balance for the sake of all humans and fellow living creatures.
