Greenland has once again found itself transported, through the magic of Trumpism, from a remote and oft-overlooked corner of the Arctic to the geostrategic center of the world.
Continue reading An Indecent Proposal: Let’s Make Greenland an Offer They Can’t Refuse!
To fully understand contemporary Arctic globalization, and its significance to world politics, it is essential to understand the geopolitical connections interlinking the Arctic region to rest of the world across time. This interlinkage has a geospatial dimension that extends beyond the Arctic due to the region’s increasing global influence (as a consequence of both climate change and historical processes of globalization), and a temporal dimension as well. The geospatial dimension is well understood today, thanks in large measure to climate scientists and their important work informing the world of the Arctic/global nexus, in addition to the many Arctic actors and scholars engaged in responding to the many pressing climate challenges affecting the region. Less well understood is the temporal dimension, which when considered is usually framed by a narrow snapshot of modern historical time, in which climate change (and, in particular, the polar thaw) is paramount. But a longer time horizon challenges us to rethink what Arctic means, and how long it has been connected to the world system, with multiple cycles of warming and cooling of global significance across the ages. To gain insight into contemporary Arctic globalization, these temporal, global dynamics can be illustrative and informative for re-contextualizing Arctic globalization as a dynamic and ongoing process that predates the rise of humanity.
We will thus look back almost a billion years (or Giga-annum), deep into geological time and from there into human prehistory, extending our time horizon for understanding Arctic globalization through the lens of over 700 million years of Arctic globalism (before the rise of humanity) and globalization (after the start of human time in prehistory). Often, Arctic globalization is contextualized by much more ephemeral and recent snapshot in time, whether our present polar thaw, or during the Cold War (1945-90) and World War II (1933-45) periods of the 20th century, and even as “far back” as the late 19th century, such as the 1867 Alaska Purchase that made the United States an Arctic state. In some of my more historic work, I even look as “far back” in time as the colonial era’s Fur Empires, from around the 16th century onwards, when the Arctic was first integrated with the global economic system While these eras all help to reinforce the idea of the Arctic as central to globalization, they all are, comparatively speaking, relatively recent events in the human story, and in the modernization of the world. But to gain deeper insight into the planetary dimensions of Arctic globalization with its enduring geographic and geopolitical centrality – and to help guide our geopolitical insights as we look forward in time to imagined Arctic futures – we will need to journey much, much further back in time, to deep (geological) history, before the rise of humanity. [See Image 1]
Image 1: The View from the North
Caption 1: A polar-centric view of the northern hemisphere reveals the Arctic’s inherent and enduring geographic centrality, of increasing salience to Arctic globalization as the polar sea ice continues its historic retreat.
Source 1: Malte Humpert, “Arctic Summer Ice Extent 1970-2100,” Maps: Visualizing the Arctic, The Arctic Institute, May 17, 2016, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Summer-Ice-Extent-1970-2100-high-res.jpg.
Indeed, we’ll start our journey over 720 million years ago – for a much deeper examination of the interplay of geology, climate, biology and later humanity with the Arctic across a vast stretch of time. This truly “far back” view integrating deep geological and both prehistoric and historic human time will help us frame the remarkable endurance of Arctic globalization across the ages – from its deep geological roots deep in the Cryogenian Period (720-635 million years, or Mega-annum, ago) of the Precambrian Age when early life evolved and thrived, showing how the Arctic region and/or Arctic geophysical conditions have had planetary-scale influences across a vast stretch of time that dwarves human time by many orders of magnitude. The Cryogenian Period is also known as “Snowball Earth,” a 100 million plus years when Earth’s traditionally “polar” cryosphere experienced a global expansion that ultimately entombed our entire planet in ice. From here, we will leap forward to the Last Glacial Maximum in which much of the Earth was covered by glaciers, during the Late or Upper Pleistocene Epoch some 29,000 to 19,000 years ago when the first prehistoric waves of Arctic globalization took place during the last Ice Age. And from there, we’ll fast forward to our own contemporary time of the Anthropocene when the polar thaw began to whittle away at our very comprehension of Arctic. These three snapshots spanning nearly a Giga-annum, fully one quarter of Earth’s existence, will help to illuminate and inform our understanding of Arctic globalization across the eons.
Indeed, the Arctic has been central to several important chapters in Earth’s most recent Giga-annum, a period we can think of as “deep history” (measured in geological, and not human, time) but which includes human prehistory as well as historic times. At various times in this long temporal gulf, the Arctic has served as either a geopolitical ‘Rimland’ (the term popularized after World War I, as global naval power was on the rise, by geopolitical theorist Nicholas J. Spykman), ‘Heartland’ (the contending concept popularized by his predecessor and theoretical arch-rival, Halford J. Mackinder, in the latter years of the colonial era prior to the cataclysm of World War I) or as the isolated ‘Lenaland’ (a term also coined by Halford J. Mackinder but seldom used today, despite my efforts to popularize it over the years), as we have traditionally imagined the Arctic before the Anthropocene and its accelerating polar thaw. This deep dive across such a vast temporal sweep firmly contextualizes the Arctic at the geostrategic center of the world time after time, suggesting it may well be Earth’s first and most enduring “Geographical Pivot” (the term Mackinder coined to described the Heartland’s enduring geopolitical importance) fostering globalization – with the Arctic center stage for several major acts of Earth’s continuing story, from the aptly named Cryogenian period of the Precambrian (hundreds of millions of years ago); through the Ice Age of the late Pleistocene in human prehistory when ‘Arctic’ again expanded southward, this time bringing waves of humanity with it (tens of thousands of years ago); the medieval era. and in particular the Viking maritime migrations across the icy North Atlantic (hundreds of years ago); to our contemporary world, with its polar thaw and consequent rise in maritime access once again – and whether in its expansion or retreat, serving as a land, sea or ice bridge between continents and cultures (called by some the “stepping stones of giants”).
Our starting point thus begins when all the world is believed to have been entombed in ice during the Precambrian’s Cryogenian Period, a time more commonly known as Snowball Earth that is understood, upon its ultimate thaw, to have been triggered by the proliferation of multicellular life on Earth, part of the “Age of Early Life” that defines the Precambrian, when continents rose, and our atmosphere fully developed. Our next stop is more recent time (relative to Snowball Earth), but still far back compared to the most timeframes that inform our understanding of Arctic globalization – the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) of the Late Pleistocene, from around 29,000 to 12,000 years ago, during which waves of migrating humans found their way to and/or through the Arctic in quest of new hunting and/or fishing territories, whether for prehistoric big game like wooly mammoths to smaller marine mammals and fishes. Their routes were, quite plausibly, varied – the most popular, and first to gain wide acceptance, being by foot along the coastal lowlands of the Bering Land Bridge that formed a land corridor traversing Beringia some 14,000 years ago. But archaeologists, finding evidence (in the form fossilized of human footprints) of an earlier arrival, postulate a use of the more northeasterly and earlier-accessible Mammoth Steppe route through what is now northern Alaska, Yukon and southwestern NWT) into today’s Prairie Provinces and Plains States; and/or a Pacific maritime crossing (along what has been dubbed the “Fertile Shore,” “Kelp Highway,” or more simply “Coastal” route) adjacent to Beringia, and accessible both before its land bridge opened (an opening that is believed to have lasted some 5,000 years), and after it was inevitably flooded by melting glaciers after the LGM concluded, some 13,000-11,000 years ago. More controversial and with less scientific evidence is the “Solutrean Hypothesis” across the North Atlantic’s “Icy Crescent” from Europe, a largely hypothetical, alternative prehistoric Atlantic maritime crossing skirting the icy coasts of the that link northern Europe to the Americas through what is now Iceland, Greenland, Labrador and Newfoundland, and that would again, many millennia later, transport seafaring medieval Vikings to North America. One can think of this as an ideological “Make Prehistory Great Again” counter-narrative to more scientific interpretations of America’s peopling along the very path some feared might entice invading Nazis to North America in World War II, particularly after Imperial Japan occupied the Outer Aleutian Islands at the outset of World War II along the ancient maritime route adjacent to Beringia, a prelude to yet another invasion that might have, but in the end did not, transpire.
Whether by land through Beringia or along the more northern Mammoth Steppe, or by sea across the Pacific’s Kelp Highway (along the Fertile Coast) or the Atlantic’s Icy Coast this multiplicity of migration routes and its extended waves of human migration had profound impacts on the Americas, which had as yet remained unpeopled, and with wildlife yet unharvested. Though prehistoric, the geopolitical consequences of this dynamic utilization of the Arctic as a strategic pivot through which humanity flowed, were profound – and indicative of the future geopolitical significance of the Arctic. A half-millennium after the Vikings braved the North Atlantic’s Icy Coast, in the colonial period, commercial enterprises rooted in European capitals voyaged to/through the Arctic in quest of marine mammals, setting up shop in what became lightly settled Fur Empires such as the Russian-American Company (seeking to satisfy China’s seemingly insatiable appetite for sea otter pelts) and the Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Companies (seeking to satisfy Europe’s equally insatiable appetite for beaver pelts), while commercial whalers sought precious whale oil to illuminate expanding cities as globalization began to vigorously integrate the Arctic’s resource frontiers with European markets – decimating ecosystems and endangering otherwise sustainable Indigenous subsistence. And in our own time, anthropogenic climate change is fast opening up even more of the Arctic to contemporary natural resource exploration, and in time the long-isolated marine sanctuary afforded by Central Arctic Ocean’s once permanent ice cover will be at risk, suggesting a final chapter in this long story of Arctic globalization that dates back 20,000 years.
While most discussions of the Arctic globalization focus upon relatively recent events from the Fur Trade to the end of the Cold War to frame our understanding, it is important to look further back in time for a deeper temporal perspective of Arctic globalization, in both human and geological time scales. Indeed, understanding the interplay of not just human life (since the Beringian migrations of the LGM) but life itself (starting with “Snowball Earth”) on polar ecosystems across this vast stretch of time can yield new insights into Arctic globalization that are relevant to our own time, and provide a more diverse view of the interconnections of the Arctic to our entire planet across a vast sweep of geological time, reflecting the global and enduring interconnections of the Arctic region to the nonpolar world, and its fragile and yet resilient web of life that increasingly unites humanity to so many polar species that humanity has sought.
Each of these periods noted above may be understood as a distinct “Age of the Arctic,” with Snowball Earth being the age when all the Earth became a polar icescape, suggesting that “Arctic” (commonly understood to be the northern “end of the Earth,” and one of the two “polar regions” (with some considering the high Himalaya a “third pole” of its own) is of itself a narrowly conceived era of divergence between both the nonpolar world and the frozen extremes of the Earth (whether the North and South polar regions, or the high alpine, glaciated components of Earth’s cryosphere), and between an unchanging temporal and spatial frozen state, and our current era, the Anthropocene, with its accelerating polar thaw driven by anthropogenic climate change (what Canadian Arctic expert, author and journalist Ed Struzik foresaw in 1992 as a looming “End of Arctic.”[1] But in between these poles of divergence, the polar world has in fact ebbed and flowed with a dynamic cycle evident in the geological record, even though the human experience of Arctic is bookended by the frozen world of the ice age during the LGM, and today’s warming (and sometimes burning) Earth. Below, we will journey through prehistory, from Snowball Earth some 600 million years ago to the more recent LGM some 20,000 years ago, when humanity began its very first wave of Arctic globalization, to our own time, the Anthropocene, with its polar thaw and consequent acceleration of Arctic globalization.
