The most probable emergent threat to northern security emanates from a bolder, resurgent, resource-enriched Russia, currently the most assertive of the Arctic states and intent on leveraging the full economic and strategic potential of its vast northern lands and seas. The Arctic Ocean’s coastal nations are Russia, Norway, Denmark (Greenland), Canada, and the United States. Non-coastal states are Iceland, Finland, and Sweden. Most of these are European, and the non-European Arctic states are NATO members with close historical, cultural, and strategic links to Europe. Only Russia’s far east, Alaska’s southern coasts, and Canada’s far western province of British Columbia abut Pacific waters. For all these reasons, a strong case can be made for U.S. European Command (EUCOM) being best suited for the defense of the Arctic.
Northern Command, which is responsible for the defense of North America, seems a likely choice to some, though the North American Arctic remains the most secure part of the Far North, thanks in large measure to the sparse population and extreme isolation of Canada’s northern archipelago. Pacific Command (PACOM), encompassing Alaska’s North Pacific waters, seems likely to others. They note that the industrialized states of Northeast Asia have a strong economic interest in emerging trade routes across the top of the world, and that China, America’s next most likely peer competitor, sees the Arctic through a Pacific lens, as did Japan a generation earlier. But widespread usage of northern shipping lanes remains a long way off, even though the Northern Sea Route, the Arctic Bridge between Murmansk and Churchill, and the famed Northwest Passage are already being used on a tentative, seasonal basis.
Geography seems to favor the European Command, since Russia owns by far the largest sector of Arctic coast and the shallowest Arctic continental shelf. As long as the region’s waters thaw, Russia will have greater access to more of its long-hidden offshore resource
wealth than will any other state. History also appears to favor the Arctic being viewed as part of EUCOM’s area of operations, as the longest recent conflict in those waters was not the relatively brief World War II battle for the Aleutians, but the six-year Battle of the Atlantic.
Even the U.S. Maritime Strategy at the Cold War’s end viewed the Arctic’s undersea domain as primarily a route to contain then–Soviet Russia’s fleet in its home waters, before it could menace North America. For these reasons, the key to a secure Arctic, at least while it remains seasonally frozen and regionally isolated, remains tied to the fate of Europe and the ambitions of its largest state: Russia.
Greenland and Iceland: North Atlantic Gateway
During the Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-45, efforts to assert command of the seas resulted in an ongoing naval clash between Allied and Axis sea powers. Convoys resupplying the United Kingdom and Lend-Lease runs to Murmansk traveled northeast past Newfoundland, through waters south of Greenland and Iceland, on their way to free Europe. Thus, the high North Atlantic and Arctic waters have long been viewed in terms of the Atlantic alliance.
After Denmark fell to the Nazis, the Germans eyed Greenland as their first stage of a route to invade mainland North America via the Gulf of St. Lawrence, through to upper Canada along the Great Lakes, in much the way Britain did during the War of 1812. Greenland’s vulnerability resulted in America extending defense protection on behalf of the Danish government in exile, and this continued through the entire Cold War era, as Soviet naval power grew.
Whoever holds Iceland and Greenland seems destined to command the North Atlantic. The role of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap during the Cold War for both Soviet and NATO naval strategy was central, though untested by war. The U.S. Maritime Strategy of 1986 likewise viewed the Arctic and North Atlantic as important areas for forward operations to contain the projection of Soviet naval power; critics feared the Maritime Strategy would destabilize deterrence, but in the end it helped reassure Europe that Soviet power was far less potent than Moscow wanted the world to believe.
An Emerging Asia-Europe Sea Bridge
In terms of economic potential, North Sea oil, the fisheries of the North Atlantic, and the sea lanes vital for transatlantic trade all illustrate this area’s strategic-economic importance as a bridge connecting Europe and North America. As the Arctic thaws, the fisheries, natural-resource extraction efforts, and sea lanes will edge farther north into Arctic seas, eventually facilitating the emergence of an Asia-Europe sea bridge.
But the fundamental strategic relationship will remain the same, another reason it makes sense to view the increasingly navigable and economically integrated Arctic as an extension of the North Atlantic. With a polar thaw, Northeast Asian trading states will find a shorter direct route to markets in Europe, making the security of ports in the North Atlantic, and the sea lanes they interconnect, even more crucial.
The Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese are considering shorter, safe shipping lanes to Europe over the top, and the Koreans have taken the lead with regard to commissioning a new generation of ice-hardened tankers, though the Russians still dominate when it comes to heavy icebreakers. The prospect of connecting Northeast Asian markets to Europe through an Arctic maritime bridge is compelling, but winters will bring new ice in the Arctic basin, limiting the year-round viability of such sea routes.
It is unlikely that we will see the center of gravity tip entirely toward the Pacific, particularly given the enduring transatlantic relationships that have been forged across centuries of trade, wartime and peacetime alliances, and the much less united strategic environment in Northeast Asia.
