The articles point is being wantonly ignored by turning this into yet another debate on whether God appointed the USA to defend the world against itself.
The US military machine pollutes more than 140 countries!
May I suggest that: 1) large powerful countries tend to bully and act pushy and attempt to coerce the smaller and/or poorer countries into doing their bidding
2) nation states as a global system won't likely survive this century, as they are largely squandering what little time we have left to confront the single largest threat humanity has ever faced in it's self-aknowledged history:
human caused climate change.
Hello 45 degree France in 2019 (celsius, my fahrenheit friends... you know: the system the entire rest of the world uses: where freezing of water is 0 and the boiling point of the same is 100... part of the metric system... in which 1 cubic meter of water is 1000 liters, in which you can convert from driving/flying distances to microscopic ones by shifting some zeros... that's another clue that you are actually doing the Devils work rather than Gods, but I digress...)