From The Ages of the Arctic to the End of Arctic
When teaching these many Ages of the Arctic that appear in history (and prehistoric deep history) as I did while visiting the University of Akureyri as a Fulbright Scholar in 2020, I often start with the prescient architect of America as an Arctic state, William H. Seward, who as Secretary of State during and after the Civil War positioned the recently reunified United States for its global rise by expanding to the polar region; author Ed Struzik, whose prescient “The End of Arctic” cover story in Equinox magazine (noted above) was published in 1992, decades before most of us became aware of the polar thaw; and pioneering Arctic international relations theorist Oran Young, whose equally prescient 1985 Foreign Policy article, “The Age of the Arctic”[2] framed Arctic international relations through a geopolitical lens centered upon the North Pole just five years before Struzik foresaw the Arctic’s very end). Whether we joyfully welcome the arrival of the “Age of the Arctic” proclaimed by Young or mourn the “End of Arctic” as foreseen by Struzik, it becomes clear that these contending visions of the Arctic span a diverse range of sentiments regarding what we may gain versus what we may lose, much as experienced at the dawn of life on Snowball Earth, and later at the dawn of human globalization during the LGM. Whether we are at the dawn of a new “Age of the Arctic” or in the first spasms of the “End of Arctic,” we find ourselves in Hegelian dialectic that seems to oscillate across the ages between Oran Young’s optimistic “Age of the Arctic” and Ed Struzik’s pessimistic “End of Arctic,” and this oscillation can be traced all the back to Snowball Earth 600 million years ago, and all the way up to our present time.
Indeed, my view is that these are all chapters in a pendular and expansive age of Arctic dynamism that resonates across geological history and may even apply to our quest for life beyond Earth at the interface between ice and liquid water, whether on the icy moons of Jupiter or deep in Pluto’s core, or on exoplanets circling distant stars in those solar systems’ habitable zones. Back here on Earth, if we broaden the time scale of our discussion, and consider human prehistory and deeper geological history as a continuous story, we can view this new, enduring age of Arctic dynamism as one that extends from deep into Earth’s past into our own time. The immediate relevance of deep history to the present may not always be obvious, since it not only predates the evolution of humanity, but marks the transition from single-celled life to more complex multicellular life. But as metaphor – to help us understand the range of changes in Arctic climate that we observe across the eons (measured in billions of years) – w come to understand the Arctic as an inherently dynamic place where change in many ways is the norm, and not the exception. In such a world, Arctic climate change is not a crisis or ephemeral event but the status quo for at least the last quarter of our planet’s (and solar system’s) very existence. Arctic dynamism embodies a dynamic fluidity and perpetual motion that greatly contrasts with the traditional view of a frozen and unchanging Arctic. Whether we look much deeper into the past, to geological history (millions of years ago), or less deeply to human prehistory (tens of thousands of years ago), or even more recently to the colonial era when globalization began to modernize (measured in hundreds of year), we find some intriguing connections to and parallels with the Arctic of our own time. And while contemporary Arctic globalization has been deeply impacted by anthropogenic climate change, if we recontextualize man-made effects as only the latest biological disruption to the Earth climate system by the world’s current apex predator and predominant species, human beings, we can more readily understand the connection to the biological renaissance that followed Snowball Earth, and other periods in which climate change resulted from disequilibria to Earth’s biosphere by runaway carbon or methane production by one species or another across the ages. The Anthropocene thus becomes more a norm and less a deviation from historical trends across geological time.
Indeed, when we turn our attention to the many worrisome manifestations of Arctic climate change today, we find not a break with the past but a reconnection to it that is often overlooked. In the murky depths of geological and human history, we can both contextualize and transition from the contending Ages of the Arctic to a broader discussion of Arctic climate (and its dynamic change) reaching deeply back in time, indeed, all the way back to the Cryogenian period (from Greek kryos (cold) and genesis (birth), when our entire planet is believed to have been entirely covered in snow and ice from pole to pole with a planetary-wide cryosphere that in essence defined our entire planet to be Arctic some 600-700 mega annum ago) – in striking contrast to today’s world, defined since the end of the LGM by a much smaller cryosphere in just our polar regions and in high alpine glaciers like the Himalaya (called by some the “Third Pole”), where what remains of the Arctic is a mere fraction of the Earth’s earlier cryosphere, and even when combined with the other cryospheric holdovers (such as terrestrial glaciers in addition to pack ice in the southern ocean) from deep antiquity, conveys not only an extreme of climate and geography, but a dynamism as well. By broadening our time-scale for this extended age of Arctic dynamism, and considering both prehistory and geological history, the immediate relevance of such deep history to understanding our present-day Arctic will become clear; indeed, understanding the range of changes in Arctic (and global) climate that we can observe across the eons, we are reminded that Arctic is dynamic and where change, in so many ways has been the norm, one that is accelerating in our time, but well within the range of climatic variation that deep history presents to us.
Snowball Earth: An Age of Ancient Arctic Globalism
Indeed, geological history provides us with some compelling metaphors for understanding the Arctic, its place in our planetary history, and its place in the human story. “Snowball Earth,” during the aptly-named Cryogenian period that started over 700 million years ago, is believed to have been essential to kick-starting evolution beyond microorganisms by toughening up early life forms through shell formation and other adaptations to the era’s planet-wide deep freeze; the Paleocene/Eocene boundary (where these two epochs transition, around 56 million years ago), when tropical forests colonized the High Arctic, forming what is now a somewhat counterintuitive oasis of “tropical” life that stretches the imaginations of those who perceive the Arctic as perpetually frozen; and the period that followed the LGM, a relatively recent 20,000 odd years ago, when sea levels dropped, revealing the Beringian land bridge connecting Eurasia to North America – one of the principal, but no longer considered only migration routes for the peopling of the Americas, extending humanity to every continent (with, until our own time, the singular exception of Antarctica).
Near the end of the Proterozoic Eon, which ran from 2.5 billion years ago to around 500 million years ago, Earth had an ice age like no other during Snowball Earth. While not everyone agrees on the details, most agree that all or nearly all of Earth became frozen over, and this frigid period is aptly called the Cryogenic. The theory is that there was so much oxygen replacing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that temperatures dropped to freezing even at the equator – with an echo of today’s climate change (but whose direction is in reverse). It was in essence the opposite of today’s excess atmospheric carbon that is warming the Earth. Some believe that the challenge of surviving Snowball Earth toughened life up, hence the notion of it “kick-starting” evolution, in a new, robust directions. After the big thaw that followed (some 600 million years ago), life proliferated, much as it would yet again after the last Ice Age, when humanity ascended and globally proliferated. Snowball Earth can thus be understood as a vital mechanism for life’s (and later humanity’s) forward evolutionary journey, suggesting that what we think of as Arctic is indeed central to the story of life and humanity on Earth – that just as “all roads lead to Rome” during Pax Romana two millennia ago, the Arctic has been a central crossroads and springboard of life for planet Earth. As today’s Arctic thaws, it can continue to serve in this central role, perhaps more visibly and obviously than in the past. Some scholars see Snowball Earth as more snow, less ice, and thus called a less cryogenic “Slushball Earth.”[3]
Archaeologists have long known from the ancient fossil record that Canada’s Arctic tundra was formerly covered in rich forest during the Paleocene/Eocene boundary, and the few visitors to venture as far north as the Queen Elizabeth Islands in Canada’s High Arctic often come across the petrified forests from this time long ago. As University of Saskatchewan paleobotanist Christopher West describes, “The heady aroma of magnolia blossoms and lotus flowers might have wafted to your nostrils if you had gone for a walk 56 million years ago in the lush green forest which covered Canada’s northernmost islands.”[4] West further describes: “It’s very surprising how similar these ancient polar forests were to some of our modern forests. … The presence of these forests gives us an idea about what could happen over long periods of time if our modern climate continues to warm, and also how forest ecosystems responded to greenhouse climates in the distant past.”
If we consider the metaphorical fluidity and centrality of “Arctic” to our world – and how at one point in time (long ago, in the Cryogenian), our entire world was a world of ice and snow, not unlike like what Pluto looks like in our outer solar system today, with its famed ice mountains and continent-sized glaciers; while at another point in time (after Snowball Earth underwent its transformative thaw), even the highest of High Arctic territories became veritable “tropical” paradises teaming with life, from dense and fertile forests to productive waters with abundant marine life; and then at another point in time, one closer to our time, as the last Ice Age ended, a Eurasian/North America transit corridor opened up between the old and new worlds, globalizing the human story with the peopling of the Americas (whether by land or by sea, or by both). Each of these snapshots in deep-history presents us with a different metaphor for the future Arctic that remain connected to one another by their facilitation of the human journey. A land of perpetual ice and snow, as many had expected the Arctic to remain forever until just over a decade ago, was not a barrier to life’s evolutionary advance, but instead a corridor connecting deep time with our time and uniting the whole of the world at its top.
An increasingly warm and fertile region today, where plant and animal life that evolved far to its south is now taking root and thriving, was once itself a warm and fertile region, perhaps even more so, than we can now glimpse in our future. And as a strategic transportation corridor uniting the continents, the emergent sea lanes so widely discussed as part of our future (and perhaps a seed for future conflict, as many emergent Arctic cold warriors predict), are not unlike those of yesteryear. Each of these ages of the Arctic starting in deep geological history and continuing to the dawn of humanity and from there to our own time, is intriguing unto itself, but the dynamic range of variation in the ages of the (inclusive of Struzik’s foreseen “End of”) Arctic, is perhaps the most compelling takeaway. The Arctic as a dynamic and at times paradoxical state of change, oscillating between its polar extremes while always nudging life (and humanity) further along its road to tomorrow, helps us to understand and contextualize Arctic of today, where change, from the extremes of freeze and thaw, is of itself the common thread that united this disparate ages that span almost a billion years of Earth’s story.
Prehistoric (Ice Age) Foundations of Arctic Globalization, from 30,000 B.C.E to the Present
Discussions of Arctic globalization are often limited in their time horizon to the current period of polar thaw or look back from our present 21st century to World War II and the Cold War when the Arctic region played a central geopolitical role. Some historians gaze further back in time, to the 19th century when the Arctic states now sovereign in the polar world expanded north, including America’s own 1867 purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire, then in fateful retreat from North America. Elsewhere, I have looked back to the colonial era, when the Arctic was first economically integrated with the world economy during through the fur and marine mammal trade.
But here, I refocus my historical lens to gaze even further back in time, to prehistory (or as some now call it, paleohistory) – and in particular, the Ice Age, helping to foster a deeper understanding of the roots of Arctic globalization that become evident with such an extended time horizon. Indeed, looking back to humanity’s epic prehistoric peopling of the Americas during the Last Glacial Maximum in the late Pleistocene, we bear witness to Arctic’s emergence as humanity’s first truly global geopolitical pivot. In our discussion, we will consider the principal theories associated with these prehistoric, trans-Arctic migrations that took place around 20,000 (starting as early as 30,000, and continuing to as recently as 12,000) years ago – which will help to contextualize our more contemporary Arctic migrations that continued into the middle of the 20th century, and which are expected to resume in the future under the environmental, ecological, and economic pressures of Arctic climate change.
One of these theories can be described as a proto-Clausewitzian Beringian Land Bridge theory,[5] a proto-Mahanian Fertile Shore, Kelp Highway or Coastal theory[6] and a more protracted, bi-directional Standstill theory that postulates an extended (multi-millennia) human presence in Beringia, which remain unflooded for some 5,000 years, from which subsequent generations migrated bi-directionally forth to the Americas and back again into Eurasia.[7] There are numerous debates and contending views on archaeological support for one or another but knowing the diversity and ingenuity of our species it seems plausible to me that all three are correct to at least some degree, and not mutually exclusive of one another. In the case of how the Americas became peopled, all of the above may in fact be the most correct answer.
The original Beringian Land Bridge theory postulates the opening of an ice-free passage enabling migration in search of megafauna (the Clovis spear hunters, who specialized in big game like mammoth, which went extinct around this time) some 13,500 years ago.[8] The Fertile Shore theory (also known as the Kelp Highway or Coastal theory), postulates a maritime migration along the fertile and life-sustaining Pacific coast. Archaeological evidence indicates humanity arrived thousands of years before the ice-free corridor opened up, but along much of this postulated route, sea level rise has erased any archaeological record. But not for all of their route, such as along coastal British Columbia where there was a much smaller sea level rise of just two meters, preserving some of the archaeological record, and revealing increasing evidence of a maritime expansion, which is all the more plausible considering the Austronesian expansion across the Pacific a millennium ago crossed the open Pacific, a much riskier feet even if much later in the human story.
