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By Root 1044 0

” offered Council on Foreign Relations (a prominent American think tank) analyst Scott Borgerson, writing in Foreign Affairs. “The rapid melt is also rekindling numerous interstate rivalries and attracting energy-hungry newcomers, such as China, to the region. The Arctic powers are fast approaching diplomatic gridlock, and that could eventually lead to the sort of armed brinkmanship that plagues other territories.”329 Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, asserted, “The Arctic must become Russia’s main strategic resource base,” and “it cannot be ruled out that the battle for raw materials will be waged with military means.”330 The prestigious Jane’s Intelligence Review concluded, “Military competition is likely to increase, with Russia and Canada increasing their deployments and exercises, while there appears little opportunity for diplomatic resolution of the disputes.”331

Could competition for hydrocarbons really spark a military buildup in the Arctic? Militarization has happened there before, after all. During the Cold War, it was a place where American and Russian forces played cat-and-mouse war games with spy planes and nuclear-armed subs, and built remote outposts to detect long-range bombers. It was a theater of military intrigue and brinkmanship, the stuff of spy novels and movie thrillers like Ice Station Zebra with Rock Hudson and K-19: The Widowmaker with Harrison Ford.

The end of the Cold War marked the end of the thriller plots, and Arctic countries quickly downsized their militaries and lost interest in the region. Canada canceled its plan to buy as many as a dozen nuclear-powered submarines. The United States canceled a new class of Seawolf attack subs designed to fight beneath the sea ice. Most dramatically, the former Soviet Union simply parked its northern fleet in Murmansk and walked away.332 But by 2009, nearly two decades later, a military revival was stirring. All eight NORC countries—Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—were either rebuilding their militaries and coast guards or at least pondering new security arrangements in the region.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was speaking often about reasserting Canada’s sovereignty over her northern territories and the Northwest Passage,333 and backing it up with new ice-strengthened patrol ships, a military training base in Resolute Bay, and a $720 million icebreaker. Norway was acquiring five new frigates armed with Aegis integrated weapons systems, and nearly fifty American-made F-35 fighter jets. Russia had refurbished its northern fleet and announced plans to expand it with new attack submarines, nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, and enough ships to man five or six aircraft carrier battle groups by the 2020s. Russia had also resumed long-range bomber patrols along the airspaces of Canada, Alaska, and the Nordic countries for the first time since the Cold War. On the eve of U.S. president Barack Obama’s first visit to Canada, two Canadian Air Force jets were scrambled—perhaps overzealously—to meet an approaching Russian bomber.334 Even Iceland, nearly bankrupted by the global financial crisis, was pondering how to bolster its security. Finland, Denmark, and Sweden were considering new alliances with each other, or even possible membership in NATO.335

The United States—dubbed the “reluctant Arctic power” by political scientist Rob Huebert at the University of Calgary336—was not growing its northern military power as noticeably. Its Polar Star icebreaker was out of service; a replacement was scrapped from the Obama administration’s omnibus stimulus bill.337 However, America had never downsized its northern forces as much as the other Arctic countries after the Cold War. It still maintained some twenty-five thousand army, air force, and coast guard personnel in Alaska and had even begun conducting naval exercises offshore.338 One of the United States’ two controversial missile defense complexes (intended to shoot down incoming ICBM missiles) was installed at Fort Greely in