When transpolar shipping does become more frequent, we may find reason for PACOM and EUCOM to consider joint operations in the Arctic. Even with Asian states eyeing Arctic routes, the North Atlantic still features in most of their plans. Iceland could become a primary trans-shipment hub for Asian cargo ships, positioning the high North Atlantic to remain of critical strategic importance. That may be one reason Moscow helped bail out Iceland with a €4 billion loan when its economy collapsed in October 2008, hoping to expand Russian influence in the high North Atlantic and counterbalance the Scandinavian states that share maritime borders with Russia and have historically contained its naval influence.
Beyond Iceland, if Greenland were to become estranged from the West and pursue an unfriendly secession from Denmark, Moscow could find yet another island-nation open to courtship. That would certainly favor Russia’s strategic position, putting pressure on the West and its command of the high North Atlantic. But for the moment, Greenland’s independence movement is a friendly one, with Denmark’s blessing.
The United States and NATO allies should cultivate warmer relations with all the micro-states and territories of the high North Atlantic and Arctic. Alaska and Iceland have especially close political ties, so this could be a good foundation.
Inuit Interests
Greenland may well be the key, since no one at this stage can predict where the loyalties of an independent Greenland will lie. Embracing the Inuit and their seal-hunting traditions would also go far to reduce tensions between them and the Europeans, who oppose this hunting and the fur trade, despite their long history of fur empires. More concerted confidence-building measures could help to ensure that the interests of the Inuit, and of the modern states that jointly assert sovereignty over their homeland, remain aligned.
This might, in turn, help thaw relations between Canada and the European Union, solidifying transatlantic rapport and boosting regional security. During the 6 February 2010 meeting of G7 finance ministers in the Canadian Arctic, Nunavut leaders generously offered their visitors a taste of northern cuisine, including a staple of their subsistence diet: seal meat. The ministers’ undiplomatic decision to disrespect Inuit hospitality in Nunavut’s capital city, Iqaluit, by refusing to attend a feast held in their honor was certainly not Europe’s best moment.
The opportunity to restore a climate of friendship and trust may still be with us, but a serious effort is needed to mend fences with the still-disappointed Inuit. This may be why Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rebuked her Canadian counterparts for their exclusion of indigenous northerners from an A5 conference on the future of the Arctic in March 2010, calling upon her peers to provide the Inuit with a seat at the table. Canada’s northern natives may be few in number, but they control many local economic and political levers, and their interests are now fully backed by Ottawa, their partner in land claims, self-government, and northern development.
It would not take much diplomatic savvy for the Russian bear to seize the opportunity and share with the Inuit tasty slabs of whale and seal meat, hoping to drive a wedge between the people of the Arctic and Europe. Secretary Clinton’s overture was thus a well-timed preemptive move to ensure the West doesn’t lose the North on her watch.
Russian Side of the Arctic
In its sector of the Arctic, Russia focuses on its vast, resource-rich, uniquely shallow continental shelf—which it wants the world to recognize as Russian territorial waters. The United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) will likely agree. The 2007 diplomatic stunt placing a Russian flag beneath the North Pole was less a grab for the polar seabed than it was an assertion that there is a Russian side of the Arctic. Moscow would probably welcome the selection of the North Pole as the boundary point, as it was in the Cold War.
UNCLOS and the International Seabed Authority may, after all the claims have been filed and adjudicated, find that Canadian territorial waters extend past the pole into what Moscow views as its side—or that Russian waters extend to what many in the West perceive to be our side. It all depends partly on what Canada, Russia, and the United States can prove to be their respective continental-shelf extensions.
With its extensive and increasingly accessible Arctic continental shelf chock-full of petroleum in exploitable quantities, Russia has much to gain from a thaw and is rehabilitating its all-but-abandoned Northern Sea Route to bring the treasure to market. The strategic importance of this wealth to the country’s economic resurgence also provides ample motivation for Moscow to ensure an adequate defense of its northern domain. It can no longer count on nature for a great wall of ice. This could increase security tensions along the old East-West fault line.
In April 2010, Russia and its Cold War rival Norway resolved long-simmering disagreements over their offshore boundary line, easing the way to the joint development of bountiful offshore petroleum resources. But economic collaboration can, and throughout history has, yielded to nationalist rivalries and even war between trading partners. In the end, the old East-West rivalry could resurface. This possibility reinforces the notion that the Arctic as a region, and a potential theater of conflict, fits logically into EUCOM’s area of operations and its continuing mission of securing Europe from external threat.
Funding Patriotism
Just as Canadians have a powerful emotional attachment to their northern frontier, Russians view the Arctic as an extension of their heartland. It has been and remains their key to their survival, militarily and economically. The intensity of this attachment, and the strategic importance of the heartland, which saved the nation from Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies as it did Adolf Hitler’s, combine to define a vital national interest for Moscow.