Beringia is the region stretching from the Lena River in Siberia to the Mackenzie River in Canada, along which I lived during the 1990s. It also includes the Yukon River watershed, which forms a riverine trade route from the Bering Sea all the way into the Yukon and across its border into northern British Columbia, an active migration route from the late Pleistocene. Interest in Beringia has grown in lockstep with the proliferation of theories on Beringian migration. On the Alaska side of Beringia, named the Seward Peninsula for William H. Seward, whose 1853 “Destiny of America” speech presented America’s polar ambitions as part and parcel of its rise as a global power, a vision that he achieved at least in part with the Alaska purchase fourteen years later. And more than a century after, in 1978, then President Carter created a new national monument celebrating Beringian heritage, the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve on the Seward Peninsula, just across from Chukotka in Siberia, which two years later, as part of the sweeping Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) that redressed the exclusion of subsistence protection from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement ACT (ANCSA) of 1971, it became a national preserve which opened these very lands to subsistence hunting by natives, linking, at least metaphorically, the original indigenous migration across Beringia to the restoration of indigenous subsistence to those very lands.
The shared heritage of the Beringian region, and the remembrance of the Ice Age interconnection of Siberia to Alaska via the land bridge, is the focus of a U.S. National Park Service research program that supports researchers on both sides of the bridge, helping to preserve its collaborative spirit in our own time, including geologist David Hopkins who conducted field research in the Seward Peninsula, and who worked with an interdisciplinary group of scholars to document the land bridge theory of migration across what is now the strait separating the United States and Russia. The region, like adjacent parts of Alaska, has been experiencing profound effects of climate change, and over a decade ago, the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve experienced a sudden and massive die-off of an entire muskox herd from a storm surge that shattered sea ice, causing them to plunge into the icy depths, providing us with a bridge not only linking the two continents that nearly meet in Beringia, but the two extremes of Arctic climate that profoundly influenced humanity in the same region: the Ice Age land bridge that brought humanity to the Americas, and the current polar thaw, which appears to be fast bringing the last chapter of the Ice Age to its end in our time.
The Many Migration Mysteries and Ambiguities of Ice Age Globalization
The debates behind the theories of Beringian migration, and the politics of the routes supposedly taken, and their alignment with archaeological, paleobiological, and indigenous origin legends, also reveal to us the passions unlocked in looking back deep in time. Science does seem to support a more complex history and prehistory than many presume, and perhaps a longer sojourn in Beringia that cultivated the emergence of a new, Arctic or trans-Arctic culture, something like the mythical lost continent of Atlantis that was swallowed up by the sea covering the tracks left behind. It shows us how the Arctic has been part of globalization for at least 20,000 years, shaping the destiny not only of the North, but of the continent and hemisphere, perhaps the world. We see in our look back that there was an Age of the Arctic long before there were theorists to postulate the emergence of such an age. And visionaries like William H. Seward who foresaw a destiny in the Arctic for the United States, were prescient in seeing value in this far and remote geography for a nation just exiting the maelstrom of civil warfare, and reuniting as a people, though the ages of the Arctic and its dynamism as a catalyst for the evolution of complex life, and later the globalization of humanity, has roots deeper in time. For humanity, it was every bit as important that the Ice Age started as it ended, and at both the beginnings and ends of the LGM, it brought Earth’s continents, seas and peoples together, stimulating march of humanity to the Americas from Eurasia, completing the human journey, the Arctic’s first wave of globalization – the Arctic as a crossroads that would reappear millennia later, in our time.
A variation of classic Beringian Land Bridge Theory that better corresponds to the more complex archaeological and genetic record, is the Standstill Theory postulating the emergence and genetic differentiation of “Beringians” as distinct from Asian peoples, thus emerging as a separate trans-Arctic group that started arriving as far back as 36,000 years ago, and “stalled” in Beringia around 21,000 years ago, enjoying upwards of 5,000 years of Beringian isolation and civilizational and cultural development before splitting into three separate waves as post-Ice Age warming commenced, migrating south (to South America), southeast (to the rest of North America), and finally, northeast (into the Arctic), bringing Aleut, Yupik and Inuit now indigenous to Arctic North America.
The Dorset people (called the Tuniit by the Inuit) came before the modern Inuit, and peopled the Arctic from around 500 BC through to the middle ages (1000 to 1500 AD), subsisting primarily by seal hunting and land mammal hunting but not apparently by whaling; they were eventually displaced by the more modern Thule migration, which started around 1000 AD, and which introduced new technology including whale and walrus hunting tools and long distance sleds, and the Thule either crowded out the Dorset, outcompeting them for game, or possibly annihilated them through war. It is quite possible that the Inuit thus “conquered” a hitherto peopled Arctic from an earlier indigenous people, practicing a form of expansion we nowadays associate with state expansion that either absorbs, displaces or annihilates smaller, sub-state entities in the path of expansion. At the very least, the Inuit expansion across the Arctic, which has roots in late prehistory (commencing just a few thousand years ago), has continued into the mid-20th century (facilitated by the modern state, in particular Canada – which sought to settle the Queen Elizabeth Islands with an “indigenous” populace that was in fact exogenous to the High Arctic, the Inuit of northwestern Quebec in the 1950s – and thus completed, in contemporary times, a migration with ancient roots – and is thus not entirely rooted in the distant haze of prehistory known as “Time Immemorial,” challenging our conception of indigeneity, forcing us to recognize peoples from prehistory, and early history, were not necessarily unique in their trans-Arctic geographical migrations and expansions from our own time, and may well have practiced a form of colonial and imperial expansion we now associate with states.
This not only challenges our understanding of what indigeneity is but forces us to re-align our conception of sovereignty with mobility – as the early Ice Age cultures were on the move, and even once settled practiced much dynamic seasonal migration in search of game or living marine resources. The epic Thule migration, according to some, may have crossed the entirety of the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland in just a few years (owing to the survival of fragile pottery found along the entire migration route, which is not thought to have been able to survive much longer.) And so we gain insight from the past not only into the deep-geological time impacts of “Arctic” climate (when “Arctic” could be said to define the planetary state during Snowball Earth) on life and its evolution, but also the broad, millennia-long impact of “Arctic” globalization on humanity (with Ice Age origins, when “Arctic” extended across much of North America), and the ambitions of humanity as it encountered new lands and waters, crossing new frontiers, and settling new territories far from their starting point.
After the Ice: Accelerated Arctic Globalization in a Warming World
Thinking about the peopling of the Americas in prehistoric times, and the dueling theories of Ice Age migration, I quite like having multiple theories to ponder, and do not see it as an either-or, one-size-fits-all situation, since each of these trans-Arctic migration theories contains its own metaphorical value for thinking about our own time. Some find there is much that is counterintuitive about the original Bering Land Bridge theory – including its non-alignment with so much of the archaeological record. The newer coastal theories have much that is appealing, including an alignment with recent coastal archaeology and an embrace of maritime migration– and is a logical explanation for seafaring peoples who may not have needed to head north by land, but instead ventured out onto littoral or even open seas. As noted above, when you consider the success of the Austronesian expansion across nearly all of Oceania, and perhaps as far east as the coast of South America, an earlier maritime explanation cannot be dismissed outright, at least as a partial explanation for the peopling of Americas.
As well, there are some intriguing cultural parallels across the North Pacific, such as between the Ainu in and around the island of Hokkaido and the Kurils, and several of the B.C. coast First Nations, which shared bear worship, subsisted off migrating salmon, and erected magnificent totem poles, to reinforce the plausibility of a direct maritime bridge. On the other hand, the Thule migration and prior Dorset routes clearly arced toward the far north/northeast – and were among the last of the large migrations from the general vicinity of Beringia, suggesting that at least some peoples headed that north through Beringia after earlier routes had been sufficiently peopled, perhaps facing competitive pressures from earlier, and in some cases, larger groups further south, or potentially – fostered by adaptation to the cold, Ice Age Beringian landscape, found the Arctic coast to be comparably hospitable than the steppes of Central Asia from which they started, and were well adapted by their transit through or “standstill” in Beringia. The original Clovis/megafauna-hunter explanation across a more northerly Mammoth Steppe may similarly explain just one path of migration for big-game hunting peoples, while excluding the many maritime/fishing peoples who either stayed along the coast or traveled across open ocean like the Austronesians. Each of these theories thus captures one part of the mosaic of prehistoric, trans-Arctic migrations to the Americas.
One can imagine a grand clash between maritime peoples and interior game hunters that may have played out across Eurasia and into the Americas – the former providing a prehistoric proto-Mahanian strategic (intuitively recognizing the strategic pre-eminence of a sea power) and Spykmanian geopolitical (intuitively recognizing the strategic pre-eminence of a maritime Rimland) conception of migratory expansion by sea, and the latter a prehistoric proto-Clausewitzian strategic (intuitively recognizing the strategic pre-eminence of a land power) and Mackinderian geopolitical (intuitively recognizing the strategic pre-eminence of the interior Heartland) conception of migratory expansion by land – bumping into each other at interfaces such as river deltas and across the entirety of Ice Age Beringia. The relatively recent strategic competition between Athabaskan and Inuit peoples from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, up and over the Yukon watershed to the Brooks Range and into the Mackenzie Delta, and along the Nunavut boundary with the northern prairies; and perhaps the hypothesized prior Thule-Dorset clash (which may well have been an early manifestation of the more modern Inuit-Athabaskan clash), aligns with this somewhat. If we superimpose all these regional rivalries between migrating prehistoric peoples, some with maritime strengths and others better adapted to the interior, we can comparatively understand both the emergence of so many different hypothesized migration corridors as well as their modern variants – each tailored to the strategic and economic cultures of the people involved in their utilization, whether defined by the sea, its coasts, and/or in the interior. At the very least, it creates some intriguing metaphors to frame contemporary discussions of the various Arctic shipping routes, and who favors which and why. [See Image 2a]
Image 2a: Destination: The Americas
Caption 2a: The proliferation of theorized Ice Age migration routes to and through the Arctic is reminiscent of the emergent Arctic trade routes of the Anthropocene.
Source 2a: Nikhil Swaminathan, “Destination: The Americas,” Archaeology Magazine, September/October 2014, https://archaeology.org/issues/september-october-2014/collection/peopling-the-americas-paradigms/.
Indeed, the debates over these prehistoric migration routes through the Arctic remind me of the contemporary debates over future Arctic shipping routes – and whether the Northern Sea Route (NSR), Northwest Passage (NWP), or a Transpolar Route will emerge as future marine transit highways, not just hypothesized proposals – or as described by Malte Humpert, a fully utilized “golden waterway” and not a “niche trade route.”[9] [See Image 2b.]
Image 2b: Arctic Sea Routes: NSR, NWP and Transpolar Route
Caption 2b: Arctic shipping routes: ‘golden waterways’ or ‘niche trade routes’?
Source 2b: Malte Humpert, “The Future of the Northern Sea Route – A ‘Golden Waterway’ or a Niche Trade Route,” The Arctic Institute, September 15, 2011, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/future-northern-sea-route-golden-waterway-niche/.
More likely, in time, all three routes will find appreciative users whose needs are met by one or another, whether it’s security concerns (that currently aligns Chinese maritime interests with Russia’s NSR, while leaving Japan, until 2022 caused Tokyo to split with Moscow over its Ukraine invasion, a major investor in the NSR, now on the sidelines), or simple questions of the shortest path between departure ports and arrival destinations, or thornier questions of future ice conditions as pack ice breaks apart and drifts south). It is true the NSR is the first of the Arctic marine transport routes to be properly commercialized; but the NWP is expected to eventually follow in its wake, after an initial lag in development caused in part by Canada’s less exuberant embrace of Arctic shipping (fearing the environmental and security consequences) and its less attractive ice conditions (compounded by an insufficiency of icebreakers to ensure the trade route can stay open).
