Eight countries exchange views on environmental and development issues in the region in the Arctic Council. Since global warming is now opening shipping routes, China is arousing strategic interest in a northern sea route. It invented the term “near Arctic state” for itself.
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Will the Arctic region become a plaything in the global race for power and influence? For centuries and millennia, the ocean surrounding the North Pole was frozen over all year round; human life could only develop to a limited extent on its coasts.
With accelerated global warming, the ice cover has been melting faster and faster for forty years and during the summer months it releases ever larger parts for shipping. The so-called Northwest Passage through the Canadian islands remains difficult for a commercially interesting crossing. The Northeast Passage running along the Russian north coast can be used better and better for commercial shipping. It connects the North Atlantic with the North Pacific.
The route is globally significant for trade between East Asia and Europe or North America because, depending on the port of departure and destination, it significantly shortens the otherwise usual route through the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal and thus makes it cheaper. China’s foreign trade in particular is therefore interested in partially relocating its trade routes to the Arctic.
What is the «Arctic Region» anyway? On the one hand, it is the ocean that surrounds the North Pole; it is the smallest of the world’s oceans. On the other hand, the region also includes five Arctic states that border this ocean with their northern coasts. It is geographic clockwise around the North Pole Russia, Norway, Denmark (because of its sovereignty over Greenland), Canada and the USA. Three other Arctic states also have claims in the Arctic region: Finland, Sweden and Iceland.
The eight states together founded the Arctic Council and have exercised stabilizing control for a quarter of a century, especially over environmental and development issues in the region. Strategically important security issues are excluded from their joint responsibility.
Russia is the arctic superpower
The real arctic superpower is Russia. It stores its strategic, ie nuclear weapons in the region and maintains two thirds of its naval forces here permanently. Also, Russia can do those along its north coast onshore and offshore exploit lying oil and gas fields and the energy sources on land and on ships through the Northeast Passage, today too North Sea Route called, transport to Europe.
In view of falling oil prices, gas reserves are becoming increasingly important. From the central Yamal peninsula, gas is being carried westwards through new pipelines, some of which are under construction. The major projects have as Nord Stream 1 and 2 Gaining geostrategic importance. Since the annexation of Crimea by Putin’s Russia and the imposition of sanctions against Russia, the American government has been demanding that Europe refrain from building these pipelines.
Starting from the same central Arctic peninsula of Yamal, Russia is also building infrastructures for the production and shipping of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is delivered on ships to Europe and, since January of this year, to East Asia, especially China. China has bought into the arctic Russian LNG plants as an investor and is thus setting foot in the arctic.
The development illustrates why China, without geographical logic, uses a previously unknown and in itself meaningless term to refer to itself as “near Arctic state” and thus indirectly claims to participate in the Arctic region. What this claim means strategically is documented by a statement by Chinese President Xi Jinping from 2017 that China is committed to developing shipping lanes. In particular, the northern shipping route is said to be the Ice Silk Road, the Silk Road through the arctic north.
The northern sea route becomes part of the Belt and Road-Initiative
So it was communicated from the Chinese side in 2017 that the northern sea route, which is opening up further due to global warming and maintained by Russian infrastructure buildings, will be part of the Chinese route that will soon span the world Belt and RoadInitiative should be. The strategic approach does not immediately create a new conflict, as no international or national law is broken. The Chinese reach into the Arctic must be seen in the context of the general global expansion of Chinese influence. And this is quite capable of conflict.
As a state bordering the Arctic, the USA currently sees its territorial integrity as being threatened primarily by the Russian missile and naval arsenal. The American response is limited to its own rearmament in the Arctic and is not, for the time being, a systematic response to Chinese expansion in the region.
For the time being, it is probably enough for the US to trust that Russia, apart from trading in its energy sources from the far north, has no interest in looking for an alliance-like link with China. The obvious junior role that would result from this for Russia due to the economic imbalance would not fit into Russia’s own strategic calculations.
It is to be expected that the USA will persuade its NATO allies, especially the Arctic states among them, to strengthen their military surveillance capacities in the North Atlantic. In the narrower framework of the eight members of the Arctic Council, in which, apart from the environmental policy projects, no security policy structures are available, a certain good behavior of Russia can be demanded thanks to the regulatory principle of consensus.
Overall, in the current interests of the Arctic states, no independent potential for conflict can therefore be identified; but should global conflicts break out elsewhere, the Arctic would not be protected from spill over.