More than the other littoral Arctic states, Russia is inclined to make full use of its Arctic assets, even though the post-Soviet economic collapse led to a decade-long abandonment of many mega-projects in the vast and now-rusting Russian Arctic, and of the maritime infrastructure along the Northern Sea Route. But in recent years, with higher commodity prices changing the calculus, Moscow has reversed course. There is a growing commitment to Arctic resources along with an awareness that Russia’s destiny is tied to the North.
Already Arctic naval, land, and air exercises have shown the world that Moscow is serious about its ambitions there. Along Russian borders, where regional military deployments could appear to be more menacing, such activities could lead to a reemergence of historic tensions with neighbors, especially after the 2008 assault on Georgia. There can be little doubt that Russia would aggressively defend its Arctic interests if Moscow felt they were threatened.
Still raw is Russia’s loss of empire, first with the sale of Alaska to the United States, which many in Russia still feel was nothing short of wholesale theft. The history of that transaction remains clouded by distrust. Moscow transferred sovereignty over Alaska to the United States in 1867, and the commercial interests of the Russian American Company were sold to Hutchinson, Kohl & Co. of San Francisco, which was renamed the Alaska Commercial Company—after decades of sacrifice and investment by explorers who risked much to colonize the high North Pacific. Many Russians were perplexed by the abandonment of Alaska, and some nationalists still include Alaska on their maps, even though this is largely symbolic and not necessarily a reflection of military ambition.
With the Soviet collapse, Russia became even smaller and more vulnerable when it lost its Central European, Central Asian, and Baltic empire. The remaining Arctic lands and seas are thus highly valued as a sacred part of Mother Russia, a key to its future, and one of its last sources of pride and hope. Having agreed to purchase new French warships and with more heavy icebreakers than all its neighbors combined, Russia may well emerge a predominant regional power in the high North.
While Russia was at the table at the Arctic Ocean Conference held in Ilulissat, Greenland, on 27-29 May 2008 and pledged to support international law and the UNCLOS mechanism, one wonders what Moscow would do if the world community sided with Canada or Denmark in terms of continental-shelf extensions, at Russia’s expense. The resolution of the border dispute with Norway is a welcome sign of a more collaborative Russia, but political winds can change.
On the other hand, much like what Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev proposed in his prescient Murmansk speech on 1 October 1987, the Arctic could become a testing ground for a new relationship between Russia and the West, and perhaps even a path toward eventual NATO membership. But if competition trumps cooperation in the end, the Arctic may become one of the first regions where a newly assertive Russia confronts the West. This is one more reason for which EUCOM will be drawn into the increasingly salient and challenging mission of securing the Arctic.
Pacific Power and Economy
Japan made a dramatic but tenuous grab in its militarist past for the high North Pacific, gaining possession of the Kuriles, Sakhalin, and, during the opening shots of World War II, the outer Aleutians as well. But Tokyo’s far-northern reign was brief, and currently its ambitions are primarily defensive. Japan is no longer a major strategic player in the high North Pacific, owing to the defensive mission of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. But with some 110 major warships, it remains an important partner, particularly with regard to countering China’s increasing naval power.
China has increased its Arctic activities, while at the same time expanding its naval aspirations and capabilities from brown to blue water. But its primary far northern ambition is most likely to establish a secure, dramatically shortened, direct trade route to Europe, and to benefit from the increasing trade in Arctic natural resources that were formerly inaccessible.
These economic interests favor a less-aggressive position than that of Japan during World War II. At that time Japan viewed the region’s resources less collaboratively, considering the high North primarily for strategic defense of its home islands and as a tactical diversion for the U.S. fleet during the Battle of Midway. China’s assertion of greater naval dominance of the South China Sea has precipitated a vigorous reaction from its neighbors in partnership with the U.S. Navy, suggesting that it’s unlikely that China will be able to dominate the high North Pacific as Japan once did. China will compete aggressively for resources, but it will likely do so as a member of the world economy. The country may seek to explore the Arctic, and in so doing demonstrate that it has become a great power with global capabilities, but it is not likely to threaten the region.
In sum, as Northeast Asia’s populous industrial countries monitor the thawing Arctic, they see it primarily as a gateway to European markets and a new source of natural resources for their expanding economies—less as a target for military expansion. With these states thinking in terms of trade, they are unlikely to pose a strategic threat to the region or its security. Consequently, the Russian bear stands alone as the primary Arctic power, with intentions and capabilities that could conflict with those of the West.
Transatlantic relations and the security of the West, as well its continuing integration with economies of the industrialized Far East, will increasingly depend on ensuring the security of the Arctic. This suggests that EUCOM could be the right command in the right place to take the lead on these defense issues.
Like the Arctic, EUCOM’s area of responsibility is adjacent to Russia, and this ensures their fates will remain linked for years to come. Being near an awakening bear, and having experience in taming its aggressive instincts, will be an important key to a secure and peaceful North. While hoping the bear can be subdued and enticed to become a friend, we must be prepared for aggression. EUCOM, whose mission since the darkest days of the Cold War has been to defend the West, has the experience to do both.