Many hope that a direct route over the pole will open up, avoiding any conflicts with sovereigns like Russia and Canada, who view these passages as territorial even when most believe otherwise, with UNCLOS, as the ice retreats and Article 234 (Ice-Covered Areas) becomes less relevant. Article 34 of UNCLOS states: “Coastal States have the right to adopt and enforce non-discriminatory laws and regulations for the prevention, reduction and control of marine pollution from vessels in ice-covered areas within the limits of the exclusive economic zone, where particularly severe climatic conditions and the presence of ice covering such areas for most of the year create obstructions or exceptional hazards to navigation, and pollution of the marine environment could cause major harm to or irreversible disturbance of the ecological balance. Such laws and regulations shall have due regard to navigation and the protection and preservation of the marine environment based on the best available scientific evidence.”[10] This would be welcome to Japan, whose isolation of Moscow has come, for now, at the cost of its continued role in the NSR, and to China, whose alignment with Russia, while of near-term benefit, is less appealing than an alternate trade route independent of any single sovereign, friendly or not. In this way, a continued polar thaw would, in time, displace both the NSR and NWP in favor of a trans-polar route.
One can imagine, two dozen millennia ago, various groups of Ice Age humanity having, in their own way and through their selected routes, a similar “debate”: across the land bridge of Beringia (or the adjacent waters of the “Fertile Coast” or “Kelp Highway”), over the Mammoth Steppe to its north; or even across the icy North Atlantic. This multiplicity of migration routes and diversity of direction positions the Arctic as a crossroads of globalization since ancient times, linking Asia, Europe and the Americas through or adjacent to Beringia, the Mammoth Steppe or the High North Atlantic’s Icy Crescent, each forming a prehistoric “Middle Ground” where distinct precursor civilizations seeded what would become America’s rich mosaic of Indigenous diversity. How little the world has changed in over 20,000 years – or, in other measures, 200 centuries; 7.3 million days; or 630.72 billion heartbeats – and yet, how much the world has changed! This perhaps is both the paradox and lesson of this ongoing age of “Arctic dynamism,” from the deep geological time of Snowball Earth, when multicellular life proliferated; to the first wave of Arctic globalization during the LGM, in human prehistory; to our own present moment in time, the Anthropocene, with its accelerating polar thaw. The Arctic united us all, regardless of our origins, regardless of our present “Arcticness.” Accordingly, it is here for all of us, whether America, Russian or Chinese, or any of the many nations that look to the Arctic for their futures, or in their pasts (or both).
Our deep dive across this vast, at times overwhelming sweep of time, finds the Arctic has and remains at the geostrategic center of the world – or, as Cyndi Lauper might remind us, “If you’re lost you can look, and you will find me, time after time; If you fall I will catch you, I will be waiting, time after time.” This positions, contextualizes and reinforces the Arctic as Earth’s first and most enduring geographical pivot – central to the evolution and proliferation of multicellular life in deep geological time; to the flow of humanity across the polar region to the Americas during the first wave of Arctic globalization in the prehistoric Ice Age; to our contemporary world of the Anthropocene, serving as a bridge between continents and cultures, the long-imagined “stepping stones of giants” – and increasingly, for the rest of us as well.
Endnotes
[1] Struzik, Ed. “The End of Arctic,” Equinox, No. 66: November/December 1992, 76-91.
[2] Oran R. Young, “The Age of the Arctic.” Foreign Policy, No. 61 (1985): 160–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/1148707.
[3] Micheels, Arne and Michael Montenari, “A Snowball Earth Versus a Slushball Earth: Results from Neoproterozoic climate modeling sensitivity experiments,” Geosphere 2008 4 (2): 401–410; Ross, Rachel, “Snowball Earth: When the Blue Planet Went White,” Live Science, February 05, 2019, https://www.livescience.com/64692-snowball-earth.html.
[4] University of Saskatchewan, “Canadian tundra formerly covered in rich forest: Ancient plant fossil record shows,” Science Daily, December 12, 2019, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191212163338.htm.
[5] John F. Hoffecker, W. Roger Powers, and Ted Goebel. “The Colonization of Beringia and the Peopling of the New World.” Science 259, no. 5091 (1993): 46-53.
[6] Fen Montaigne, “The Fertile Shore,” Smithsonian Magazine, January/February 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-humans-came-to-americas-180973739/.
[7] Kelly E. Graf and Ian Buvit, “Human Dispersal from Siberia to Beringia: Assessing a Beringian Standstill in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” Current Anthropology 58, no. S17 (December 2017), S583-S603.
[8] Charles C. Mann, “The Clovis Point and the Discovery of America’s First Culture: Beautifully crafted blades point to the continent’s earliest communities,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-clovis-point-and-the-discovery-of-americas-first-culture-3825828/
[9] Malte Humpert, “The Future of the Northern Sea Route: A ‘Golden Waterway’ or a Niche Trade Route?” The Arctic Institute, September 15, 2011, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/future-northern-sea-route-golden-waterway-niche/.
[10] United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), 1982.
Welcome to our special issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum: The Icelandic E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies (NoMe) on the theme of “IR Theory, the Arctic System, and the Individual Theorist in Perspective.” It includes papers submitted to and/or inspired by our Spring 2020 class on Arctic security through the lens of IR theory that I taught at the University of Akureyri while I was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Polar Law Centre.
To the surprise of many two years ago, the global media and diplomatic community went into a frenzy after the Wall Street Journal published an article about then President Trump’s keen interest in purchasing Greenland from Denmark, generating worldwide headlines comparable to those that greeted Secretary of State William H. Seward when word leaked out of his 1867 secret treaty with Russia to purchase its ailing Alaskan colony, a move widely ridiculed as “Seward’s folly” (but which proved to be enormously prescient). News of Trump’s Sewardian interest in Greenland generated an immediate critical reaction in both Greenland, where a movement for increased autonomy and a gradual, incremental evolution toward sovereign independence has had majority support for many years, as well as Denmark, leading to a brief display of diplomatic sparks between Denmark and its American ally. As Greenland’s foreign minister Ane Lone Bagger put it, “We are open for business, but we’re not for sale.” Prudently, Greenland’s leaders, while vehemently opposed to the idea floated by Trump, nonetheless embraced the immediate (and sustained) rise in attention his proposal elicited, and in the months that followed, enjoyed multiple benefits associated with America’s rekindled interest in the world’s largest island, including fast-tracking the re-opening of a U.S. consulate in Nuuk for the first time since 1953.
At 2.13 million square kilometers, Greenland is equal in size to the combined areas of the world’s next three largest islands: New Guinea (785,753 square km), Borneo (748,168 square km) and Madagascar (587,041 square km), occupying a strategic location along the northeastern flank of North America comparable to Alaska’s position in the far northwest with a comparable geostrategic importance for hemispheric security, one recognized during World War II, again in the Cold War, and now once again as the polar thaw invites increased global interest in the Arctic. While Greenland has long been a colony of Denmark, its formal governing status has evolved in recent years from outright colonial governance toward more collaborative Home-Rule governance in 1979 to, in the wake of its 2008 referendum on autonomy and independence that garnered overwhelming (75.54%) support of Greenland’s electorate, to increasingly robust and meaningful Self-Rule in 2009 – with a path toward peaceful secession mutually endorsed by both colony and colonizer.
Roots of Greenlandic Autonomy: The Circumpolar Inuit Rights Movement
A key driver of this movement for increasing autonomy has been the steady empowerment of the island’s majority Inuit population – part of a wider, circumpolar movement for Inuit rights spearheaded by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), renamed the Inuit Circumpolar Council in 2006. This movement includes, and for many has been defined by, securing the protection of Inuit land rights through various mechanisms, such as the land claims process in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic which has formally transferred land title to approximately one-tenth the land in Arctic North America to the Inuit along with a variety of co-management tools to protect those lands and its recourses (in contrast to the Russian Arctic, where in the absence of gaining land title, there has instead been a more limited use of joint-venture economic development projects, occasionally augmented by the creation of national parks in the absence of a formal restoration of land title to Native ownership). In addition to regaining (and formalizing) land rights, the Inuit rights movements has sought, and successfully strengthened, the preservation and revitalization of Inuit culture and language, along with the increasing empowerment of Inuit through greater self-governing powers, with notable achievements in both Alaska and the Canadian Arctic in addition to Greenland.
The movement for autonomy in Greenland, and the collaborative path toward its eventual independence with the support of Denmark, is both part of this circumpolar movement and distinct from it, as noted by Hannes Gerhardt in 2011, and takes inspiration in part from the pioneering gains of the Arctic’s evolving experience with Inuit land claims, starting with the historic Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 which jumpstarted the process of Inuit-State reconciliation, and continuing through subsequent revisions as land claims were sequentially settled across Arctic North America until 2005, over three decades later. But at the same time, the constitutional and historical context for the Inuit rights movement in Greenland is markedly different from on the mainland of Arctic North America, with a colonial system largely in place, albeit with much increased autonomy. It is this asymmetry of constitutional and historical contexts that has propelled Greenland on what Gerhardt describes as a Westphalian trajectory, toward the emergence of what would be the first truly sovereign majority-Inuit state.[1]
ANCSA was the first land claim to transform the political geography of the North, and while it had many structural flaws and imperfections, it laid a foundation from which Arctic land claims continued to evolve, with each new iteration providing the Inuit with greater powers, increasingly augmenting Inuit self-governing powers, first through the integration of co-management with a land settlement, and later with the integration of self-government (initially via public governance models, and later – in the 2005 Labrador Inuit (Nunatsiavut) Land Claim – embracing ethnically-defined Inuit self-government.[2] Outside of Greenland, these iterations have been constitutionally subordinated to the sovereign states governing the Arctic region, with Inuit autonomy defined either municipally, regionally or territorially, but always subordinates to constitutional supremacy of the sovereign state itself. But in the case of Greenland, there is for the first time a process in which sovereign independence is a distinct possibility, as mutually recognized by both Greenlanders and the Danish state.
How this movement toward independence evolves, and the diverse constitutional forms the emergent sovereign Greenlandic state may potentially take, has generally not been discussed in great detail in the academic literature or press, apart from being the logical conclusion to the incremental approach to expanded Greenlandic autonomy that has taken place thus far, and thus with sovereignty limited to the island of Greenland itself, and not generally in any other form, expanded or diminished in geographic scope. But this does not mean that Greenland’s independence will remain confined by its present geography, and that over time we won’t see other manifestations of Inuit sovereignty and configurations of Inuit state extent emerge. This article presents a preliminary discussion of some of these variants, primarily sovereign or co-sovereign models that may at the present time seem highly improbable. Because the future of Greenland, and the ultimate extent of Inuit sovereignty asserted, is of such great importance to the stability of the High North Atlantic region and to North American security, it is vital that we consider all possible models and outcomes. The following paper is a preliminary effort to elucidate these possibilities.
Climate Consequences: Energizing the Inuit Rights Movement
Adding urgency to the contemporary circumpolar Inuit rights movement, with roots firmly planted in the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, has been the dramatic and volatile effects of the polar thaw, bringing global attention to a region that has, since the Cold War, been largely neglected. What was once something of a niche field understudied by international relations and strategic studies scholars has, since the polar thaw become a topic of global attention from the lay-public to the highest levels of governance, becoming front and center to not only study, but policy formulation and strategy development around the world – so much so that numerous non-Arctic states have their own Arctic policies, and non-Arctic observer states now outnumber the Arctic member states on the Arctic Council, the post-Cold War international regime that collaboratively overseas the Arctic region on a number of non-defense and non-security issues areas. Growing global interest in the Arctic brings along new diplomatic challenges, most recently the rise of China and its assertions of a special “near-Arctic” status aligned with its “Polar Silk Road” initiative which was noted in the 2019 United States Coast Guard Arctic Strategic Outlook, along with other U.S. policy papers and strategy documents, as particularly concerning.
The results of these competing interests in the near as well as more distant future are exceedingly difficult to predict, so considering a wide range of scenarios is essential. For instance, a determined China could develop regional alliances and dependencies through strategic capital infusions to the sovereign island-states of the High North Atlantic, which owing to their exceedingly small populations remain vulnerable to rapid demographic upheavals resulting from a small number of development projects staffed by overseas contractors – resulting in a potential stealth invasion of the region. Iceland, with a population around 364,000 and a long sovereign experience, far more resilient to such an external demographic threat, though were Iceland to break from NATO and pursue a non-aligned future, its vulnerability could increase. Greenland, while part of the Kingdom of Denmark, likewise remains embedded in a solid alliance architecture, but with only 56,000 people could, once it becomes independent, become highly vulnerable to external pressures, whether economic, demographic, or even military.
