Fletcher Security Review

On April 18, 1775, Massachusetts businessman and U.S. revolutionary Paul Revere alerted fellow patriots that British military action against the rebellion in Boston would come by sea rather than by land. The warning that “the [British] regulars are coming” was a verbal intelligence report. It was based on what Revere and his associates had seen with their own eyes. They interpreted the visual data correctly; British military action came the very next day via an initial naval landing of troops that engaged in the first battles of the United States’ Revolutionary War.   

 

Intoning the urgency of Mr. Revere, these U.S. analysts and Alaskan politicians seek to inspire a sense of urgency within United States decision-making, warning that the Russians are coming to dominate the north. While taking exhaustive notes on the ambiguous “duality” in Russia’s Arctic policies, the pessimists have nonetheless quickly resolved this open question and pronounced with alarm the fear that Russia is secretly deploying a “new ice curtain,” meaning actions to deny the United States access to the allegedly vital Arctic region. 

 

The pessimists have paid most attention to the visible field of strategy, likely misinterpreting information about Russia’s physical movements of military personnel and bases to the north and overstating the importance of even the worst-case scenario of denial of access to the Arctic. While they understand that additional, inconspicuous fields of strategy exist, these analysts discount America’s long-term advantages in invisible battlefields. However, there are three long-term trends (political, technological, and economic) that, although intangible, are no less powerful than the physical presence of Russia’s naval fleet.

 

First, the balance of concern favors, and will continue to favor, the United States. For Russia, the political stakes of national concern are much higher than in the United States. The Russian sentiments about the need for strategic predominance in the high north are broadcast loudly and clearly in the public statements of Russia’s Arctic point man, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin. He claims that the frigid north is “Russia’s Mecca.” He even spent time in 2015 denouncing Czar Alexander II’s 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States (advisably, it is time to move on). Unlike Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the USA, only Russia appears to be ramping up official nationalistic rhetoric on the topic. The other seven Arctic Council members are reportedly getting nervous, but should relax.

 

Rather than grow fearful that such long cultural memories of history give Russia the advantage somehow, we should cheer the folly of Rogozin’s grudge. Alaskan senators might hate it, but I am relieved that U.S. citizens, by contrast, do not care nearly as much; this enables the government that serves them to be less nationalistic and more objective as it assesses the importance of the Arctic’s potential strategic worth.

 

Moreover, even if the Arctic proves, as estimated, to be super rich in mineral, oil, and natural gas resources, the United States will likely continue to drive the extraction innovation frontier. Only the United States and its friends currently produce the kind of technologies that have led to great leaps in extractive work - from deep-water robots to sideways drilling. Russia desperately needs this technology to achieve its energy extraction objectives in the high north. That is a critical source of U.S. leverage. It is therefore important that the U.S. private sector invest today in its invisible defenses – cybersecurity and intellectual property protection – so that the U.S. government can hope to maintain a strategic edge against Russia in the long term, when oil prices rise again. This type of investment likely provides much more leverage per dollar than any physical undertaking to develop new Alaskan deep-water ports.

 

How could this current innovation advantage possibly endure in later years, when Russia has every incentive to invest in the high-technologies of resource extraction? Under Republican administrations, expect that the U.S. government will actually (and regressively) subsidize such developments, as was done in 1970s Department of Energy projects to maintain technological leadership in energy extraction. Under Democratic administrations, the pressure from a green trinity of regulations on climate impact, wildlife protection, and water safety would also force the industry to innovate quickly (and progressively pay for it themselves). Professional U.S. policy planners do not care much which party is in power. Either way, the United States can afford to invest today in maintaining its edge, while Russia faces budget cuts across the board. 

