The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [79]
This “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 66, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD 25,” or, more compactly, “Arctic Region Policy,”339 was crafted exclusively for the Arctic, a significant change because all previous directives had lumped it and Antarctica together. Equally significant was its elevation of “National security and homeland security needs” to priority position #1 (out of six)—a return to Cold War prioritization. To political scientists, these changes are significant and signal a growing American strategic interest in the region.
War in the Arctic?
We’ve seen that current trends in rhetoric, defense spending, and written policy all point to a renewed militarization of the North. That is the trend. But what about war? Huebert believes that the world is beginning to perceive the Arctic as the “next Middle East” in terms of fossil hydrocarbon energy.340 Is it also the next Middle East in terms of fault lines for conflict? After all, jostling militaries imply heightened risk of incident; and conflicts needn’t even be about the Arctic to erupt there—the region could also become an expanded theater for global tensions and antagonism, as happened during the Cold War.
This last scenario is certainly not the case today. Whether it develops in the future depends on the choices of future political leaders and thus lies outside the bounds of our thought experiment. But what of intrinsic pressures within the Arctic itself ? Is the “mad scramble” so fevered, the oil and gas assessments so compelling, the retreating ice and new shipping lanes so transformative, that extreme tension or violent conflicts in the region become inevitable?
There are good reasons to think not. One is a persistent trend of northern cooperation over the past two decades. A second is a legal document of the United Nations that is fast becoming the globally accepted rulebook on how countries carve up dominion over the world’s oceans.
The story of the first begins October 1, 1987, with a famous speech delivered in Murmansk by then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Standing at the gateway of his country’s strategic nuclear arsenal in the Arctic Ocean, Gorbachev called for transforming the region from a tense military theater to a nuke-free “zone of peace and fruitful cooperation.” He proposed international collaborations in disarmament, energy development, science, indigenous rights, and environmental protections between all Arctic countries.341 The choice of Murmansk, the Arctic’s largest and most important port city and the heart of the Soviet Union’s military and industrial north, was highly symbolic. Just as the sea ice would experience a record-breaking melt exactly twenty years (to the day) later, the Cold War thawed first in the Arctic.
Four years after the Murmansk speech the Soviet Union dissolved. The Russian Arctic, which had been totally closed off from the world, plunged into a horrible decade of decimated population and economy, but new opportunities to interact with outsiders opened. After a half century of iron-walled separation, aboriginal Alaskan and Russian relatives become reacquainted across the Bering Strait. Siberians, if they had the money, could travel abroad, while western scientists—including myself—could enter and work in formerly closed parts of the Russian North. New international collaborations and foreign cash342 were a rare bright spot for many suffering Siberians. All around the Arctic, new collaborations and groups were born. Aboriginal groups, most notably the Inuit, began to organize politically across international borders.
In 1991 all eight NORC countries—the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia—signed a landmark agreement to cooperate on the region’s pollution problems, and scheduled