Similarly, with Russia resurgent and its recently illustrated appetite for foreign intervention (following its annexation of Crimea, incursion in Eastern Ukraine, and military interventions from Libya to Syria), and the renewed specter of a clash with NATO over the small Baltic states, or potentially, the non-aligned northern European states, scenarios of extreme instability in the High North Atlantic can also again be envisioned. In short, global interest in the Arctic introduces new risks which could in time threaten the hemispheric security of North America. This follows a long period that with few exceptions was marked by a steadiness and predictability; the pre-thaw Arctic region was more a strategic buffer in world politics that – even at the height of the Cold War – was defined foremost by its stability. The movement for Inuit rights emerged during this period of calm, and the incrementally increasing empowerment of the Inuit proceeded with the same stability during a half-century of policy innovation that began with ANCSA, culminated with the formation of the Nunavut Territory in 1999, and achieving its conclusion on the mainland of Arctic North America with the passage of the Labrador Inuit (Nunatsiavut) Land Claim in 2005.
Were the strategic and geographic landscape to remain stable and largely free of uncertainty, the emergence of a sovereign and independent Greenland would likely continue the current mutually amicable autonomy process and its multi-decade incrementalism further, and not upend regional geopolitics. But because of the dynamic uncertainties of the polar thaw, and the return of Westphalian state competition to the Arctic region in recent years, the potential independence of Greenland becomes instead a strategic wildcard needing to be closely studied and pro-actively engaged to ensure a future sovereign Greenland maintains the close, collaborative and friendly relationship with the United States and the West, optimally as part of NATO, that it currently pursues as a constituent component of Denmark.[3]
Alternate Models for a Post-Denmark Greenland: ‘Thinking About the Unthinkable’ Once Again
While most conversations regarding Greenland’s constitutional evolution, at least those prior to the Trump White House’s surprise overture to purchase the island from Denmark, consider Greenland’s continuing movement for increasing autonomy strictly within the context of peaceful, and negotiated, Danish constitutional politics, there is good reason to consider alternative scenarios not widely discussed – including scenarios of a broader Inuit secession from the states that now assert constitutional authority over Inuit lands catalyzed by Greenland’s successes thus far.
The Inuit homeland has, in contrast to the more complex and diverse subarctic region, a cohesive ethno-political culture, and while it has until now deftly adapted its aspirations for the many different sovereign polities whose borders intersect the Inuit homeland, it is conceivable that as the prospect of formal independence grows for Greenlandic Inuit, the appetite for enhanced autonomy elsewhere, such as in neighboring Nunavut, northern Labrador (Nunatsiavut), Canada’s Western Arctic (the Inuvialuit settlement region), and Alaska’s North Slope, may grow in lockstep. It is imperative to thus ask: What if Nunavut and/or other Inuit regions join Greenland in a coordinated secession movement, or – in the face of successful lobbying by either party or a groundswell of support at home, Greenland decides to change sovereigns, and join either Canada or the United States? While these scenarios may seem unlikely, prior to 1989 one did not hear comparable discussions of a collapse of the Warsaw Pact, breakup of Yugoslavia, or implosion of the Soviet empire before events rapidly spiraled out of control, radically transforming the constitutional fabric of eastern Europe. With the prospect of an Inuit state ultimately and amicably emerging from the negotiated constitutional dialogue between Greenland and Denmark, the consequential implications of this profound and catalyzing transformation must not be overlooked. As Herman Kahn reminded us during the Cold War, it is now essential to think about the unthinkable. Below are what Kahn might dub relevant “metaphors and scenarios” to consider.
Joining Canada and its Exemplary Constitutional Embrace of Indigenous Rights
Were Greenland to change sovereigns rather than seek formal independence, there is much logic to the notion of Greenland selecting Canada as its new constitutional partner – finding in the Nunavut model of territorial self-governance aligned with a land claim treaty many potential benefits well-suited to its needs, and a refreshing break from its current colonial governing structure. Joining Canada is not without precedent: the province of Newfoundland and Labrador did so as late as 1949, around the time the United States was contemplating its own acquisition of Greenland – bringing under the Canadian constitution not only the island of Newfoundland, but the northern coastal territory of Labrador, home to several thousand Inuit who serendipitously are among the most recent beneficiaries of a comprehensive land claim treaty with Ottawa – presenting a logical path for Greenland to follow. Imagining how such a scenario could unfold will require much further study, and would depend, in part, on the emergence of a transnational movement for Inuit unification that, as of now, has not taken root in either Greenland or Nunavut. Should such a movement arise, and for it to succeed, Denmark would have to agree to Greenland’s departure and to Canada’s expansion (as would Canada) unless it were to occur in two separate steps sufficiently paced to forestall Denmark’s opposition – a scenario that may seem extremely unlikely today, but which, in a situation of war in northern Europe, might become more feasible.
Indeed, before Trump’s unsolicited overture, Canada seemed the more likely alternative sovereign partner for Greenland, given the advances achieved by Canadian Inuit through their dynamic mixture of comprehensive land claims, robust co-management, and increasingly powerful self-government processes as well as the long, close collaboration between Greenlandic and Canadian Inuit at the ICC. In recent years, Inuit leaders have expressed much dissatisfaction with Ottawa’s commitment to fulfilling the promises of Nunavut, turning to the courts in frustration on multiple occasions, and in 2006 calling for the moral intervention of famed jurist Thomas Berger, to many Canadian natives the conscience of Canada. More recently, native rail blockages across Canada have re-inflamed long-simmering tensions between the indigenous and settler communities in Canada, straining recent reconciliation efforts of the Trudeau government, a situation that will likely be even further inflamed by the recent discovery of a mass grave at a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Amidst such circumstances, one can no longer presume that Canada, by default, would be the only logical choice for Greenlandic Inuit should they seek to change sovereigns.
Joining the USA: Not Necessarily as Illogical or Ahistorical as Many Think
Indeed, Trump’s unexpected interest in Greenland may – despite the initially critical response to his surprise overture to purchase the island – provide an alternative to choosing between joining Canada or remaining part of Denmark, with Alaska’s transition from territory to state serving as alternative model for Greenland’s future. Such a possibility, of Greenland joining the United States in a constitutional union not unlike that of Alaska, is a scenario that has been considered at the highest levels of the U.S. Government before, particularly in the immediate aftermath of World War II, during which Greenland was an American protectorate and its strategic significance the coming Cold War was keenly appreciated. Such a tectonic shift in North America’s sovereign political geography is uncommon now, and it has been a century and a half since a change of similar magnitude directly affected the United States, when, in 1867, Alaska was purchased from Russia – a move that was widely criticized at the time as a great “folly” but which, in the years since, has contributed much to American security, particularly since World War II. But it’s more frequent, and recent, than many would think, with the aforementioned entry of Newfoundland and Labrador to Canada’s confederation.
And while political leaders in both Greenland and Copenhagen quickly insisted that Trump’s idea was without merit, and inconsistent with their own step-by-step process of decolonization under way in addition to the very needle of history, Greenlandic officials did subsequently, and enthusiastically, embrace America’s renewed diplomatic and economic interest in what had largely been an overlooked Cold War outpost rediscovered amidst the dynamic flux and strategic uncertainty of the polar thaw, and the consequent (and significant) rise in high-profile official delegations to and from Greenland including an accelerated re-opening of an American consulate in Nuuk, the first since 1953, in addition to high profile visits by leading members of America’s strategic and diplomatic community, culminating in the May 14, 2021 visit by current U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken – notably via Copenhagen, and with the Kingdom’s official blessing (and an in-person greeting once arrived on the island by Denmark’s foreign minister and both Greenland’s premier and foreign minister) in contrast to the unilateral nature of the Trump initiative.[4]
Supporters of the Trump’s Greenland purchase initiative, few as they were, noted the increasing strategic importance of Greenland in a thawing Arctic, part of a wider process of Arctic integration with the world economy and its geostrategic architecture under way for many years, with roots dating back to the colonial era when Arctic furs and whale oil fueled the economies of both the New World and Old. They also understood it was a backdoor approach to recognizing the strategic implications of climate change in an administration that did not formally or publicly acknowledge global warming. Indeed, the economic integration of Arctic resources with the global economy is not only a contemporary phenomenon accelerated by climate change, but an historic one dating back centuries with deep and enduring roots. During the Gold Rush era, the mineral potential of the Far North would be equally recognized for its strategic-economic value (leading to a brief demographic imbalance in the Yukon Territory, with more Americans in the Klondike than Canadians, and Ottawa rightly concerned there could be instability and potentially a secession risk); and in the twentieth century, with the advent of air power, the strategic-military value of the region was recognized for its own sake, while its energy and mineral resources continued to be highly sought after by all of the Arctic states, driving a new wave of northern resource development.
During World War II, thousands of U.S. soldiers were stationed across the North, building the strategic Alaska-Canada (Alcan) highway, the lesser-known Canol road, a slew of air bases, and protecting the vital Northwest Staging Route ferrying Lend-Lease aircraft to the Eastern Front, where the Nazi military onslaught was, at great sacrifice by America’s Russian war-time partner, brought to a halt. At the same time, the U.S. Coast Guard’s Greenland Patrol defended Greenland, which came under America’s direct military protection after Denmark fell to the Germans, from becoming a North American beach head for further Nazi advances – indeed, the specter of Greenland falling, and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence becoming vulnerable to Nazi conquest, would concern war planners until the machinery of the Nazi state was decisively demolished. It wasn’t long after World War II came to an end that President Truman floated the idea of purchasing Greenland from Denmark for $100 million, an idea that Time Magazine endorsed for its strategic wisdom the very next year, with widespread encouragement from war planners who recognized Greenland’s strategic prominence for the post-war world.
During the Cold War, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line was built across the Inuit homeland, protecting the North American continent from strategic bomber assault, the Thule air base augmented American air power in the region, and an American consulate in Nuuk helped to reinforce America’s presence. The waters off both Greenland and Iceland, the famed Greenland-Iceland-UK (G-I-UK) gap, would come to play a central role during the U.S.-Soviet confrontation and in America’s forward maritime strategy near the Cold War’s end. Soon after the Cold War ended, columnist and foreign affairs expert Walter Russell Mead proposed in all seriousness, in his July 1992 column in the LA Times, to purchase Siberia from Boris Yeltsin’s Russia for $1-2 trillion USD.
While the outright purchase of such a large portion of the globe is now uncommon, and due to this relative infrequency is widely perceived to be better-suited to the world of yesteryear than that of today, it wasn’t all that long ago that large-scale shifts in borders were more the norm and less the exception. And in today’s world, so much is in flux, and let’s not forget that it was only a half-dozen years ago that Crimea quickly fell to Moscow’s expansionist ambitions, experiencing a rapid annexation by a resurgent Russia – changing hands largely without bloodshed (in contrast to the subsequent contest for eastern Ukraine), suggesting that such tectonic shifts in political geography do remain possible, and in some cases, might even contribute to geopolitical stability. It is thus conceivable that in a future world, Greenland’s union with the United States could again be envisioned.
It is no secret that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been fortifying his vast Arctic territories, with mothballed military bases unused since the Cold War period undergoing a recent and ongoing strategic refurbishment on a scale comparable to Beijing’s fortifications of contested islands in the South China Sea, gaining increasing strategic attention and media coverage – as both Russia and China seek to expand their global military influence and to secure their most proximate island chains.[5] There is every reason to expect the U.S. to do much the same, by strengthening its own strategic architecture and re-fortifying its own proximate island chains along its ramparts, from the Aleutian Islands guarding the Bering Strait, to the Canadian Arctic archipelago standing watch over North America’s northern flank, to the islands that anchor the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap. America’s rekindled interest in Greenlandic security, along with the return of U.S. forces to Iceland (now on a rotating basis), reflect this strategic re-awakening, as does its icebreaker modernization program, the Polar Security Cutter (PSC) Program. Thinking ahead to a more fluid geopolitical world, and toward the protection of the more isolated island outposts in the Far North that remain vulnerable in such a world, is a prudent exercise given the perceived risks associated with both increasing state rivalry in the Arctic, and of Arctic climate change.
