Arctic supremacy up for grabs

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/04/2021 (1638 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Seizing the moment recently, Russia made light of the Suez Canal blockage to promote its Arctic-spanning Northern Sea Route as an alternative Asia-Europe shipping lane. Russia’s natural resources minister has said that by 2024 over 80 million tons of cargo will traverse the waterway each year, confirming how climate change is opening up pristine Arctic territory to human activity.

The region is warming at a rate two to three times faster than anywhere else on the planet, unveiling new economic opportunities. Although along with these opportunities comes all kinds of environmental and geopolitical risks.

Large-scale, trans-Arctic shipping could be economically viable as soon as 2040. The ecologically vulnerable area also contains around one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas reserves, along with vast fish stocks and huge deposits of rare earth minerals used in advanced manufacturing, including the production of smartphones, fighter jets and clean energy technology.

Despite all of this — and how an oil spill from increased tanker traffic could be devastating to the fragile Arctic ecosystem — Canada and its northern NATO allies lag well behind both China and Russia in asserting their strategic interests in the far North.

Russia passed laws in 2020 opening up $300 billion in tax incentives for new Arctic ports and oil and gas projects. Authority for the Northern Sea Route rests with Russia’s state nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, whose subsidiary is now busy building next-generation nuclear-powered icebreakers capable of plowing through up to ten feet of frozen ice. The first of these monster ships was launched last year, joining a Russian fleet of icebreakers already numbering more than 50. President Vladimir Putin has promised to have at least eight more nuclear-powered icebreakers in operation by 2035.

By comparison, Canada has seven icebreakers that are used mostly off the East Coast and on the Great Lakes. Ottawa only began in February 2020 to consult domestic shipyards about building polar icebreakers, estimated to cost $800 million apiece.

Russia has also massively upgraded its Arctic military capabilities. Four-fifths of its nuclear submarine fleet has been relocated to the area and hundreds of new structures now dot Russia’s expansive northern coastline. From over a dozen airbases, 10 radar stations, and satellite-jamming systems, to anti-aircraft batteries and anti-submarine defences. Russia’s combat units are quickly adapting to the region’s unforgivable terrain, too. An awe-inspiring three-day equipment testing exercise in 2020 commenced with Russian paratroopers dropping from 30,000 feet onto an uninhabited archipelago 900 kilometres from the North Pole in -30 C weather.

Meanwhile China — possessing both the world’s largest navy and biggest, most aggressive fishing fleet — appointed itself a “near-Arctic state” in 2013 and has since signalled its own Arctic endgame. A 2018 white paper outlines the Chinese Communist Party’s intention to create a “Polar Silk Road” that will connect northern trade routes to its Belt-and-Road initiative, a vast Beijing-centric international development and supply chain scheme spanning over 130 nations, to be completed by 2049.

Ottawa, though, has been conspicuously absent in the race to shape the region’s future. An array of Arctic experts, investors, Indigenous communities and northern leaders have been calling on different federal governments for years to devise a coherent, forward-thinking Arctic strategy. But Canada’s approach so far has been a scattered mix of various announcements, programs and funding initiatives that either never seem to align, quickly fall apart, or fail to materialize.

Complicating matters is how China and Russia aren’t purely economic competitors, but hostile foreign states of main concern for Canada, according to the head of CSIS, Canada’s spy agency.

Attempts by Ottawa to stake its claims in the Arctic will no doubt raise the frequency and severity of ongoing Chinese and Russian cyberattacks against Canada, and increase intellectual property theft, trade disruption, socially polarizing disinformation campaigns, intimidation tactics against Canadian citizens and attempts to manipulate election outcomes.

The U.S. Coast Guard last summer even stumbled upon China and Russia conducting joint naval exercises in Arctic waters. As the deputy commander of NORAD has said before, “North America is no longer a sanctuary.”

Canada has historically been able to pick and choose — or neglect — its foreign policy priorities thanks to geographical luck: bordered by oceans on three sides and the world’s military superpower on the other. But climate change and the pandemic have both shown that in a globalized, interconnected world, risks no longer respect sovereign boundaries. A deficit-addled federal government must now be both assertive and creative in taking ownership over Canada’s Arctic territory.

If not, Beijing and Moscow will happily dictate Canada’s northern prospects.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and analyst and the former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.