West risks being frozen out of the Arctic Great Game
What goes for whale indigestion goes for geopolitics. The thick layers of ice seemed, certainly in the latter part of the Cold War, to give the far northern states a sense of protection, or at least complacency. Yes, you can see Russia from Alaska on a clear day across the Bering Strait but no one seriously thought Russian troops would venture across.
The big Cold War threat to the US security establishment of the 1950s was the possibility of incoming Soviet missiles flying over the Arctic. An early warning system was set up, stringing radar stations from Alaska to Canada, to Greenland and Iceland. That was essentially retired in the 1990s after the Soviet Union shut up shop. The underpinning logic being, who the heck would want to invade this frozen terrain when we can just do business?
Now the accelerating ice-melt, coupled with Vladimir Putin’s evident readiness to make war on neighbours in order to right ancient (or fabricated) wrongs, has changed calculations. An ice-free passage from Asia to Europe is a sure way to lasting prosperity for a big exporter like China, a pathway to overtaking the US economy. And for Russia, which holds the longest chunk of the increasingly navigable northern sea route, it provides a key to the modernisation of its most remote territories. It will be a new and profitable strategic choke point for the Kremlin and a sign that the relationship between Moscow and Beijing is more than just a wartime axis.
Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s first-term strategist, predicted recently that “fighting it out over the Arctic is going to be the new Great Game of the 21st century”. This time the scrap would not be between the two 19th-century empires, Britain and Russia, but between China, Russia and the US. When Bannon excavates historical analogies he usually just means “Wake up, America!” But he has a point. The strategic edge that Russia and China enjoy over their Western adversaries is that their leaders have greater control over their calendars, that they are not bound by democratic constraints. Both Putin and Xi Jinping have the stamina and political will to turn the northern sea route into their domain, and perform a global pivot.
For Putin, the charm of a melting Arctic lies in completing a Russian dream, the mastery of the ungovernable space. Under the tsars, the remoteness was the point; Siberia in particular was the obvious place to banish critics. When the Soviet leadership expanded the labour camp system to an industrial scale, Gulag prisoners were used to build, in hideous conditions, the region’s early infrastructure.
The Kolyma Highway in Siberia, between Yakutsk and Magadan, was largely built by prisoners in the 1930s and 1940s. Some 250,000 of them died, literally worked to death. It’s known as the Road of Bones and symbolises the huge human investment in consolidating the Arctic and near-Arctic into the greater Russian state. It’s a similar story for Norilsk, now a city of 180,000 and an Arctic Circle nickel mining hub, which grew out of the Gulag system. In the winter, temperatures there can fall to minus 50C.
Putin’s aim is to secure this complicated legacy, to establish that Russia and not the other members of the Arctic Council (the US, Canada, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and Denmark, through its control of Greenland) is the Lord of the Arctic, its seabed minerals, its military grip. Russia has by far the largest fleet of icebreakers: 44, according to Russian statistics, at least seven of them nuclear-powered. Some of its combat ships can not only smash through thick ice but also fire cruise missiles. There is already a floating nuclear power plant (environmental activists warn it’s “a Chernobyl on ice”) and more to come. And Russia’s spies and disruptors spread far and wide across the High North.
The US is way behind, with only two heavy icebreakers; it doesn’t have the port and aviation infrastructure to contest access to the northern sea route, can’t yet match the satellites, sensors and training programs. Nor can America’s allies. When Trump publicly played with the idea of buying Greenland it was in part to mask US vulnerability to commercial and military challenge.
Britain should not shrug off the fast approaching strategic issues being posed in the High North. True, it’s not part of the Arctic Council, but seven of the members belong to NATO. We should all be sharing Arctic-related intelligence. China, like Britain, does not have an Arctic coastline, yet it has won an important observer seat on the council. We should be lobbying for that, too.
Part of Britain’s naval mission in the Cold War was to observe, even stop, Soviet submarines entering the Atlantic through the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap. Now Britain has started to supply AI technology to Iceland to identify hostile Russian maritime activity against undersea cables. Good, but not enough. Britain, overwhelmed by the polycrises of our age, seems content to be a spectator, sitting out this new version of the Great Game.
The Times
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