Exchanging Colonial Sovereigns: An Alternative to Independence
To imagine a hypothetical world in which Greenland might become an American territory, on a path toward statehood not unlike that which Alaska followed, is to imagine a world in which North America is more secure and united than it is today. Greenlandic Inuit, who suffer from a long legacy of neglect and whose colonial experience, despite recent gains in autonomy, has not been entirely positive, particularly in the smaller and more remote villages lacking basic infrastructure and economic opportunities, could indeed stand to benefit in multiple ways.
First and foremost, the defense of Greenland in time of war would be strengthened by its constitutional integration into the U.S. polity, much the way Alaska’s has been since its purchase, and this alone could deter war from ever taking place. That the legacy of Russian colonialism, which under the RAC was brutal and exploitative, could be gradually reversed in Alaska over time – where particularly since the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 and the subsequent Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) of 1980, gains by Alaska natives have been notable, even if still a work in progress – is illustrative of the changes we can expect in such a hypothetical future.
While Greenland’s gradual process of increasing autonomy and decolonization under Danish rule would be up-ended by such a change of sovereigns, a mutually positive outcome of a U.S. purchase could be a win-win for both Greenlanders and for America. There would have to consent to such an exchange of sovereigns, to be sure, and that would require a referendum to be held. But, once the people of Greenland make their choice, if they choose to join the United States in union, it would be an historically transformative event on a scale of the Alaska purchase, and with the same long-term potential strategic and economic benefits. It may not be likely, and at the moment is not under consideration by either the U.S., the Danes or the Greenlanders. Indeed, it may well have been just a brief flirtation, and not a long-term strategic commitment of the President’s, and thus different from, say, Secretary of State William H. Seward’s embrace of Alaska as a critical component of America’s expansion. But it is no less a scenario worthy of study.
Because the globalized world is vastly different from the colonial world, however, it would require additional parameters be met than required for the Alaska purchase. Like with the Alaska purchase, which Russia welcomed for the financial relief it provided, as well as its reduction in strategic pressure with the century-old United States providing a much-needed buffer between the British Empire in North America and the remaining territory of mother Russia on the Eurasian side of the Bering Strait. But in addition, the people of Greenland, who are majority Inuit, would have to also welcome a change in sovereigns, and find American policies and investment, in addition to its military protection, attractive enough to forego independence. Because securing and sustaining independence with a population of 56,000 is quite a difficult challenge, a formal sovereign association with the United States might, in some circumstances, appeal to the people of Greenland. Just as the earlier-mentioned scenario of Greenland joining Canada would require Greenlanders to find merit in the Nunavut model of regional self-governance, for the scenario of Greenland becoming part of the United States, Greenlanders would have to find merit in the “Alaska model,” with its combination of multi-level governance, settled land claims, still-evolving structures for co-management between the various levels of governance (federal, state, tribal, and municipal), and robust natural resource development experience.
Indeed, were Greenlanders to one day consider whether to join the United States or Canada (in lieu of pursuing independence), their choice may be between resource-development (more robust in Alaska, with its strong state government, than in Arctic Canada) vs. cultural and environmental protections (which are more robust in Arctic Canada than Alaska, owing to the absence of a powerful state level of government, more readily enabling an alignment of indigenous and federal interests), the very same fault line that divides contemporary Alaska. Issues of future settlement by non-Inuit would also surely be an issue: Alaska today is less than 15% native (and over 85% settler), while Nunavut remains nearly 85% native (and less than 15% settler), as if an inverse mirror image of one another. Greenland is, at present, closer to 90% native, so is more aligned with Nunavut in terms of its ethnography. On the other hand, Canada, by virtue of its proximity to the United States, is largely buffered from the risks and dangers of world politics, and unlikely to face an external threat to its sovereignty. Greenland, however, is quite exposed, on the outer edge of the North American continent, and in waters that are not only increasingly strategic, but also potentially contested. It faces existential risks as a polity much the way Iceland does, perhaps more so because of its smaller demography and more expansive geography. If alliance membership alone does not guarantee its independence, perhaps a closer constitutional relationship, such as territorial status and a path toward statehood, could one day prove to be an appealing option to the people of Greenland.
Dual-Secession Models: Strength through Confederation
Often, when Greenlandic independence is considered critically, its small population and vast territorial breadth (and its even more vast EEZ offshore) is presumed to leave the island in an inevitably unviable position, particularly should its independence ever be contested by force – suggesting there is at least some strategic and economic logic to a change of sovereigns rather than a bid for a fragile sovereign independence. But a mere changing of sovereigns may fail to find domestic support among Greenlanders; even so, going it alone need not be the only path left to pursue. Indeed, Greenland may in the face of so many obstacles to sovereign viability continue to choose to remain part of the Kingdom of Denmark by mutual consent, and thus decelerate its march toward independence and continue to refine its relationship, and expand its autonomy over time, with the same incrementalism as in the past.
Alternatively, it is also possible that the movement for independence in Greenland could inspire a similar movement in Canada – particularly Nunavut, which has close historical, cultural and familial ties to Greenland (with its north settled by Canadian Inuit just over a century ago) in addition to its close geographical proximity to Greenland, where Inuit already govern at the territorial level but face continuing implementation resistance from Ottawa – resulting in the theoretical potential for a transnational movement for dual-secession from both Canada and Denmark. While Canadian Inuit have gained much in native rights and self-governing powers, more than in any other Arctic region, their communities still remain traumatized, with multiple indicators of societal collapse including epidemic levels of suicide, substance abuse, and community violence. Should Ottawa remain unwilling or unable to fulfil the aspirations of Inuit for meaningful autonomy and the many material comforts enjoyed by southern Canadians (ranging from health security and community safety to educational opportunity), one can envision a movement emerging in Nunavut that aligns with Greenland’s independence movement, where seeds for a dual-secession movement may find fertile soil.
Dual-secession would be complex to manage, posing even greater risks to the United States and its NATO partners’ security, comparable in scale to the Quebec independence movement further south, which over the years has threatened to destabilize the northeast of North America, coming perilously close to a Quebec secession in 1995. While much progress has been made toward healing the enduring French-English divide in Canada, it is not inconceivable that the movement could re-intensify, and if it did, the fate of Nunavut to its north and Nunatsiavut to its east could be profoundly affected – either by overt Quebec military expansion to secure these vulnerable, majority-Inuit flanks, or covert efforts to destabilize these regions to prevent them from serving as staging grounds from which Anglo-Canada could destabilize Quebec’s energy-rich north. Further, in the event Quebec one day secedes from Canada, Inuit to Quebec’s north could seize the opportunity to make a similar bid for independence – and in so doing, may find many reasons to partner with Greenland in its quest. Such a scenario, while clearly improbable at the moment, remains worthy of future study, since the role Nunavut and Nunatsiavut might play in a post-Quebec Canadian confederation, and their likelihood of being caught in the whirlwind of chaos precipitated by a Quebec secession, could be of much consequence.
Joining Iceland and/or the Faroes: Dual Secession with a Twist — A Confederation of Former High North Atlantic Colonies
A similar dual-secession movement might emerge to Greenland’s east, where currently separate movements for a gradual and mutual secession from Denmark have emerged in both Greenland and the Faroe Islands, modeled in part on the successful independence movement by Iceland a century ago. If the movements for Faroese and Greenlandic independence were to merge into a single High Atlantic independence movement, once can envision the potential confederation of the Faroes, Greenland and Iceland – a union of former Danish colonies that share a colonial heritage and many post-colonial synergies. This scenario would create, in essence, a greater Icelandic sovereign entity, leveraging Iceland’s diplomatic, economic, and political strengths along with its central strategic role as a strategic hub between Europe and North America within the NATO alliance. The demographic diversity of such a union, united by its shared heritage of remote subsistence marine resource harvesting communities, whether seal, whale, or cod, would lay the foundation for a fascinating polity enriched by its own regional variation and distinctiveness.
In contrast to a dual Nunavut-Greenland secession, with all its risks and complexities, such an island-confederation of former Danish colonies could offer the region much promise of stability and cohesion, since the two new secessions would be equally embraced by both island colonies as well as their mutual colonizing sovereign, and their constitutional union with Iceland would further bring solace to their mutual alliance partners concerned with the emergence of new EEZs in newly independent microstates lacking the self-defense, search and rescue, or monitoring capacity for EEZ enforcement. Reykjavik could serve as a mentor to both Greenland and the Faroes, offering independence through confederation, much the way the union of the Malay peninsula with most of northern Borneo did after World War II – harnessing the movement for independence and away from colonialism while avoiding the specter of balkanization and instability. Originally, Singapore – the economic engine of that region – was set to be part of the new Malaysian state, along with Sarawak and Sabah, and had Singapore stayed in Malaysia, its role would likely mirror that which Reykjavik could play in an Iceland-Greenland-Faroe Islands confederation, as an engine of economic growth, a model for effective, efficient and democratic self-governance, and a center for education and training.
While a constitutional union with the United States was, from the moment the Trump White House proposed it, highly controversial and widely lampooned, a confederation of former High North Atlantic colonies seems less likely to face as much criticism, even if not actively under consideration now. Iceland, independent now for over seventy-five years and autonomous for more than a century, can thus serve as a mentor to its neighbors as they follow down the path that it earlier blazed, with the full blessing of their mutual (former) colonizer, and a close relationship with Copenhagen after independence. While Iceland’s sovereign independence is universally recognized, and a fixture of the Arctic’s political geography that contributes not only to the region’s unique and enduring collaborative balance between East and West dating back to the Cold War, but to its dynamic balancing of the interests of small and large states, as well as between hard-power and soft-power approaches to international relations and regional security; it would not be illogical to view Iceland’s independence experience as part of a sequential process of decolonization across the High North Atlantic, both inspiring and guiding the movements for independence of its neighbors – positioning Iceland as an exemplary leader on how to amicably decolonize, remain friends with the former colonizer, and emerge as a bridge between the many seeming contradictions inherent in the diverse NATO alliance, much the way Greenland (if and when it does secede from Denmark) can serve as a bridge between the indigenous and the Westphalian worlds.
So while each movement for independence in the High North Atlantic is generally viewed as sui generis, viewing them in tandem and in sequence raises an interesting possibility of confederation after independence. All three, once sovereign, will emerge on the world stage as relatively vulnerable microstates, with populations that would be hard pressed to secure independence in war time on their own – but whose strategic geography, despite their asymmetries in scale, infrastructure, and resource potential, positions them as important future alliance partners. With a shared security challenge and a common history of colonization, and with strong cultural, maritime, trade and diplomatic ties, there could be numerous benefits of forging a common union, one highly decentralized to ensure maximal achievement of sovereign aspirations, but not necessarily independent of one another. Just as there is a logic in Greenland uniting with the Inuit of Canada’s Eastern and High Arctic, one can as logically imagine a High North Atlantic union. Whether the will for such a union ever emerges, or can overcome centrifugal forces pulling the three insular polities apart, remains to be seen, but the theoretical potential is no less intriguing.
Village Sovereignty, Multi-Village Secession, and the Return of the Polis?
There is one other secession model to consider, one more complex than these models of dual secession contemplated above, and that is a secessionary cascade in the more isolated and remote villages which share a strong tradition of independence and survival against adversity, harsh climate, and limitations in resources and their accessibility, from both the colonial sovereigns (where they exist), and regional governments (that have gained much autonomy), and which the more remote communities often find pose a common threat to their interests, and in many cases, their survival as distinct ethnolinguistic communities. Whether that means cutting ties with both Ottawa and Iqaluit on one side of Baffin Bay, and with Copenhagen and Nuuk on the other, or just breaking free of Nuuk and Copenhagen, the result is the same: a Balkanization process in favor of localized forms of micro-sovereignty. One can even envision a restoration of a security relationship between pro-Copenhagen remote communities and Denmark even as they sever their ties to what some perceive as a neocolonial governing structure in Nuuk, no better than the more distant sovereign Nuuk aspires to replace.
