“CLIMATE change will be a battle between uncontrolled capitalism and the planet,” Anatol Lieven declares in his conclusion to this thought-provoking book. In his view, it is far more of a threat to the world’s great powers than they are to each other.

Yet, while the 2008 National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom states that climate change is [[{"fid":"24893","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]“potentially the greatest challenge to global stability and security and therefore to national security,”nothing has been done.

Instead the security agenda and expenditure on it have been frittered away on traditional challenges such as the war in Afghanistan which, by 2008, was already effectively lost and from which Britain achieved nothing.

Lieven argues that the only way to cope with the challenges is via the nation state. “People look to national identity to preserve some element of inherited culture and to nation states to give them some protection against capitalist exploitation and uncontrolled movements of transnational finance,” he writes.

The state needs to guarantee living standards through social welfare and universal healthcare and plan and control the flows of capital, goods and immigration because “there is no way to limit climate change without massive state intervention in the economy.”

He explains that workers have good reason to oppose open borders because in the US free-market economists have long talked openly of using immigration to drive down wages and discipline workers. “The inescapable fact about US economic growth since the 1970s is precisely that it has not benefited unskilled and semi-skilled workers,” he states.

Capitalism is incapable of regulating and limiting itself and the nation state has to play a central role, based on the wider interests of the state and people.

Unregulated financial speculation inevitably leads to crashes like those of 1929 and 2008 and without state and social controls, the capitalist search for increased profit “tends inevitably to the immiseration of large parts of the population, the destruction of the environment and the disintegration of society,” Lieven writes.

All we can do for other countries is provide a good example of how to solve problems, so that they can then take responsibility for solving their own problems.

Then, Lieven believes, nations can work together to cope with climate change.

Published by Allen Lane, £20.