Polar Wars: Arctic tensions overshadow climate urgency and cooperation

Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic

by Kenneth R Rosen

Published by Simon & Schuster

320 pages ₹999

 

Polar War is a depressing read. What begins as an apocalyptic warning over what global warming, exacerbated by the relentless extractive and exploitative activities, are inflicting on the once pristine and peaceful Arctic, the book veers into the dynamics of a renewed geopolitical contest, in which the Arctic has become an indispensable prize. The author acknowledges that whatever happens to the Arctic will affect weather patterns and ocean circulation across the entire planet but then proceeds to spell out the security threat posed by an aggressive Russia and a newly assertive “near-Arctic” China to American and western security interests. 

His recommendations include the expansion of US military bases and facilities across the region, investment in ice-cutters that will allow year-round access and promoting research and scientific activities that will study environmental changes for the purpose of supporting military presence and operations. The book reflects how the existential threat posed by rapidly advancing climate change is inevitably pushed into the background by economic and commercial interests and, more insistently, by security compulsions. 

In the Arctic Ocean, the melting of year-round ice is being seen as an economic windfall, opening up shorter sea routes between Asia and the Atlantic littoral. The steady thinning and increasing disappearance of permafrost over Greenland and other Arctic littoral spaces is exposing potential reserves of oil and gas and critical minerals. The security argument is another reason such exploitation is being justified in our age of economic warfare. Kenneth Rosen warns his readers that the environment itself is becoming weaponised with the changes triggered by global warming being looked upon as potential assets in warfare. Research into dangerous pathogens that may be released from the melting permafrost are being studied so that resident populations may be protected from them. At the same time those pathogens could become agents of biological warfare. 

The book refers to the more hopeful era that followed the end of the Cold War, when the Arctic began to emerge as a zone of peace with the littoral countries agreeing to collaborate in maintaining the region’s environmental integrity, putting in place guardrails against unconstrained economic exploitation and dealing with natural hazards in an unforgiving landscape. There was a recognition of the Arctic’s role in global weather and the need to study these phenomena so that the world was better prepared to deal with climate change. The Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy was signed in Rovaniemi in Finland in 1991 among Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the then Soviet Union and the US. Cooperation under this agreement included search-and-rescue operations, the monitoring of climate change’s impact on the north and conservation of its fragile ecology. Five years later, as the book points out, the Arctic Council was set up with the same eight countries as permanent members. Later several non-Arctic countries, including India, joined as observers. This collaborative phase lasted barely a decade. The author puts the blame squarely on Russia and China, who he claims “knew exactly what they wanted: all of it.” In 2007, Russia planted its national flag under the North Pole under the Arctic Ocean. The age of nationalism had returned to the north. 

In making his plea for the US strengthening its military presence in the Arctic, Mr Rosen spells out how Russian and Chinese military activities have expanded in the region. Russian and Chines warships appear regularly in close proximity to the Aleutian Islands. “While the US had only 2 working so-called heavy icebreakers, Russia had more than 50; China had 4 in service and at least 2 to be completed icebreakers to open up what it called its Polar Silk Road.” 

What happens in the Arctic is of particular importance to the Indian sub-continent and research helps in understanding the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas. The book refers to an Indian researcher (the appendix identifies him as Dr Shailesh Nayak, currently Director of the National Institute of Advanced Studies and a respected scientist) making a plea for resumption of collaborative research under the Arctic Council, which has been suspended since the onset of the Ukraine War. 

Polar War reflects the current reality of security considerations overwhelming all others, including the threat of climate change. The irony is that the ecological catastrophe that awaits our carbon-soaked world will make utterly irrelevant the inter-state contestation that drives international politics today. The myopia is breathtaking and, unfortunately, the author himself falls prey to it. 

While the book is densely packed with perspectives drawn from the author’s extensive travels in the Arctic countries and his familiarity both with the climate change issues and security dynamics, the presentation suffers from dispensing with chapter numbers and lacking a certain flow in the narrative. There is a certain abrupt shift from a compelling narrative on the degradation of the Arctic ecology to the compulsions of national security, which becomes the main theme of the book. One would have preferred a more balanced perspective.

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The reviewer is a former foreign secretary