 

Finally, the culminating result of U.S. technological leadership, relative political flexibility, and its ability to restrict exports to Russia (if the sanctions coalition is maintained) is that the balance of economic threat benefits the United States and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. When I was overseas as a U.S. diplomat articulating the details of U.S. sanctions on Russia (as punishment for incursions into Ukraine and subsequent formal annexation of Crimea), I did not understand why sanctions experts at the U.S. Treasury and State Departments had targeted Arctic extractive industry high technology. Now, it seems like a stroke of evil genius. If Russia cares so much more about its conquest of the frigid elements in the region that produces a whopping 20% of its GDP and 22% of its exports, why not force them to choose between the archaic myth of Novorossiya in Ukraine (about which the United States has a stronger strategic concern) and their modern Arctic “Mecca” nationalism? The Arctic is an important negotiation space for the restoration of territorial integrity to a beleaguered Republic of Ukraine.

 

Pessimistic Arctic specialists have excellent ideas about detailed policies that would keep the Arctic a zone of peace. They correctly argue that the United States should let federal engineers use Alaskan money for a deep-water port, expand (even if only marginally) the dismal two-ship fleet of U.S. Coast Guard ice-breaker ships, and permit some off-shore drilling near Alaska through Department of Interior licenses. The first two much-ballyhooed priorities are already authorized or in the new draft budget for Congressional approval; the third priority was permitted by the federal government but Royal Dutch Shell stopped its work when rock-bottom world oil prices reduced the incentives for exploring the stormy, wildlife-rich Arctic. 

 

U.S. diplomats should indeed pressure Russia to adhere to normal de-conflicting procedures related to ship travel and to avoid risks inherent in not notifying your neighbors of military exercises. But, the pessimists are mistaken to argue that the United States needs a major economic investment push in the Arctic specifically for security reasons, a whole new multilateral structure based on the OSCE, and detailed formal security codes agreed with Russia for these issues of military de-confliction. Surely the need for US-Russo military de-confliction agreements in the Arctic can be at least as informal as the memorandum that has succeeded in keeping the two forces apart in Syria – a much more strategically important and tense battleground. Although the rate of growth of concern in these areas is high, the absolute numbers of military incidents in the Arctic still pale in comparison to the daily territorial tensions between NATO countries like Greece and Turkey.  Greece, for example, argues that NATO ally Turkey violated its airspace over 2,000 times in the year 2014. In the same year, European policy experts expressed shock and alarm at only 40 such accusations in the Arctic against the Russian Federation. 

 

Agreements on commercial fishing, search and rescue arrangements, the tracking of ships, and detailed charting of each power’s territorial claims should be left to experts and kept away from the theater of geopolitics, where the overacting of politicians can become dangerous. Rather than a new Arctic-specific ministerial body modelled on the Helsinki Accords to handle a comparatively modest set of incursions, the Arctic powers can be fully represented by special coordinators and all their able coastal security agency counterparts at Arctic Council events without having Foreign Ministers in the room dramatizing the situation. 

 

The good, practical subset of recommendations of the pessimists deserve full implementation, but the pessimists are dead wrong to dress up these economic priorities with the alarming language of intense geopolitics. Resurrecting Cold War phrases like “icebreaker gap,” and “ice curtain,” and alleging unambiguous “belligerence” might help dramatize the issue for busy Congressional staffers, but it also serves as precisely the kind of irresponsible rhetoric that the pessimists criticize when voiced by Russian officials. 

 

Let’s acknowledge that in the Arctic, the United States is making its next moves from a position of relative strength. Maintaining that relative position will require investment today in cybersecurity and the close guarding of intellectual property arrangements, but these are not existential challenges. Our invisible advantages and impressive economic levers are enduring and comforting. Meanwhile, the United States also has a broader portfolio of truly vital long term naval interests in the Aegean, Mediterranean, Red, and South China Seas where commercial sea traffic is exponentially more voluminous than in the frosty north and where alliance-maintenance across Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia is far more challenging than in the comparatively cozy 8-member club of Arctic powers.

 

To break a glass, one could either invest in a hammer to achieve an advantage or simply hire a soprano to sing an invisible, shatteringly high note. Let Russia attempt, in the worst-case scenario, to build an “ice curtain” to block the United States from accessing the Arctic; let the invisible, enduring advantages enjoyed by the USA shatter it too.

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