The power struggle in the Arctic thaws

MR.

GARCIA

The Arctic is a traditional area of ​​geopolitical interest for Russia.

Since Stalin, all the Kremlin leaders, except Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, have considered it an exceptional territory to reaffirm their status as a great power.

Hence, they have defied their Arctic neighbors - from Norway and Finland in the west to the United States and Canada to the east - and dragged other smaller and more neutral states and the Atlantic Alliance (NATO) into this strategic rivalry.

What is at stake today, as the Arctic seascape melts and new economic opportunities emerge, is the potential impact of international rivalry raging in the context of the global climate emergency, but also the legal order that has contributed to keep the peace on the last great frontier of the planet. This peace seems increasingly fragile now that China has entered the Great Polar Game and the US, with Biden, has begun to pick up the gauntlet.

At the end of March 2021, three Russian nuclear submarines surfaced simultaneously, having crossed several meters of ice in the Russian Franz Josef Archipelago, 900 kilometers from the North Pole.

Meanwhile, soldiers from the Arctic Motorized Rifle Brigade were seen training on those same islands and several MiG-31 fighter jets were seen flying over the Pole.

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The Polar Bear 2021 exercises were nothing more than the Kremlin's latest display of dominance in the Arctic. The US command in Alaska reported in April that 2020 was the year it intercepted the most Russian military aircraft near its air defense identification zone since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Russians have concentrated unprecedented military forces in the circumpolar region. They have dedicated themselves to refurbishing old Cold War bases and modernizing Soviet-era infrastructures, including ports and rail lines. In addition, Russia has invested billions of rubles in stealth jets, strategic bombers and a huge fleet of 50 icebreakers, and is using the area to test new technological weapons, from hypersonic cruise missiles to strategic nuclear torpedoes.

These activities are not necessarily the prelude to an inevitable war.

But they cause concern in the Euro-Atlantic community because they are developing in the midst of the weakening of the arms control regime that was put in place when the Cold War began to soften.

After several years of beating around the bush, NATO has begun to react to Russia's military build-up.

On May 31, 2021, the Alliance sent a deterrent message to Moscow when, within its Allied Sky exercises, approximately 100 aircraft from 22 member states flew over the entire NATO territory in just 12 hours.

The Kremlin has strongly rejected this "intensification of military activity by NATO members." But Russia's strategy in the Arctic is more complex than it sounds. On the one hand, Moscow seeks to unilaterally project its power. On the other, it remains committed to cooperation in the region, as its neighbors Norway and Finland can attest. The question is whether the cooperative government regime in the Arctic, so far exemplary, can survive the general problems posed by global warming and the political dispute for power between the big three (China, Russia and the United States) and that they have started to affect the region.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Arctic has generally been a model of international governance, a territory of peace and collaboration between States with interests in the region. In the Arctic Council, Russia, the US, Canada and the Nordic countries have worked as equal partners in all areas of “soft” power, from culture to ecology. And they have managed to prevent external dynamics and crises such as those in Georgia, Ukraine and Crimea from interfering in the affairs of the region. But the situation is changing due to the climate emergency.

As sea ice melts and continental permafrost thaws at unprecedented speed within the polar circle, new maritime corridors are opening up, fueling the hunger for natural resources. Russia has gone ahead: it has sovereignty over more than half of all Arctic lands and is eager to develop the increasingly accessible Northern Maritime Route. It is driving the region's development through the extraction of minerals and fossil fuels and new infrastructure projects on its northern shores. The ensuing uproar over development opportunities has attracted more remote countries and, above all, the world's second largest economy, China.

This evolution has contributed enormously to upsetting the regional balance of power. Tensions over control of the Arctic are mounting and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is correct in saying that climate change is a "crisis multiplier". There is deep uncertainty about how to move forward. Stoltenberg has insisted that NATO should develop an updated strategy to deal with Russia's claim to take the military lead and manage the emergence of China as an ambitious power in the Arctic.

Beijing has included for the first time the Polar Silk Road and the Arctic in its national Five-Year Plan for 2021-2025 and in its long-term goals until the year 2035. At the bottom of this bid for the Arctic is the aspiration of China to displace the United States from its supposed "unipolar" pedestal since the end of the Cold War and obtain recognition that it is one of the great world powers, on an equal footing with the United States.

Relations with Washington are clearly headed for a collision, as evidenced during the tense China-US summit in March 2021. But more importantly, the US and China (and to a lesser extent Russia) have plunged into a dispute over how the world system and the rules that support it should be, a competition between different norms, narratives and legitimacies derived from the practices that have governed international politics since 1945.

Therefore, what Biden must do now, as he tries, together with his NATO allies and his Nordic friends, to address the dissolution of the international order (in the Arctic), is two things: pragmatically manage the relationship with Russia as a crucial state in the region and decisively carry out a containment strategy against an increasingly aggressive China on a global scale. Biden believes, as he told Putin in June in Geneva, that "it is clear that nobody cares ... that we return to a Cold War situation." And Secretary of State Blinken coined a very apt aphorism about Washington's relationship with Beijing: "Competitive when it needs to be, collaborative when it can, and antagonistic when it has no choice." The extent to which fruitful relationships between the Big Three can be nurtured remains to be seen.For the good of the Arctic and the world, such cooperation is necessary. But everything will depend on an enormous skill on the part of the rulers and a great deal of luck.

Kristina Spohr

is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Johns Hopkins University.

Translation by

María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia.