Energy needs (and the energy lobby) and mining riches, not global warming, are the push factors why the White House is looking North.68 Indeed, America remains the odd state out when it comes to Arctic governance, still not having ratified the UNCLOS and pulling out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
The Pentagon’s April 2019 Arctic Strategy commits the Department of Defense to work with allies and partners to counter unwarranted Russian and Chinese territorial claims and maintain free and open access to the region. This reactive position in the Arctic is a sign that the United States has begun to consider how to project force in the North in the context of great power competition. The Coast Guard now plans to add six new polar ice-cutters for Arctic and Antarctic missions, in addition to its current two.69 It has also announced that it will conduct freedom-of-navigation operations in the Arctic to contest Russian claims that the NSR is an internal rather than an international body of water. Furthermore, the U.S. Navy has relaunched its Second Fleet in the North Atlantic and expanded exercises in the Arctic Ocean, while the U.S. Air Force’s July 2020 Comprehensive Strategy is premised on exercise vigilance that “recognizes the immense geostrategic consequence of the region and its critical role for protecting the homeland and projecting global power,” all to be underpinned by a combat-credible force.70
For all this recent activity and bombastic rhetoric, the United States—together with Canada, and the Nordic countries—has continued to work with Russia on a range of issues in the Arctic, including search and rescue (SAR) under the May 2011 Arctic Council agreement on Arctic SAR, and creating a scheme for managing two-way shipping traffic through the Bering Strait and Bering Sea in 2018. Some observers see possibilities for further U.S.-Russian coaction in the Arctic.
It is undeniable, however, that Putin’s Russia has played it both ways—engaging in cooperative diplomacy in the Arctic Council and over territorial questions via the UN Law of the Seas, while constantly seeking to assert itself on the global stage.71 Putin’s long-term strategy has been to rebuild Russia’s international position since its humiliating crash at the end of the Cold War. Over the past decade, having restored political and economic stability at home, Putin has been testing the West—exploiting opportunities in Ukraine (Crimea and Donbas) and Syria.
The Arctic is a keystone of that policy, because only here—as Putin said in December 2017—is there real scope for territorial expansion and resource acquisition. This builds on and deepens the main asset of Russia’s unbalanced economy—its continued heavy reliance on the extraction and export of raw materials, especially oil and gas—which no modern leader of the country has been able to change.
The natural resources in Russia’s Arctic region already account for a fifth of the country’s GDP. The oil and gas under the North Pole offer the prospect of huge additional wealth but it will take time, money and technology to exploit, not to mention much international haggling. Somewhat easier pickings may be in the offing thanks to the thawing northern rim of Siberia—14,000 miles of coastline from Murmansk to the Bering Strait—both on land and in Russia’s territorial waters. De-icing opens up new opportunities for mining—from hydrocarbons to lithium—and shipping, but the melting of permafrost also harbors the problems of collapsing infrastructure, oil spills and toxic leaks, as the costly accidents at Norilsk and in Kamchatka in 2020 revealed.72
Russia has complemented its economic activities with an Arctic security policy, involving bases and ice-breakers. In December 2014, Moscow announced that it intended to station military units all along its Arctic coast, and began pouring money into airfields, ports, radar stations and barracks. The new infrastructure includes two huge complexes: the Northern Shamrock on Kotelny Island and the Arctic Trefoil on Franz Josef Land, 620 miles from the North Pole. Taken together, Russia’s six biggest Arctic bases in the High North will be home to about a thousand soldiers serving there for up to 18 months at a time in constant snow, permanently sub-zero temperatures from October until June, and no daylight for nearly half the year. Moscow is now concentrating on making airfields accessible year-round. Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, “our Arctic border areas were stripped bare,” Pavel Makarevich, a member of the Russian Geographical Society, proclaimed. “Now they are being restored.”73
No other country has militarized its Arctic North to anything like this extent. And none can match Russia’s 40-strong ice-breaker fleet, which is used to clear channels for military and civilian use. Three nuclear-powered ice-breakers, including the world’s largest, are now under construction to complement the six already in operation. Russia is also giving its naval warships an ice-breaking capacity. By 2021 the Northern Fleet, based near Murmansk, is due to get two ice-capable corvettes, armed with cruise missiles.74
The scale of Russia’s endeavor becomes clearer when one considers that the next countries on the ice-breaker list currently are Finland (eight vessels), Canada (seven), Sweden (four), China (three) and then the United States (two).75 We are not talking about Cold War-era militarization, when the Soviets packed much more firepower in the Arctic and were geared to wage nuclear war with the United States. Arctic bases were staging posts for long-range bombers to fly to the United States. Now, in an era when a slow-motion battle for the Arctic’s energy reserves is unfolding, Russia is creating a permanent and nimble conventional military presence in small packets that are highly mobile and capable of rapid reaction. Furthermore, having tested its hypersonic Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missiles in the Arctic in 2019 with the quiet threat to regionally deploy them, Russia has in 2020 begun preparations to resume testing of nuclear cruise missiles on Novaya Zemlya, all the while, according to U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Paul Zukunft, “building ice-capable combatants” that can launch cruise missiles with ranges “as far south as Miami, Florida.”76
The scale of Russia’s Arctic ambitions is not in doubt. In March 2015, Moscow conducted the largest full-scale readiness exercise in the Arctic since the collapse of the USSR. It deployed 45,000 soldiers, 3,360 vehicles, 110 aircraft, 41 naval vessels and 15 submarines, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense. On Navy Day, July 30, 2017, Russia made a point of showing off its naval might across the world, from Tartus in Syria to Sebastopol and Vladivostok, and, above all, in the Baltic waters of St. Petersburg under Putin’s approving eye. Up to a point, Putin’s naval show that day represented a Potemkin village, for Russia’s 2018 defense budget of $61.4 billion was small compared to America’s spending of $649 billion, and even China’s $250 billion.77 Yet it would be an error to write off the resurgent Russian fleet as mere bluff and bluster. In fact, in July 2017, Russia and China held their first common naval drills, called Joint Sea 2017, in Baltic waters, bringing the Chinese uncomfortably close to one of the most turbulent fault lines in East-West relations; and once again, China was an active participant in a 2018 exercise, the massive Vostok 2018 maneuvers (throughout Siberia and all the way to the Pacific), officially with some 300,000 Russian service members. Both countries’ growing focus on the North became evident when—it seems by chance—the crew of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter found the Chinese and Russian navies conducting a joint exercise simulating a potential small-scale military encounter in the Bering Strait in the summer of 2020.78
Perceptions matter as much as crude power projection. In this vein, the Kremlin regularly releases pictures of President Putin in snow gear, of ice-breakers in the Arctic Ocean, and of troops training in white fatigues, brandishing assault rifles as they zip along on sleighs pulled by reindeer. And now that Russia’s military forces can move with agility to deliver precise and deadly strikes, they are far more useful. Such forces need not be enormous. If cleverly deployed, even a small military hand can deliver a big blow with success—as Russia did in Ukraine and Syria, outmaneuvering the West. Through its new presence and military build-up, Russia can also deny others access to polar terrain—just as China has managed to do in the East and South China seas. And it does so under the pretext that as “the Arctic region has become a zone where geopolitical, geo-strategic and economic interests of the world’s leading powers are colliding,” Russia must be able to counter what it sees as the U.S. challenge to its control of its “Arctic zone,”
