O f the 195 countries in the world, eight can be considered truly Arctic: the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Finland. These countries constitute, along with thirteen observer countries—including China—and six Indigenous representative organizations, the membership of the Arctic Council, which was formed in 1996 to address issues faced by the nations, inhabitants, and environment of the region. The eight Arctic countries have equal votes in the forum, while the thirteen observers have none; even so, in the Arctic, as in other walks of life, some countries are in practical terms more equal than others. Some carry the swagger of a superpower. Others engage in more activities in the Arctic, with a greater capacity to impact the region. And others are simply more invested: economically, politically, environmentally, or even psychologically.
In terms of economic and military might, the US remains, for now, without peer. It has, however, traditionally been less significant a player in the Arctic than one might imagine given its general geopolitical heft, largely because the period between nineteenth-century American-led explorations in search of the Open Polar Sea and a twenty-first-century realization that it needed to engage seriously in the region was characterized by what might be termed a studied indifference.
To a large extent, among the broader body politic and the general populace, that remains the case: a 2016 survey of American citizens, for example, found that just 18 percent of those polled knew the US is an Arctic nation, with many respondents convinced it “was a trick question to which we were offering no correct answer.”
Perhaps this isn’t entirely surprising given Americans’ famously subpar geographic knowledge and the fact that all of the country’s Arctic seas and lands are in a state that joined the union only in 1959, does not border any other state, and is all too frequently left off maps of the US or relegated to a small corner. And while the Pentagon has of late been sounding the alarm over the security challenges of a melting Arctic, American policy toward the region has by and large been subcontracted to the Alaska congressional delegation.
In contrast, Canada, rarely considered a geopolitical heavyweight, is something of an indispensable nation in the Arctic—even if it almost stumbled into Arctic governance when Britain dropped responsibility for its northern regions into its lap. Its opinions and positions would carry weight anyway, given that it boasts more than 100,000 miles of Arctic coastline and that the Canadian Arctic Archipelago alone encompasses an area of some 500,000 square miles.
Canada, more than most, is able to speak with some authority and experience on the issue of Indigenous rights and perspectives, having undergone a relationship with the Arctic’s founding peoples that has at times involved some horrendous misjudgments, mistakes, and outright racism but which has also, in recent decades, been undergoing a significant course correction—not yet by any means sufficient, perhaps, to compensate for generations of deep and profound mistreatment, but a substantial start along the lengthy road to redemption. And, of course, Canada is inevitably at the centre of discourse over the Arctic’s future given the contentiousness and uncertainty that surrounds the fate and status of the Northwest Passage.
And then there’s Russia. Its northern shore, stretching from the Barents Sea to the Sea of Okhotsk in the east, accounts for 53 percent of the Arctic Ocean coastline. It houses eight of the ten largest cities north of the Arctic Circle. And it is unapologetically assertive about its Arctic nature and territory and its right to encourage others to take advantage of the opportunities its Arctic waters present while being simultaneously selective about who it permits to do so.
In 2007, a Russian submarine planted a titanium flag on the seabed at the North Pole, and in October 2019, Russia’s defence ministry proclaimed that it had collected enough evidence to support a territorial claim to much of the Arctic Ocean. Canada has exerted a counterclaim, while Denmark has laid down its own metaphorical marker, based on the fact that a large area up to and beyond the North Pole is connected to the continental shelf of Greenland.
Some observers see in this competition the emergence of a truly cold war as great powers jostle over issues of access and territory. Some worry about the impact of increased traffic and development on wildlife and the environment, in the form of increased noise and development and the potential for accidents, oil spills, and pollution. Others envisage a scenario in which regional development and economic growth empower and enrich the peoples of the North. What is clear, however, is that, absent steps to address climate change, the Arctic will undergo significant change in the coming decades.
I n 2016, Donald Trump swept into the White House with his own very particular view of global relationships. Perhaps predictably, the administration succeeded in ruffling the feathers of just about every participant in Arctic affairs, sometimes all at once.
