Prisoners of Geography

by Tim Marshall

  The melting of the Arctic ice is bringing with it a hardening of attitude from the eight members of the Arctic Council, the forum where geopolitics becomes geopolarctics.

  The ‘Arctic Five’, those states with borders on the Arctic Ocean, are Canada, Russia, the USA, Norway and Denmark (due to its responsibility for Greenland). They are joined by Iceland, Finland and Sweden, which are also full members. There are twelve other nations with Permanent Observer status having recognised the ‘Arctic States’ sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction’ in the region, among other criteria. For example, at the 2013 Arctic Council, Japan and India, which have sponsored Arctic scientific expeditions, and China, which has a science base on a Norwegian island as well as a modern icebreaker, were granted Observer status.

  However, there are countries not in the Council which say they have legitimate interests in the region, and still more which argue that under the theory of the ‘common heritage of mankind’ the Arctic should be open to everyone.

  There currently are at least nine legal disputes and claims over sovereignty in the Arctic Ocean, all legally complicated, and some with the potential to cause serious tensions between the nations. One of the most brazen comes from the Russians: Moscow has already put a marker down – a long way down. In 2007 it sent two manned submersibles 13,980 feet below the waves to the seabed of the North Pole and planted a rust-proof titanium Russian flag as a statement of ambition. As far as is known, it still ‘flies’ down there today. A Russian think-tank followed this up by suggesting that the Arctic be renamed. After not much thought they came up with an alternative: ‘the Russian Ocean’.

  Elsewhere Russia argues that the Lomonosov Ridge off its Siberian coast is an extension of Siberia’s continental shelf, and therefore belongs to Russia exclusively. This is problematic for other countries, given that the Ridge extends all the way to the North Pole.

  Russia and Norway have particular difficulty in the Barents Sea. Norway claims the Gakkel Ridge in the Barents Sea as an extension of its EEZ, but the Russians dispute this, and they have a particular dispute over the Svalbard Islands, the northernmost point on Earth with a settled population. Most countries and international organisations recognise the islands as being under (limited) Norwegian sovereignty, but the biggest island, Spitsbergen, has a growing population of Russian migrants who have assembled around the coal-mining industry there. The mines are not profitable, but the Russian community serves as a useful tool in furthering Moscow’s claims on all of the Svalbard Islands. At a time of Russia’s choosing it can raise tensions and justify its actions using geological claims and the ‘facts on the ground’ of the Russian population.

  Norway, a NATO state, knows what is coming and has made the High North its foreign policy priority. Its air force regularly intercepts Russian fighter jets approaching its borders; the heightened tensions have caused it to move its centre of military operations from the south of the country to the north, and it is building an Arctic Battalion. Canada is reinforcing its cold-weather military capabilities, and Denmark has also reacted to Moscow’s muscle-flexing by creating an Arctic Response Force.

  Russia, meanwhile, is building an Arctic Army. Six new military bases are being constructed and several mothballed Cold War installations, such as those on the Novosibirsk Islands, are reopening, and airstrips are being renovated. A force of at least 6,000 combat soldiers is being readied for the Murmansk region and will include two mechanised infantry brigades equipped with snowmobiles and hovercraft.

  It is no coincidence that Murmansk is now called ‘Russia’s northern energy gateway’ and that President Putin has said that, in relation to energy supply, ‘Offshore fields, especially in the Arctic, are without any exaggeration our strategic reserve for the twenty-first century.’

  The Murmansk Brigades will be Moscow’s minimum permanent Arctic force, but Russia demonstrated its full cold-weather fighting ability in 2014 with an exercise that involved 155,000 men and thousands of tanks, jets and ships. The Russian Defence Ministry said it was bigger than exercises it had carried out during the Cold War.

  During the war games Russian troops were tasked with repelling an invasion by a foreign power named ‘Missouri’, which clearly signified the USA. The scenario was that ‘Missouri’ troops had landed in Chukotka, Kamchatka, the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin in support of an unnamed Asian power which had already clashed with Russia. The unnamed power was Japan, and the scenario’s conflict was provoked by a territorial dispute said by analysts to be over the South Kuril Islands. The military display of intent was then underlined politically when President Putin for the first time added the Arctic region as a sphere of Russian influence in its official foreign policy doctrine.

  Despite Russia’s shrinking economic power, resulting in budget cuts in many government departments, its defence budget has increased and this is partially to pay for the boost in Arctic military muscle taking place between now and 2020. Moscow has plans for the future, infrastructure from the past and the advantage of location. As Melissa Bert, a US Coast Guard captain, told the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington DC: ‘They have cities in the Arctic, we only have villages.’

  All this is, in many ways, a continuation, or at least a resurrection, of Russia’s Cold War Arctic policies. The Russians know that NATO can bottle up their Baltic Fleet by blockading the Skagerrak Strait. This potential blockade is complicated by the fact that up in the Arctic their Northern Fleet has only 180 miles of open water from the Kola coastline until it hits the Arctic ice pack. From this narrow corridor it must also come down through the Norwegian Sea and then run the potential gauntlet of the GIUK (Greenland, Iceland and the UK) gap to reach the Atlantic Ocean. During the Cold War the area was known by NATO as the ‘Kill Zone’, as this was where NATO’s planes, ships and submarines expected to catch the Soviet fleet.

