Climate of Conflict in Arctic
By Jody Ray Bennett for ISN
The continuation of melting sea ice and expansion of water in the Arctic Ocean is beginning to impact the degree to which the Arctic states - Canada, Denmark via Greenland, Iceland, Norway, the US and Russia - engage the region in what may soon become an Arctic race for natural resources and territory.
While each country has been mandated by the UN to register their claims in the Arctic region before various deadlines - Russia’s claim is due this year and Canada’s in 2013 - the Arctic states have already begun to deploy state forces and research teams to uncharted arctic territory.
Canadian forces are now headed toward the remote regions of its icy north to carry out external pagemilitary exercises for its yearly external pageOperation Nunalivut - an indigenous Inuit word for ‘land that is ours.’ This month, and for the first time in history, the world’s only special Danish external pagemilitary dogsled team will join nearly 150 Canadian soldiers and rangers for the operation, an exercise engineered to “project Canadian sovereignty in the High Arctic by providing a boots-on-the-ground Canadian Forces patrol presence.”
Despite Denmark’s ongoing boundary dispute with Canada over the tiny external pageHans Island between Greenland and Ellesmere, this new military cooperation seems to have somewhat broken - or at least put on hold - the rivalry between the two countries over increasingly accessible resources in the Arctic.
Melting claims
The cooperation between Denmark and Canada can be linked to external pageRussia’s recent claim to the Arctic that external pageextends all the way to the North Pole. Since 2001, Moscow has argued that the external pageLomonosov Ridge, an underwater region that it believes could be rich in natural gas, mineral and oil reserves, is a part of its Siberian shelf and therefore has a claim to the area under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (external pageUNCLOS).
In 2007, Russia descended a external pagedeep submergence vehicle that descended 4 kilometers below the North Pole, planted a one-meter tall rustproof Russian flag, left a time capsule containing a message to future generations and brought back to the surface soil and water samples of the seabed. Earlier this month, Russia’s Natural Resources Ministry announced a external page$50 million investment for “hydrographic and geophysical research in the Arctic Ocean” in order to “prove [Russia’s] right to more of the Arctic floor.”
Parallel to the announcement from Moscow, a external pagemeeting of US senators from Alaska at the Council on Foreign Relations discussed the US role in “a whole new area of Earth […] suddenly open for international conflict, environmental destruction, and an economic bonanza.” The meeting specifically focused a defrosting Arctic - where summer sea ice shrank 40 percent between 1970 and 2007 - and potential skirmishes between the Arctic states involving territorial disputes, the undersea resource race and new international transportation routes that will develop the ice continues to melt.
G7 on ice
More significantly, however, was the external pageFebruary meeting between the G7’s finance ministers in external pageIqaluit, a small settlement in Canada’s northeastern region with a population of around 6,000. As the external pagemeeting was held “to discuss the fallout from last year's global economic meltdown” and “how best to prevent the same from happening again,” some experts have aptly noticed that this meeting in the Canadian Arctic was “surely no coincidence.”
“With global warming and the melting of the ice cap and the ice in the Arctic archipelago, all of the sudden the Arctic is a hot topic in Canadian political circles, most notably due to the famous Northwest Passage, which will quite likely become ice-free for at least part of the year in the not-too-distant future,” Dr John Matthew Barlow, professor at John Abbott College in Montreal, told ISN Security Watch.
“So, Canada claims that the passage is in its internal waters, as it controls the archipelago around it, whereas other nations, most notably the US, claim that it is international waters,” he said.
“There is also the matter of various questions of endangered species in the Arctic, such as polar bears and the ongoing contentious issue of the seal hunt, which Canada supports and the rest of the world opposes. So, having the G7 meeting in Iqaluit puts that onto the front burner. It also says that Canada won't be pushed around. Our current Conservative government likes to act all bellicose at times, and this is one of them,” Barlow said.
But beyond the G7 meetings, the potential wealth up for grabs consistently brings arctic politics back into the arena of classical realism, where armies and relations are more controlled by the stringent theories of realpolitik, and indeed in a geography external pagereferred to as a place “where the Cold War never ended.”
“Canada and Russia have the longest, largest Arctic coastlines and are neighbors over the North Pole. So it is Canada and Russia who are mostly in dispute here. Russia, moreover, is the one Arctic nation that seems to be least interested in cooperation, for reasons that are rather similar to Canada's rationale behind holding the G7 in Iqaluit. Russia is attempting to re-establish itself as a world power; and while Canada is no world power, it is trying to regain its ability to punch above its weight class on the international stage,” Barlow opined.
Indeed, Moscow realizes it is up against the other arctic states, all of which are NATO members. The continuation of melting ice coupled with increased traffic between the Arctic states external pagehave already given way to speculations that a 21st century Arctic Circle could be “what the Middle East was in the second half of the 20th century” and could include a external pagenorthern coast of Alaska that “could soon external pageresemble the coast of external pageLouisiana, lit by the lights of ships and oil rigs" while new Arctic ports could function as a “new Singapore.”
Looking beyond the normal winners and losers deduced by the rationalist arguments of classical realist international relations theory, other analyses have identified the plight of the Arctic Inuit and how this population is further impacted by nation states’ desire to project power in the icy north.
“This is a population that has, for a long time in Canada, been ignored, abused, or forgotten by all Canadians, but especially the government. The Inuit have been shunted around the Arctic, removed to new locations at the government's whim, either to satisfy its sovereignty issues, or to place them closer to external pageDEW Line or weather stations for supervisory purposes,” Barlow said.
“The Arctic aboriginal populations of Canada, the US, Russia, Greenland, and Norway (as well as the extreme northern populations of Finland and Sweden) are left out of the discussion, even now that the Arctic is a veritable hotbed of activity. Renewed interest in the Arctic, plus questions of global warming, has and will continue to have, a profound impact on these Arctic aboriginals, and this is something that always seems to be beyond the pale of mainstream news coverage,” he added.
The culmination of these forces should shape Arctic relations for the foreseeable future, but as global warming defrosts the earth’s northern cap, will relations follow the thaw?
Given the growing scarcity of natural resources, a melting ice cap has the potential to create a climate of conflict between states at the peril of indigenous populations caught in the middle of a new Arctic race. The destiny of the Arctic Circle will indeed reveal whether or not the Cold War has ended or merely been frozen until the ice melts.