At a meeting of the traditionally collegiate Arctic Council in 2019, Trump’s then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, took swipes at the Arctic ambitions of China: “Beijing claims to be a near-Arctic state. . . . There are only Arctic states and non-Arctic states. No third category exists, and claiming otherwise entitles China to exactly nothing.” And of Russia: “We’re concerned about Russia’s claim over the international waters of the Northern Sea Route,” he said, before adding, “We recognize that Russia is not the only nation making illegitimate claims,” a clear reference to Canada and the Northwest Passage. In case anyone was in doubt, he pointed out that “the US has a long-contested feud with Canada over sovereign claims through the Northwest Passage.”
While none of the positions Pompeo articulated were necessarily novel ones, the nature of the discourse, as well as the setting of them, did not sit well. Michael Byers, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, told the Guardian that while Pompeo’s remarks were consistent with US policy, the “belligerent” speech contained numerous “factual mistakes and logical inconsistencies.” Gao Feng, China’s special representative for the Arctic, sighed that the “business of the Arctic Council is co-operation, environmental protection, friendly consultation, and the sharing and exchange of views. This is completely different now.”
And the Inuit Circumpolar Council, or ICC, rebuked Pompeo, with Monica Ell-Kanayuk, then president of ICC Canada, stating that “the Northwest Passage is part of Inuit Nunangat, our Arctic homeland,” and adding, “Mr. Pompeo’s characterization of the Arctic as a place of geopolitical and military competition is faulty.” She said, “Geopolitical differences in the Arctic have always been resolved peacefully. Indigenous peoples living in the Arctic are integral to its international institutions and decision making that has achieved this.”
The reason for Pompeo’s bellicosity was clear. “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade. This could potentially slash the time it takes [for ships] to travel between Asia and the West by as much as twenty days. Arctic sea lanes could [become] the twenty-first-century Suez and Panama Canals,” he said. However, the Trump administration refused to acknowledge the reason for those reductions, and the US would not sign onto the Arctic Council’s traditional end-of-session declaration, because it opposed any mention of the words “climate change.”
The administration was not quite done playing the role of skunk at the Arctic garden party, however. That same year, it confirmed that Trump had expressed interest in buying Greenland, a notion that Mette Frederiksen, prime minister of Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland’s foreign and security affairs, dismissed as “absurd.” Martin Lidegaard, a former Danish foreign affairs minister, called it a “grotesque proposal. . . . We are talking about real people, and you can’t just sell Greenland like an old colonial power.”
In a fit of pique, Trump promptly cancelled a planned state visit to Denmark. Aleqa Hammond, the chair of Greenland’s parliamentary foreign and security policy committee, said the effect of the whole episode was “at least one or two steps back” for the US reputation in the Arctic.
In his second term, Trump has only doubled down on the same approach, with the administration clumsily declaring a desire to purchase Greenland and responding in a huff when the notion was airily dismissed by Denmark.
A s China has grown in economic might and geopolitical heft, it, too, has begun testing its prospects in the Arctic. It has declared itself a near-Arctic state—a designation of its own invention—and since 2013 has been an observer at the Arctic Council. China is exploring the expansion of its naval and commercial reach by investing in its own fleet of icebreakers, and it is testing out the prospect of itself taking advantage of new pathways through the ice—through North America, across the top of Russia, or even via the North Pole.
So what is the extent of China’s interest in the Arctic? Given that the country is neither adjacent to nor possessed of a long history of involvement in the region, what is its motivation? The answer to the second question is both complex and straightforward: it is at once neither geopolitical, commercial, nor military, and yet simultaneously all of these: an important component of China’s progression toward genuine superpower status, a forward-looking approach to the challenges and opportunities presented by a changing Arctic, and a move to secure a prominent seat at the table to influence and benefit from decisions that inevitably will be made in response to those Arctic changes.
In 2021, China’s National People’s Congress formally adopted its latest Five-Year Plan, the fourteenth in total and the first to mention the Arctic. That mention was blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brief, but what it chose to include could reasonably be inferred to highlight Beijing’s priority in the northern polar regions. China will, it read, “participate in practical cooperation in the Arctic and build the ‘Polar Silk Road.’”
That China should be invested in the idea of shipping routes through the Arctic to the point of wanting to develop infrastructure to support those routes and even give the concept some catchy branding should, on one level, be no surprise. China boasts, by at least one measure, the largest merchant fleet in the world; by other measures, it lies second behind Greece, but whatever metric one chooses—be it gross tonnage, deadweight, or number of vessels—its position on the charts has been rising, and having overtaken Japan’s fleet in 2018, it is at the very least competitive in size with the Greeks and increasing at a faster rate.