  Fast forward to the New Cold War and the strategies remain the same, even if now the Americans have withdrawn their forces from their NATO ally Iceland. Iceland has no armed forces of its own and the American withdrawal was described by the Icelandic government as ‘short-sighted’. In a speech to the Swedish Atlantic Council, Iceland’s Justice Minister Björn Bjarnason said: ‘A certain military presence should be maintained in the region, sending a signal about a nation’s interests and ambitions in a given area, since a military vacuum could be misinterpreted as a lack of national interest and priority.’

  However, for at least a decade now it has been clear that the Arctic is a priority for the Russians in a way it is not for the Americans. This is reflected in the degree of attention given to the region by both countries, or in the case of the USA, its relative inattention since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  It takes up to $1 billion and ten years to build an icebreaker. Russia is clearly the leading Arctic power with the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world, thirty-two in total, according to the US Coastguard Review of 2013. Six of those are nuclear-powered, the only such versions in the world, and Russia also plans to launch the world’s most powerful icebreaker by 2018. It will be able to smash through ice more than 10 feet deep and tow oil tankers with a displacement of up to 70,000 tons through the ice fields.

  By contrast, the United States has a fleet of one functioning heavy icebreaker, the USS Polar Star, down from the eight it possessed in the 1960s, and has no plans to build another. In 2012 it had to rely on a Russian ship to resupply its research base in Antarctica, which was a triumph for great power co-operation but simultaneously a demonstration of how far behind the USA has fallen. No other nation presents a challenge either: Canada has six icebreakers and is building a new one, Finland has eight, Sweden seven and Denmark four. China, Germany and Norway have one each.

  In the fall of 2015, President Obama made the first trip by a sitting President to Alaska and did call for more US icebreakers to be built. However, this was almost a passing remark on a trip built around the issue of climate change. The security and energ
y aspects of the Arctic were barely mentioned. Washington remains way behind the curve.

  The USA has another problem. It has not ratified the UNCLOS treaty, effectively ceding 200,000 square miles of undersea territory in the Arctic as it has not staked a claim for an EEZ.

  Nevertheless, it is in dispute with Canada over potential offshore oil rights and access to the waters in the Canadian archipelago. Canada says they are an ‘internal waterway’, while the USA says they are a strait for international navigation not governed by Canadian law. In 1985 the USA sent an icebreaker through the waters without informing Canada in advance, causing a furious row to break out between the two neighbours, whose relationship is simultaneously friendly and prickly.

  The USA is also in dispute with Russia over the Bering Sea, Arctic Ocean and northern Pacific. A 1990 Maritime Boundary Agreement was signed with the then Soviet Union in which Moscow ceded a fishing region. However, following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Russian parliament refuses to ratify the agreement. The area is treated by both sides as being under US sovereignty, but the Russians reserve the right to return to this issue.

  Other disputes include that between Canada and Denmark over Hans Island, located in the Nares Strait, which separates Greenland from Ellesmere Island. Greenland, with its population of 56,000 people, has self-government but remains under Danish sovereignty. A 1953 agreement between Denmark and Canada left the island still in dispute, and since then both countries have taken the trouble to sail to it and plant their national flags on it.

  All the sovereignty issues stem from the same desires and fears – the desire to safeguard routes for military and commercial shipping, the desire to own the natural riches of the region, and the fear that others may gain where you lose. Until recently the riches were theoretical, but the melting ice has made the theoretical probable, and in some cases certain.

  The melting of the ice changes the geography and the stakes. The Arctic states and the giant energy firms now have decisions to make about how they deal with these changes and how much attention they pay to the environment and the peoples of the Arctic. The hunger for energy suggests the race is inevitable in what some Arctic specialists have called the ‘New Great Game’. There are going to be a lot more ships in the High North, a lot more oil rigs and gas platforms – in fact, a lot more of everything. The Russians not only have their nuclear-powered icebreakers, but are even considering building a floating nuclear power plant capable of withstanding the crushing weight of ten feet of ice.

  However, there are differences between this situation and the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the nineteenth century or the machinations of the great powers in the Middle East, India and Afghanistan in the original Great Game. This race has rules, a formula and a forum for decision-making. The Arctic Council is composed of mature countries, most of them democratic to a greater or lesser degree. The international laws regulating territorial disputes, environmental pollution, laws of the sea and treatment of minority peoples are in place. Most of the territory in dispute has not been conquered through nineteenth-century imperialism or by nation states at war with each other.

  The Arctic states know that theirs is a tough neighbourhood, not so much because of warring factions but because of the challenges presented by its geography. There are five and a half million square miles of ocean up in the Arctic; they can be dark, dangerous and deadly. It is not a good place to be without friends. They know that for anyone to succeed in the region they may need to co-operate, especially on issues such as fishing stocks, smuggling, terrorism, search and rescue and environmental disasters.

