There is a global national security crisis going on right now, the most urgent in human history. You may not have heard about it, because it hasn’t been mentioned in presidential debates, and there are no prominent op-ed columnists calling for war over it.

It’s not Iran’s nonexistent pursuit of a nuclear weapon. It’s not the array of terrorist groups who kill fewer people a year than childbirth. And it’s not Russia or China, who, for all the malevolence of their governments, still spend a fraction of what the US government invests in its military and meddle in far fewer countries. Rather, this crisis is entirely about extractive industries’ determination to cripple the natural world for profits, and one South American leader’s determination to speed that process up.

The election of far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil last year sent tremors of fear through many communities for a variety of reasons. Among them were environmentalists and climate campaigners, who worried that Bolsonaro’s planned push to further open up the Amazon rainforest to economic exploitation could be disastrous. They warned that his plan to accelerate the deforestation of the Amazon, an enormous carbon sink and cradle of planetary biodiversity, could finally send it past an irreversible tipping point that would see it eventually die off and become a desert. This would not only be catastrophic for all life in South America, but would make it impossible to keep global warming within 1.5°C and would further heat the planet on top of our regular emissions.

In less than a year in power, Bolsonaro has brought us alarmingly closer to this tipping point, teaming up with agribusiness to accelerate deforestation of the Amazon while, more recently, facilitating mass burning of the rainforest by ranchers and farmers. One prominent economist warned yesterday that, at this rate, the Amazon could hit that tipping point as early as 2021, the year the next US president will take power.

While there is disagreement over this timeline, scientists have estimated it would take 20–25 percent deforestation of the rainforest to reach this tipping point, and Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research estimated deforestation had hit 19.3 percent at the end of last year, before Bolsonaro had taken power. More alarming still, according to documents leaked to the Intercept last month, Brazil’s powerful military, which for decades headed a violent dictatorship in the country, is now reviving plans to colonize the Amazon, which would accelerate deforestation further.

Socialist and progressive lawmakers, including those running for president, urgently need to make the prevention of this crisis and the reforesting of the Amazon a centerpiece of their foreign policy, the same way much of the political class centers terrorism and the nonexistent military threat of Iran. They need to do so with the aim of shifting the Overton window the same way they have for ideas like raising taxes on the rich, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal. And Bernie Sanders needs to lead the way.

To be clear, it would be welcome if any other leading candidate came out with a plan to rally global, nonviolent diplomatic action to prevent this catastrophe — say, Elizabeth Warren, the next most progressive candidate in the race. But let’s not hold our breath.

Warren may be vastly superior to the rest of the field, but she is still wedded to the idea of market-based action, including on the issue of climate change, a position that has little to do with reality. More than this, all the Democratic candidates, other than Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, have taken ignorant to dangerous stances on US foreign policy in Latin America, and Gabbard is unlikely to go there with Brazil: she has a history of backing far-right governments that claim they’re fighting terrorism, and she has strangely failed to say anything about Bolsonaro, or the wider situation in Brazil and the Amazon.

For Sanders, by contrast, it would be a perfect fit. Sanders has been outspoken in his criticism of Bolsonaro and his destruction of the Amazon. He is the only candidate to call for the release of Brazil’s leftist former president Lula da Silva, imprisoned in 2017 by right-wing prosecutors on politically motivated charges, just as he is the only major US politician who appears to recognize there is a growing far-right authoritarian axis in the world, of which Bolsonaro is a member. In fact, Sanders is the only candidate who seems to realize Latin America even exists when the Washington elite isn’t calling for the ouster of one of its leaders — standing alone in expressing his support for the anti-IMF protests in Ecuador earlier this month. Finally, doing so would fit with the broader climate agenda championed by himself and recent endorser Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, slotting in with his foreign policy vision of US-led international cooperation to roll back the crisis.

What exactly this would mean in practice depends. Military intervention should be ruled out, not just for the mayhem it would cause, but because it would likely be disastrous and ineffective, rallying the Brazilian public around a weakened and unpopular Bolsonaro. Sanctions could do the same if they increase economic hardship for Brazilians, and particularly if the rest of the world’s biggest economies abstain.

But a sustained global campaign of diplomatic pressure, which has already gotten some results, could be combined with aggressive action against the American and European banks, investment firms, and corporations that are driving the Amazon’s destruction, such as BlackRock, the Wall Street firm that is the world’s largest asset manager. As Amazon Watch put it in a report released earlier this year, with Bolsonaro’s fragile economy more reliant on global markets than ever, “the private sector offers one of the few checks available on those intent on devastating the Brazilian Amazon for short-term economic and political gain.”

Should Sanders choose to address the crisis in the Amazon — whether by releasing a plan, making a major speech addressing it, or even highlighting it in a foreign policy trip some experts have suggested he take — it would have two important effects. Just as with his and Ocasio-Cortez’s championing of climate change as a central issue, it would raise awareness and possibly even media coverage of an urgent issue the public hears far less about than fearmongering over Iran, North Korea, ISIS, or the copious other boogeymen who haunt the nightmares of the DC elite.

More importantly, with Sanders having largely set the current Democratic agenda on both domestic and foreign policy, it would force the other candidates to catch up, the way they’re doing now on conditioning aid to Israel, which Sanders had first suggested back in June, and Ocasio-Cortez had done even earlier in April. The next Democratic president will urgently need to address this crisis as soon as they’re in office; forcing the current crop of candidates to at least think about and plan for this will be a victory in itself.

And it would be good politics. Sanders’s foreign policy in this election is leaps and bounds ahead of his rivals, and while far from the only thing that distinguishes him in a field that’s suddenly adopted many of his ideas, it is perhaps what most starkly separates him from the rest of the pack this time. It would not only again demonstrate his willingness to break with the stagnant DC foreign policy consensus and its mindless obsession with war and terrorism, but would paint him as a forward-thinking foreign policy expert who talks about issues the others don’t even notice, as well as a responsible statesman with a foresight that his rivals lack.

Finally, putting forward a plan to aggressively force Wall Street and corporations to keep deforestation out of their supply chains and portfolios, for instance, would also enhance his anti-corporate message. It would complement his already aggressive plans to check the rapaciousness and criminality of the private sector, such as his pledge to criminally prosecute fossil fuel CEOs and those engaging in unfair trade practices. And it would connect his domestic and foreign policies into a coherent whole, allowing him to show not just “what unfettered capitalism is doing to this country,” as he put it in the last debate, but what it’s doing to the entire world.

What is happening to the Amazon is a global emergency, and while far from the only rainforest that must urgently be protected, its high profile and proximity to the United States means it’s a start. It’s a moral and political imperative that left-wing politicians turn this into a priority.