Such yearnings have been felt across the Arctic and subarctic for generations and appear from time to time in different places, such as a 1992 “study” the Inupiat leadership told the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (as it was then called) they would sponsor to investigate their potential to secede from Alaska and form not an independent sovereign polity, but a “51st state” in the U.S. union, a research endeavor that catalyzed a formal response by the state of Alaska to forestall. After the Alaska land claim was enacted in 1971, standing up a new system of native corporations and in time a new generation of corporate leaders, a tribal sovereignty movement erupted across much of rural Alaska in search of a return to village autonomy, and federal protection from not only state-level governance but from the assimilating pressures of modernization and globalization. Alaska’s constitution allows for the formation of municipal boroughs for Alaska’s distinctive natural regions, such as on the North Slope where the Inupiat reside, providing a path for municipal governance to embody the sovereign aspirations of a unified region – but which in 1992 seemed far too limited against a state government in Alaska that opposed greater protections of Inupiat subsistence rights. Across the border, efforts to construct a Western Arctic Regional Municipality to jointly govern Inuvialuit and Gwich’in communities, shared a similar aspiration, albeit one that ultimately fell short of implementation, despite coming close more than once – for a more localized version of sovereignty and autonomy.
Justice Thomas Berger, when heading up the Alaska Native Review Commission in the mid-1980s, called his series of hearings a “village journey” which ultimately called for a re-tribalization of Alaska lands, away from corporations and corporate values, toward governance more traditional. Not long after, in 1993, the U.S. Department of the Interior recognized the more than two hundred Alaska Native villages as tribes under federal law. It is possible that the people of Greenland, along with their counterparts in the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic, may choose to pursue a similar model, one that will lead to a new conversation about what sovereignty means, and how it can be nurtured at the local level. The fact that the city-state of Singapore, known affectionately as the “little red dot” on maps of peninsular Southeast Asia, has achieved such a vision, building a modern state with its own sovereign form at the municipal level, is proof there is no limit to what can be achieved within the city-gates, and in the Arctic region, each village is in its own way a country of its own, so why not assert a new sovereign form that embodies the strength of the village as a unit?
Seizing the Moment: Asserting a Stronger Commitment to, and Presence in, the Arctic
Given the widespread attention and curiosity that accompanied the critical response to the Trump White House’s Greenland initiative, even in the absence of forward movement on the plan, the White House’s renewed (and continuing) interest in the Arctic and its increasing commitment to engagement and forward presence in the region, has nonetheless been positively reinforced in the many months since – and this surely has not escaped the attention of America’s principal rivals in Beijing and Moscow, nor of its friends in Greenland and across the lightly-settled and strategically vulnerable High North Atlantic.
Leveraging this moment, by extending America’s Arctic presence through greater economic, diplomatic and military engagement with the region and its people, can achieve many of the very same benefits of an outright sovereign accession of Greenland, but without either its risk or controversy. As Greenland considers is many options, and continues its transformation from colony to a more autonomous and beyond toward a more formally independent sovereign status, continued engagement, and support of the people of Greenland, no matter what sovereign model they choose, will go far to ensure the High North Atlantic remains secure and free.
References
[1] Hannes Gerhardt, “The Inuit and Sovereignty: The Case of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and Greenland,” Politik 14, No. 1 (2011): 6-14.
[2] See the author’s 2008 monograph, Breaking the Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic (Lexington Books) as well as his 2009 monograph, On Thin Ice: The Inuit, the State and the Challenge of Arctic Sovereignty (Lexington Books) for more details.
[3] For an overview of Arctic geopolitics in the post-Cold War era, including the era of the polar thaw, see the author’s 2010 monograph, Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom: The Geopolitics of Climate Change in the Arctic (Praeger Books); for more on the evolution of the land claims model and its contribution to Arctic stability and security, see the author’s Chapter 16 of The Fast-Changing Arctic: Rethinking Arctic Security for a Warmer World, “Stability and Security in a Post-Arctic World: Toward a Convergence of Indigenous, State, and Global Interests at the Top of the World.” For a discussion of the complex diplomatic environment of the contemporary Arctic, see the author’s “A Missed Opportunity: How China Ceded its Claims to What Is Now the Russian Far East, Leaving Japan as Asia’s Pre-eminent ‘Near-Arctic state’,” Intersec: The Journal of International Security, October 2019, 26-28; “China and the ‘Near-Arctic’: An Opportunity Lost Over 150 Years Ago,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, September 5, 2019; and “China Lost Chance to Be ‘Near-Arctic’ 150 Years Ago,” Stars and Stripes, August 8, 2019. For a discussion of Inuit involvement in Arctic diplomacy, please see the author’s Spring 2010 article in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, “Cold Front: Hillary, Ottawa, and the Inuit: A Year after the Inuit Re-Assert their Sovereignty, Washington Takes Their Side.” An earlier version of this article was presented by the author at the International Small Islands Studies Association (ISISA)’s Global Island Studies Webinar (GISW) on June 24, 2020, on a panel discussing the future of Greenland chaired by his colleague from the University of Akureyri’s Polar Law Centre, Jonathan Wood, who is also contributing to this special issue of NoMe.
[4] Ned Price, “Press Statement: Secretary Blinken’s Travel to Denmark, Iceland, and Greenland,” U.S. Department of State, May 14, 2021, https://www.state.gov/secretary-blinkens-travel-to-denmark-iceland-and-greenland/. As noted in the State Department’s press briefing on Secretary Blinken’s visit, before heading to Reykjavik for the Arctic Council ministerial, Blinken began “his trip in Copenhagen, Kingdom of Denmark, where he [met] with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod to discuss our strong bilateral ties, commitment to combating the climate crisis, and our shared interest in strengthening the transatlantic relationship” and “then travel[ed] to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where [to] meet with Greenlandic Premier Múte Bourup Egede and Minister Broberg, together with Foreign Minister Kofod [to] discuss the strong partnership between the United States and Greenland and our shared commitment to increase cooperation in the Arctic.”
[5] For instance, see Andrew E. Kramer, “In the Russian Arctic, the First Stirrings of a Very Cold War,” New York Times, May 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/russia-us-arctic-military.html.
Pioneering theorist of geopolitics, Sir Halford J. Mackinder, long ago recognized the strategic interconnections between the Eurasian “heartland” (viewed by Mackinder as history’s primary “pivot area”), the “inner-” or “marginal-crescent” (called by many, most famously by Nicholas J. Spykman, the “rimland”), and the more distant “outer-crescent” of the world island, but left the frozen Eurasian Arctic region beyond this vital, dynamic and recurrently contested “pivot area” of the heartland, instead dubbing it “Lenaland” for its strategic isolation from the world island.[1] The Northeast Passage (of which the Northern Sea Route is part), and the offshore islands to its north, were, before the current era of profound and by many counts accelerating Arctic climate change, every bit as remote as “Lenaland,” of much future anticipated value but doomed by climate and geography to remain of minimal strategic importance while Ice Age conditions persisted in the Arctic. But with our era’s polar thaw, “Lenaland” itself has the potential to become a new extension of the heartland, and gain equivalency with the rest of this all-important pivot area, just as even more remote archipelagic regions of the Arctic long impenetrable to state power and thus of limited importance to world politics (particularly prior to the militarization of the global air, space and subsurface domains during the 19th and 20th centuries), may one day emerge as strategically salient rimlands.
Introduction: From Old Geopolitics to New – Arctic Island Chains, Global Security, and the Polar Thaw
That the Arctic was largely insular and archipelagic mattered less in the prior era of near-permanent polar pack ice than it does in our era of polar thaw, as the many islands and archipelagos that define the region’s physical geography remained locked in ice, in some cases all year round, and were thus perceived as strategic buffers due to their inaccessibility, more akin to the vast “wall of sand” defined by the Sahara than the dynamic (and frequently contested) Mediterranean basin. But this is decreasingly the case, and will in time profoundly transform the geopolitics of the Arctic and its strategic significance to the world, weakening sovereign claims to both the Northeast Passage (by Russia) and the Northwest Passage (by Canada) rooted in Section 8, Article 234 of the Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC) once they’re no longer perceived to be ice-covered areas. Indeed, with the disappearance of much permanent multi-year Arctic ice, it has become increasingly obvious that for the vast majority of the Arctic’s land, a defining geographical feature is increasingly its insular and/or archipelagic nature, comprised of multitudinous individual islets and islands that encircle the entirety of the circumpolar Arctic – as if stepping stones for future northern state expansion and development, and even potential conquest. This plentitude of tightly clustered archipelagos form increasingly strategic and salient island chains that must be held in order to defend against external threats or to deter them from rising altogether. In their aggregate, they in turn form a pan-hemispheric super-island chain, an increasingly salient foundation stone of the global order, each archipelagic component cluster with its own inherent tactical or regionally strategic value. These stretch all the way from the Aleutian Islands in the west to Wrangel Island in the east – between which can be found thousands of others from diminutive (44 square miles) Herschel Island just off the Yukon Territory’s north slope with its storied whaling era history and worrisome (to Ottawa) year-round American commercial presence; and the even smaller Hans Island (0.5 square mile), a rocky outcropping midway between Canada’s Baffin Island and Denmark’s island colony of Greenland which has been amicably contested in a neighborly way by both Ottawa and Denmark through what some have dubbed their “whiskey wars”[2] as the armed forces of each nation leave their liquor of choice – Canadian whiskey, or Danish schnapps, along with their respective national flags – upon departure for their rival to enjoy upon their next arrival); or the slightly larger Grimsey (2 square miles), just off Iceland’s northern shore, straddling the Arctic Circle and making Iceland, by its possession, a bona fide Arctic state.
To the immediate north is Greenland, the world’s largest island – greater in area than the next three largest islands combined (New Guinea, Borneo and Madagascar); and to the immediate west are respectively, Canada’s Queen Elizabeth Islands (where a controversial Cold War resettlement of Inuit families from northern Quebec took place, which critics have described as a callous deployment of “human flagpoles” to strengthen Canada’s sovereign claims to this lightly settled region) in the north[3] and Baffin Island toward the relative south; and farthest west in Arctic North America is the relatively newly settled Banks Island at the western entrance to the Northwest Passage, which has known modern Inuit habitation only since the early 20th century, when schooners brought Inuit trappers over in search of white fox.[4] To Greenland’s immediate east, of course, is the independent and formally sovereign island state of Iceland, and further east is Jan Mayen island, a remote outpost of Norwegian sovereignty, followed by the multinational treaty-governed island of Svalbard (formerly Spitzbergen), formally under Norwegian rule but bound by treaty to remain unmilitarized and to provide full and equal economic access to all treaty signatories, resulting in a permanent though declining Russian economic and consular presence there – and whose proximity to Russia’s northwestern frontier and gateway to both the Northern Sea Route and Russia’s submarine bastion at Murmansk, has long been recognized as a strategic island. Further eastward are the numerous islands and archipelagos off Russia’s mainland – including Franz Josef Land, Novaya Zemlya (so isolated that it served as one of the Soviet Union’s above-ground atomic testing grounds during the early Cold War years), the Zapovednik Islands, Severnaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, and Wrangel Island, among others, where Russia has been busily fortifying its defense installations after they were mothballed at the Cold War’s end.