  It is plausible that a row over fishing rights could escalate into something more serious, given that the UK and Iceland almost came to blows during the ‘Cod Wars’ of the 1950s and 1970s. Smuggling occurs wherever there are transit routes, and there is no reason to believe the Arctic will be any different; but policing it will be difficult due to the conditions there. And as more commercial vessels and cruise ships head into the area, the search and rescue and anti-terrorism capabilities of the Arctic nations will need to grow accordingly, as will their capacity to react to an environmental disaster in increasingly crowded waters. In 1965 the icebreaker Lenin had an accident in its reactor whilst at sea. After its return to shore parts of the reactor were cut out and, along with damaged fuel, placed in a concrete container with a steel liner which was then dumped into the sea. Such incidents are likely to occur more frequently as the Arctic opens up, but they will remain difficult to manage.

  Perhaps the Arctic will turn out to be just another battleground for the nation states – after all, wars are started by fear of the other as well as by greed; but the Arctic is different, and so perhaps how it is dealt with will be different. Our history has shown us the rapacious way of the zero-sum game. Arguably, a partial belief in geographic determinism, coupled with human nature, made it difficult for it to have been any other way. However, there are examples of how technology has helped us break out of the prison of geography. For example, we can cross the deserts and seas at speeds previous generations could not have even imagined. We have even broken the shackles of the Earth’s gravity. In our newly globalised world we can use that technology to give us all an opportunity in the Arctic. We can overcome the rapacious side of our nature, and get the great game right for the benefit of all.

  CONCLUSION

  WE FINISHED AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD AND SO THE only way is up.

  The final frontier has always called out to our imagination, but ours is the age in which humanity has lived the dream and pushed out into space, a millimetre into infinity, on our way to the future. Humanity’s restless spirit ensures that our boundaries are not confined to what Carl Sagan famously called the ‘Pale Blue Dot’.

  But we must come back down to earth, sometimes with a bump, because we have neither conquered our own geography yet, nor our propensity to compete for it.

  Geography has always been a prison of sorts – one that defines what a nation is or can be, and one from which our world leaders have often struggled to break free.

  Russia is probably the clearest example, naturally expanding from the small region of flatland it controlled until its heartland covered a huge space ringed mostly by mountains and the sea – with just one vulnerable point across the North European Plain. If the Russian leaders wanted to create a great nation, which they did, then they had little choice as to what to do about that weak spot. Likewise, in Europe no conscious decision was made to become a huge trading area; the long, level networks of rivers made it possible, and to an extent inevitable, over the course of millennia.

  As the twenty-first century progresses, the geographical factors that have helped determine our history will mostly continue to determine our future: a century from now, Russia will still be looking anxiously westward across what will remain flatland. India and China will still be separated by the Himalayas. They may eventually come into conflict with each other, but if that does happen, then geography will determine the nature of the fight: either they will need to develop technology to allow a huge military force to cross over the mountains, or, if that remains impossible and neither side wants to descend into nuclear war, to confront each other at sea. Florida will continue to guard the exit of and entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. It is the Gulf’s location that is key, not who controls it. To take an extreme and unlikely scenario: imagine a majority Hispanic Florida has seceded from the USA and allied itself with Cuba and Mexico. This would alter only the dynamics of who controlled the Gulf, not the importance of the location.

  Of course geography does not dictate the course of all events. Great ideas and great leaders are part of the push and pull of history. But they must all operate within the confines of geography. The leaders of Bangladesh might dream of preventing the waters from flooding up the Bay of Bengal, but they know that 80 per cent of the country is on a flood plain and cannot be moved. It is a point the Scandinavian and English leader King Canute made to his sycop
hantic courtiers in the eleventh century, when ordering the waves to retreat: nature, or God, was greater than any man. In Bangladesh all that can be done is to react to the realities of nature: build more flood defences, and hope that the computer modelling of rising waters due to global warming is overstated.

  New geographical realities such as climate change present new opportunities and challenges. Global warming may well result in the mass movement of people. If the Maldives, and many other islands, really are destined to be lost to the waves, the impact will not just be on those leaving before it is too late but also upon the countries to which they flee. If the flooding of Bangladesh becomes worse, the future of the country and its 160 million people is dire; if the water levels rise much higher, this impoverished country may go under. And if the desertification of the lands just below the Sahel continues, then wars such as the one in Darfur, Sudan (partially caused by the desert encroaching on nomads in the north, which in turn pushed them southwards towards the Fur people), will intensify and spread.

  Water wars are another potential problem. Even if stable democracies were to emerge in the Middle East in the coming decades, if the waters of the Murat River, which rises in Turkey before feeding the Euphrates, were to diminish considerably, then the dams Turkey would have to build to protect its own source of life could quite easily be the cause of war with Syria and Iraq downstream.