Northern exposure

One sign that governments around the world are beginning to take seriously climate change due to global warming involves the recent fracas between Canada, the United States, and Russia concerning territorial claims to pieces of the Arctic Ocean seabed. Russia touched off the diplomatic hostilities last week by having two of its submersibles plant a Russian flag on the Arctic seabed in what The New York Times called “an openly choreographed publicity stunt.”

What, then, we should ask, are the Russians trying to publicize?

It seems that some Russians are claiming that the seabed under the North Pole is an extension of Russia’s continental shelf and, therefore, rightfully belongs to Russia. This prompted Canada’s Foreign Minister Peter MacKay to utter what are sure to be famously comedic words:

This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’

Although the Russians first put forward its latest set of claims in 2001, clearly the idea here is to get a jump on the potential extraction rights for the oil and gas in the Arctic. Many speculate that huge quantities of both might be found there, and if the planet warms to a sufficient degree, the cost of extraction would suddenly become economically feasible, unlocking energy resources worth billions of dollars.

Reaction in the West, aside from Mr. MacKay’s humorous retort, has been understated and occasionally scornful, if not of the naked ambition of Russia’s expedition, then of the mission’s scientific pretense which clearly has geopolitical ends.

Those who follow and comment upon climate change typically do so from an environmental standpoint; they evaluate the potential effects on various plant and animal species, human epidemiology, so forth and so on, but clearly, if a serious climate-change event takes place, the current geopolitical calculus would be greatly upset. To provide a quick and easily understood example, consider the Russian navy. Russian naval capabilities have always been constrained by, among other things, its lack of ice-free ports, particularly along its Barents Sea coastline, where Arkhangelsk is ice-blocked during the winter months, leaving Murmansk as the best viable port. Granted, this is less a problem than it was, say, one hundred years ago, but it never the less creates strategic challenges, especially when you remember that the disintegration of the Soviet Union has deprived Russia of all its Baltic seaports, save for the enclave of Kaliningrad, which in any event lays deep within NATO territory. Its Black Sea fleet faces similar challenges, as it must transit the Dardanelles and Bosporus—those twin narrow Turkish straits—in order to sail into relevance (which might explain this recent development).

Projection of Russian naval power through the ages has been hampered by such accidents of geography, the most famous example coming in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, when the Japanese navy under Admiral Heihachiro Togo wiped out not one, but two, Russian fleets. The second Russian fleet, based in the Baltic, had to sail 18,000 miles in order to deploy and was quickly destroyed in the Battle of Tsushima Strait. This humiliating defeat reinforced among Russians the importance of obtaining and maintaining warm-water ports.

At any rate, imagine a Barents Sea with significantly less ice; imagine a relatively ice-free passage to the north of Russia. This alone would utterly change military and commercial realities to a very great degree. There is much more to potential climate change than oil and gas, for similar climate-related changes would necessarily bring about a total re-think of the global battlefield. Everything from sub deployments and air commands to polar defense installations and strategies would require radical alteration.

This is important because such a degree of military planning doesn’t occur overnight. For instance, concerning this new front that has opened up in the polar regions, we find nary one word in the Pentagon’s latest Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), published in February 2006. The latest QDR focused overwhelmingly on the threat of jihadism and global terrorism. Over the course of its 97 pages, the paragraph below is the extent of its Russia coverage:

Russia remains a country in transition. It is unlikely to pose a military threat to the United States or its allies on the same scale or intensity as the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Where possible, the United States will cooperate with Russia on shared interests such as countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, and countering the trafficking of narcotics. The United States remains concerned about the erosion of democracy in Russia, the curtailment of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and freedom of the press, the centralization of political power and limits on economic freedom. Internationally, the United States welcomes Russia as a constructive partner but views with increasing concern its sales of disruptive weapons technologies abroad and actions that compromise the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of other states.

That’s it, folks. The final sentence is about as close as one gets to the issue at hand, but the generals likely had Ukraine or Georgia in mind, not Canada. This will likely change come 2010, but the lack of attention to the region should indicate to you how long it takes for the Pentagon’s gears to spin. Our defense establishment is more reactive than predictive.

I said earlier that potential climate change was geopolitically important irrespective of oil and gas, but obviously, so much of what is geopolitically important is a result of oil and gas, our current war of choice being Exhibit A. For this reason, Russia’s latest maneuver in the polar regions is troubling. It’s not that the Russians have no rightful claim to make—after all, their Arctic coastline is immense—but the maladroitness and high silliness of planting an underwater flag is likely to have Robert Peary spinning in his Arlington crypt.