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The current US-Canada trade dispute is a symptom of our times. Ostensibly about trade and tariffs, it is more broadly about the capacity of states to cooperate in response to common challenges. In this, nationalism plays a big role.

The latest flare-up began in midsummer as wildfire smoke from Canada drifted across large parts of the United States. Rather than treating the smoke as evidence of a shared environmental crisis, Trump treated it as a foreign intrusion. Accusing Canada of failing to properly maintain its forests, he described the smoke as an “invasion.” For this, Canada had to be punished.

To Canadians, Trump’s boorish hostility and “51st state” trolling is the toxicity in the air. Performatively renaming Lake Ontario is his latest toponymic stunt. Such imperial grandiosity has drawn a robust reaction from Canadians.

How states process the alarming material consequences of climate change is going to be a major theme of 21st century geopolitics. Climate change is a planetary dynamic, but people do not experience the planet—they experience their air turning to haze, their homes flooding, their food prices rising because of distant (or close) harvest failures. These experiences have to be translated into a story about who is responsible and what should be done.

The most influential ideology telling that story today is nationalism.

Nationalism is a protean ideology. How it approaches and understands climate change is not predetermined. Yet we can already see the outlines of three distinct pathways by which nationalism is framing the frightening materialities of climate change: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

At its best, nationalism provides belonging and solidarity to a community of fate. How that community is defined, of course, is deeply contentious. But civic nationalism provides a model for inclusion and an ethic of solidarity and protection for national homelands.

This means states can harness nationalism as a vehicle to promote collective action to address........

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