The Dividing Line At 90° N – The Emerging Geopolitical Significance Of The Arctic

[I.] The Frontier Of Sovereignty

With the end of the unipolar moment resulting in new crises which face the superpowers of the 21st century, it is the uninhabited, unorganized, and fundamentally unclaimed land that opens the door to either great tragedy or lasting peace. The arctic is among such regions now under investigation by the world's great powers for its immense economic and strategic potential, and the claims laid to the region growing each decade reveal a looming threat to world order. The possibility for militarily and politically powerful states to contest the same space increases when those entities border each other in the way NATO and Russian powers stand in confrontation at the Arctic Circle. A state is constituted by its power – an expression of exclusive sovereignty, exerting its control over a defined area, while reserving the right to political autonomy. This desire to remain the most powerful absolute authority results in the infamous ‘Thucydides Trap’, wherein an existing sovereign authority (absolute by virtue of its standing power) is confronted by another rising force. The broad land mass which connects by islands and ice the North American and Eurasian plates over the North Pole is, for this reason, a fault line of potentially disastrous confrontations between western and non-western states. America – with its control over the immense landmass of Alaska, military bases in Greenland, and the reality of Canada's economic dependence upon it – finds itself de facto at the borders of its actual sovereignty along the uninhabited great plane opening up northward above it.

[II.] The Delineation Problem

The phenomena of this fault line between Russian and American power depends upon seasonal landmass change, making it a cyclical and elastic geopolitical frontier rather than a static one, simply by virtue of the shifting quantity and occupancy of the ice sheet. Curiously, the world often looks at the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as mere ideological battle between western and eastern political sensibilities, or otherwise as a failed gambit by Russia to reinforce its security posture three decades after Soviet collapse. In actuality, the conflict is itself another moment in a long and tragic struggle between European corridor states – a great historical dilemma of the Russian desire to minimize the expanse of its border with the West, thereby consolidating the possibilities for attack and defense.

Where does the West end and where the East begin? This is the question underlying nearly every view for control over the corridor. Upon inspecting the writings of some of the world's most prominent strategic minds (Mackinder, Napoleon, Kissinger, Spengler, etc.), the idea that there are in actually only two nations – the Occident and the Orient/Eurasia – makes sense of the many great conflicts which define modernity and which emerged from the difficulty of delineating the borders between these civilizations along such immense tract of land. Whilst by no means an infallible claim when measured against cultural and historical analysis, a great truth is contained in this ‘Eastern Question’, namely, that conflicts arise in the often ill-defined but continuous landmasses which split sovereign entities adhering to mutually exclusive political views.

The very same question of delineation faces the world now in a hitherto uncontested and uninteresting theater for world-history to play out. A convergence of decline in ice cover, competing grand strategy between global power blocs, and the desire to extract untapped precious resources while dominating maritime trade places in the hands of this era a new, unprecedented delineation problem. In a historic shift from the previously limited trade through the Arctic, Russia seized the opportunity presented by a mild winter and completed the first two-way winter trade haul along the Northeast Passage in 2021. The attempt to expand the economic capacities of the passage is a small part of Russia’s much broader focus on expanding its arctic capacities. Both the Dickson and Tiksi Soviet-era ports above the Arctic Circle are undergoing renovation to support Arctic military movement, and Russian grand strategy has placed an increasingly prominent focus on northern operations, investing large amounts to expand and maintain at least six airbases in the region. A fleet of over 40 icebreakers has been paired with two-thirds of Russia's sea power and has been posted as a northern fleet. While ‘late to the party’, the United States has similarly made efforts to expand its influence in the region. As recently as August of 2019, the Trump administration considered purchasing Greenland – the home to the United States' northernmost military base – until being turned down by Denmark. The construction of new ice-breakers is currently underway, and the U.S. State Department has publicly expressed both its interest and commitment to expanding in the region.

[III.] Up From Thucydides

Nonetheless, the United States and the NATO states under its military provision face a new problem of immense proportions with what will soon be two Eurasian delineation problems. The lack of focus on the Arctic program and the strategic significance of the region has left the U.S. markedly behind Russia in this important area of strategy and policy. If serious attention is not given to this emerging ‘northern question’, the estimated 412 billion barrels of oil under the ice sheet and the immanent transarctic trade route (which could be accessible for lack of ice by 2040) remain open to scrambling great powers and the mutual hostility all disorganized competition brings.

Herein lies the great opportunity for a mediation between competing Russian and American states over this unexplored road of political destinies – Russia is itself confronted by the new leviathan of China, which is both militarily and economically superior to the Kremlin. With the political fallout of the Ukraine conflict further dividing the West from Moscow, the Russo-Chinese alliance becomes more integral to the economic survival of the Russian state, but not necessarily a force to guarantee Russian security and its political posture. China has defined itself as a “near arctic state” – a notion both historically and geographically unfounded – but nonetheless a point worthy of concern for Russia and Western states alike. China clearly desires to further develop its already enormous productive sector with Siberian resources and simultaneously undercut Western grand strategy by laying claim to the same broad Arctic frontier sovereignty to which NATO and Russia are already geographically entitled; this displays the seemingly secondary role Russia seems to fill in Chinese policy. By contrast, many of the greatest foreign policy thinkers are joined by statesmen past and present in identifying that Western states like the United States and the United Kingdom are not by necessity natural enemies of Russian civilization. If cooperation or another form of de-escalatory policy could be used in establishing firm arctic fault lines in resolving its looming delineation problems, it may do well to mitigate the Thucydides Trap – which is the nightmare of all foreign policy – by proving that non-natural enemies can indeed successfully organize territory in mutually-beneficial ways amidst the new multipolar world of the 21t century. Contained then within the Arctic circle is not just the passing claims of two or three powers, but perhaps the general lot of sovereign societies and organized civilization in our time.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.