In such circumstances, it would arguably be a dereliction of duty not to read the tea leaves and take as many necessary precautions as possible for a world in which shipping routes through the Arctic are viable and competitive. The notion of a Polar Silk Road, however, suggested something deeper and more substantive.
But exactly what it means and how much import Beijing assigns to it is unclear. The Polar Silk Road was announced as a component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has been described as “one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever created.” When it was announced in 2013, it was portrayed as a “vast collection of development and investment initiatives . . . originally devised to link East Asia and Europe through physical infrastructure,” which in the decade since “has expanded to Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, significantly broadening China’s economic and political influence.”
While nominally marketed as a massive global infrastructure project, the entire Belt and Road Initiative also has national and geopolitical aspirations: to bring greater investment and opportunity to its oft-neglected western regions, to restructure and invigorate the Chinese economy more broadly, and to develop trade linkages and diplomatic leverage in the region. Its sheer scope has caused some anxiety in Western capitals, and the inclusion of the Arctic in the maritime component has added to the notion that the world’s northernmost region is shaping up to be a geopolitical battleground.
Arctic nations have been circumspect about allowing China a foothold. An analysis by Doug Irving for the RAND Corporation noted that “a Chinese company tried to buy a shuttered U.S. Navy base in Greenland, but the Danish government quashed the idea. . . . Canada blocked a $150 million gold mine deal that would have put Chinese interests too close to military installations. Greenland has held up plans for another Chinese mine over concerns about pollution.”
While it is possible to overstate Chinese intentions in the Arctic, and certainly to become overly fixated on the extent to which they conjure up images of great-power conflict at the top of the world, it would equally be a mistake to diminish them. Any perceived quieting of Beijing’s interest in the region can be ascribed, argue Erdem Lamazhapov, Iselin Stensdal, and Gørild Heggelund in an analysis for the Arctic Institute, to China pursuing an approach of “crossing the river by touching the stones”—of adapting to circumstances.
Many of Beijing’s early Arctic ventures have been conducted in conjunction with Moscow; with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine making that more difficult—and indeed posing a challenge to all manner of co-operation across the Arctic—China may choose to deprioritize the Polar Silk Road and related activities until a more suitable time. But that does not mean its interest in the Arctic isn’t genuine.
In addition to contemplating shipping networks through previously ice-choked regions, it has, noted the RAND review, “dispatched research expeditions [and] sought to establish mining and gas operations. . . . It describes itself as an ‘active participant, builder, and contributor in Arctic affairs,’ one that has ‘spared no efforts to contribute its wisdom to the development of the Arctic region.’”
Furthermore, note seasoned Sinologists, China’s goals regarding the Arctic are sometimes expressed more forcefully in Mandarin for domestic consumption than in English for a global audience. As noted by Rush Doshi, Alexis Dale-Huang, and Gaoqi Zhang of the Brookings Institution, President Xi Jinping has, for example, frequently expressed his desire at home to make China a “polar great power,” a phrase generally missing from externally facing materials.
Similarly, while documents and speeches aimed at the outside world downplay any Chinese thoughts of military competition in the Arctic, internal texts are more explicit about the feeling in Beijing that “the game of great powers” will “increasingly focus on the struggle over and control of global public spaces,” including the polar regions. China “cannot rule out the possibility of using force” in this coming “scramble for new strategic spaces.”
The climate is changing, the world is warming, and the Arctic is melting. While the Northwest and Northeast Passages are not yet reliably navigable, they are at least somewhat and seasonally so. The Northwest Passage, which had not been transited at all prior to 1906, and had been so only four times by 1954, saw twenty-five transits in 2021 alone—a consequence of sturdier ships and a stronger commercial imperative, certainly, but also of the fact that, at least for a couple of months per year, navigating Canada’s Arctic waters is significantly less hazardous than had long been the case. It is a prospect that will have the world powers, friends and foes alike, watching with anticipation.
Adapted and excerpted from Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World by Kieran Mulvaney. Copyright © by Kieran Mulvaney. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, DC.
Kieran Mulvaney is an author and a regular contributor to National Geographic. He has also written for several other publications, including the Guardian and The Washington Post Magazine. He lives in rural Vermont.