Arctic Islands, Archipelagos, and Island Chains: Foundation Stones of a More Secure World
Maintaining control over these many islands, archipelagos and island chains of the Arctic and adjacent gateway regions is of increasing importance to not only the security of the Arctic region, but to global stability and world order itself. They present fixed geographical nodes – much as the many insular “unsinkable aircraft carriers” that have been attained and fortified by expanding world powers since the colonial era, and most notably by the United States since its defeat of the Spanish and its rise as a Pacific and later a truly global power – that are essential to homeland defense, and to the dissuasion and deterrence of aggression and other coercive behaviors by external rivals. Here, the Arctic states are especially well positioned by geographical endowment, owing to their firm and globally recognized (and largely uncontested) sovereignty over their respective Arctic lands, waters, and offshore islands, which in their aggregate ring the Arctic basin like a necklace, providing a protective barrier to each Arctic state’s territorial mainlands. It is true that much of the Arctic North America north of Canada’s mainland is either lightly settled or unsettled, with minimal state presence, and with complex histories of resettlement whose soreness still lingers generations later – and this could provide a weakness to otherwise recognized claims of Arctic sovereignty for potential exploitation, such as, hypothetically, by China much the way it did in the South China Sea. But in the latter, China fortified unoccupied islands adjacent to much weaker states lacking effective means of asserting sovereignty against a rival claim by China, while in the former, the islands of Canada’s High Arctic, like those off Russia’s mainland, or the sovereign and semi-sovereign island polities of the High North Atlantic, are internationally recognized – and Canada’s Arctic neighbors recognize its claims, just as Canada reciprocally recognizes the claims of its Arctic neighbors, with few, and largely insignificant, exceptions (mostly border disputes with neighbors who are, by and large, allies first and foremost). This unity of purpose and commonality of values, reflected in governing institutions and international fora across the Arctic (like the Arctic Council and the Arctic Coast Guard Forum), strengthens the Arctic as a whole and the intra-Arctic bonds between the eight sovereign states of the Arctic region.
This horizontal circumpolar collaboration has been enduring, and will likely withstand new external pressures, or hybrid (dual external/internal) pressures one can envision arising from the strategic triangularity of the competition for power between the United States on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other, as discussed so well by Canadian political scientist Rob Huebert.[5] It would thus be immeasurably harder for China to replicate its tactics as developed in the South China Sea, as doing so would almost certainly generate a universal rebuke from the entire membership of the Arctic Council, state and indigenous alike, and lead to China’s isolation – from not only the democratic Arctic states, but its partner-of-the-moment Russia – a consequence Beijing would find humiliating and which would show the fragility of Beijing’s current entente with Moscow. And while China may seek to influence, through its checkbook, the loyalties of indigenous communities across the Arctic, such efforts will likely catalyze a renewed effort by the democratic Arctic sovereigns to invest in the development of their northern frontier communities, as we saw after China sought to assert itself in Greenland recently,[6] which ironically not only precipitated the 2019 White House overture to “buy” Greenland from Denmark, which was initially widely criticized but led to a longer-term and more mutual diplomatic re-engagement between the United States and Greenland that has included the June 10, 2020 re-opening of the U.S. consulate in Nuuk for the first time since the 1950s, and an offer of US aid to help Greenland battle the pandemic threat from Covid-19. This suggests that Beijing will ultimately have to accept its place in the Arctic order as an outsider, a third-party observer state with maritime and commercial interests and many potential economic opportunities, but limited strategic, military, or diplomatic space for expansion.
A more concerted effort by the democratic Arctic states to court Moscow, through existing international institutions like the Arctic Council and the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, can greatly help toward this end. By strengthening ties within the Arctic states to their indigenous communities, and their relationship with fellow Arctic sovereign Russia, the members of the Arctic Council can greatly reduce the likelihood of experiencing a new, polar Cold War. Active participants in the Arctic Council and the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, which already have established a solid foundation for enduring intra-Arctic collaboration, are especially well positioned to take the lead on these initiatives, with deep and broad traditions of indigenous engagement to build upon. While the previous Cold War divided not only the Arctic but much of the planet into competing military-diplomatic-economic blocs, today’s world is much more integrated and much less likely to bifurcate again – and the added unity fostered by the long and continuing processes of Arctic globalization and economic integration will ultimately trump whatever regional advantages China may seek – so as much as Beijing may persist in its pursuit of such advantage, with continued unity among the Arctic states, China will in the end emerge both humbled and disappointed by the results of its efforts.
Unsinkable Aircraft Carriers: From Cold War to Collapsing Cryosphere
The distinctive and strategically important geopolitics of islands, archipelagos, and island chains – perceived as “unsinkable aircraft carriers” since the early Cold War, and in the aggregate as foundation stones of global security today – undergird and reinforce much strategic thinking with regard to emerging zones of maritime and naval competition around the world. This is particularly evident in recent years in the Arctic Ocean amidst the continuing (and by some measures, intensifying) polar thaw, with its circumpolar chain of archipelagos forming natural bridges between the continents, where they have played an outsized role in human history from prehistoric times up to the present. With the polar thaw, these maritime geopolitical structures are re-emerging from the ice in their primordial insular form, transforming the Arctic region and fostering its reconnection to the world ocean.[7] By understanding the geopolitical significance of these marine geographical structures, and their enduring importance to a stable world order, we can better contextualize the emerging strategic importance of the Arctic region, in addition to other remote and peripheral regions in the world.[8]
There has been much attention paid to island chains in discussions of Chinese naval strategy in recent years, and Beijing’s ongoing fleet modernization and naval expansion from its proximate first island chain (running from Japan all the way to the island of Borneo) on out to its more distant, mid-Pacific third island chain as PLAN continues its evolution full throttle from regional brown water fleet to an impressively robust blue water naval power [see Figure 1 and 2 below].[9]
Figure 1: The First and Second Island Chains
Increasingly, PLA Navy strategists refer to the island chains along PRC’s maritime perimeter, with the first connecting the island of Borneo, Taiwan, the Ryukyus (Okinawa) and Kyushu (Japan’s southernmost main island) and the second extending from eastern Indonesia to Japan’s main island of Honshu via Palau, Guam, the Northern Marianas and Iwo Jima. More recently, the third island chain has entered the lexicon as PLAN achieves a more capable blue water presence. Source: Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, May 23, 2006, http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/china.html.
Figure 2: Beyond the Second Island Chain
Island Chains within the Western Pacific Ocean. Beyond the first and second island chains are a third, running north through Wake Island to Attu in the western Aleutians (which was invaded and occupied by Japan during World War II), and a possible fourth connecting the Gilberts, Midway and Adak. Source: Martin D. Mitchell, “The South China Sea: A Geopolitical Analysis,” Journal of Geography and Geology 8, No. 3 (2016), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306527696_The_South_China_Sea_A_Geopolitical_Analysis.
But island chains are an old feature of maritime geopolitics, dating back to well before the colonial era and have been as central to America’s strategic expansion across the Pacific as they were to the imperial Japanese, and before them, the British. American appreciation of island chains intensified during World War II, and achieved its zenith during the Cold War, after consolidating our hard-fought gains in World War II and dismantling Japan’s Pacific empire through an effective island-hopping campaign enroute to our final confrontation with Japan, itself an archipelagic nation, which culminated in the bloody battle of Okinawa and the subsequent atomic strikes on the island of Kyushu), while defending multiple strategic Atlantic Islands (Greenland, Iceland and Britain) from German attack.
America’s Cold War force structure and its geographic distribution consolidated these World War II victories, integrating the continued security of America’s island and archipelagic partners from Britain just offshore the European mainland to Taiwan at the doorstep to Asia’s mainland to that of the United States.[10] While America’s preferred allied partner, Britain, withdrew as a global hegemon, London nonetheless augmented America’s efforts through its own interventions in oceanic Southeast Asia, where it defended an independent Malaysia and Singapore from expansionist Indonesian nationalism in a low-intensity struggle for the stability of the Malay archipelago, to its liberation of a British-ruled Falkland Islands from Argentinian conquest (or, as Argentina viewed it, unification of mainland Argentina with its lost offshore possession – a struggle that parallels in many ways America’s own efforts to defend an independent Taiwan from what Beijing perceives as its rightful reunification.)
Figure 3: Unsinkable Aircraft Carriers
This image, from the Twitter account “Son of Taiwan” illustrates the strategic importance of Taiwan as an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender early in the Cold War, and a key to U.S. power projection across the Pacific to mainland China. Source: Son of Taiwan Twitter Account, https://twitter.com/sonoftaiwan/status/1138028385714630656/photo/1
Securing strategic island chains has been a fixture of America’s containment strategy since the dawn of the Cold War and continues to this day, and China has, by many accounts, embraced our own doctrine of island chain security with gusto, with island chains now perceived in Beijing as strategically vital outposts for asserting its own military control, and containing American influence. Providing more than a network of “unsinkable aircraft carriers”[11] – as Taiwan was famously described during the early Cold War [see Figure 3 above], and a term that has been applied to a diverse constellation of strategic islands that include Britain, Malta, Iceland, the Aleutians, Japan, and Singapore in addition to myriad South Pacific islands and atolls during World War II and the Cold War, in addition to the many islets of the South China Sea fortified by Beijing in recent years [see Figure 4 below] – island chains punctuate the worlds oceans much the way frontier forts punctuated the seemingly endless expanse of forest and grassland of the American West, providing essential forward offshore supply depots; safe harbors for repairs, recovery and maintenance; and air strips for power projection and over-the-horizon air defense – a strategically advantageous and well-fortified zone of persistent presence, force resilience, and effective control of surrounding air and sea space as central to recent Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO)[12] strategies as they were to our island-hopping efforts in World War II.
Figure 4: China’s New ‘Fleet’ of Unsinkable Aircraft Carriers
Borrowing from the United States’ strategic concept of unsinkable aircraft carriers used effectively to contain China during the early Cold War, the PRC has assertively embraced the concept, applying it to its chain of fortified islets in the South China Sea in recent years. Source: David Todd, “New satellite imagery shows Chinese ‘unsinkable aircraft carriers’ built on Spratly Island reefs, Seradata.com, August 9, 2016, https://www.seradata.com/new-satellite-imagery-shows-chinese-unsinkable-aircraft-carriers-built-on-spratly-island-reefs/
Figure 5: Beijing Erects a ‘Great Wall of Sand’ across the South China Sea
A March 16, 2015 satellite image from CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative illustrates China’s “Great Wall of Sand” under construction in the South China Sea. Source: All Things Considered, “‘Great Wall Of Sand’: China Builds Islands In Contested Waters,” NPR, April 10, 2015.
A modernized version of the offshore coaling stations central to Mahanian naval strategy, well-defended islands and archipelagos can be costly to neutralize during war, and in time of peace become de facto a zone of unrivalled economic, diplomatic and political influence, and a stepping stone toward further strategic expansion. This importance of island- and archipelagic-control to the ability of larger states to project military power, defend trade routes, assert diplomatic influence, and contain regional rivals, explains why Beijing has fortified so many islands and archipelagic clusters in what has been dubbed its “Great Wall of Sand”[13] in the South China Sea [see Figure 5 above], and has shown a comparably strong interest in the strategic-economic integration of its “String of Pearls” that arcs across the Indian Ocean – and why in turn Moscow has done much the same to its own chain of Arctic islands to the immediate north of Russia’s mainland.[14] That both major powers and leading rivals to western influence sense this same vulnerability and opportunity suggests they share a view of geopolitical theory and its intersection with naval strategy, one that the West is now again cognizant of as it was during the Cold War, and moving to counterbalance. This also explains why the White House, amidst the many paralyzing challenges of the present global public health and economic crisis, has mustered the renewed energy, foresight, and policy attention to reassert and clarify its Arctic (and Antarctic) interests, as expressed in its June 9, 2020 memo on Arctic security (“Memorandum on Safeguarding U.S. National Interests in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions”)[15] – which was aligned with, preceded by just one day, the re-opening of an American consulate in Nuuk, Greenland for the first time since 1953 – and why just a year before, it briefly floated an unsolicited bid for what the business community might liken to a hostile takeover of Greenland from Denmark (which Denmark quickly rejected),[16] while around same time anteing up over a billion dollars in funding for its long-anticipated icebreaker modernization program, renamed, appropriate to the contemporary challenge of projecting American sovereignty across an increasingly contested Arctic region, the Polar Security Program – providing a platform for sovereign assertion with the mobility to reach into the deepest of pack ice, from the shores along the Arctic basin all the way to the North Pole.[17]
Stepping Stones to Everywhere
But beyond the Arctic, in places where tensions remain between America’s armed forces and the communities that host their foreign bases, China rightly perceives an opportunity for strategic expansion without conquest. Its overtures to elites in a long list of remote island, archipelagic, and coastal nations as part of its global Belt and Road Initiative, from its “String of Pearls” to its “Great Wall of Sand,” will invariably yield new economic partnerships from which a closer strategic integration will follow. The onus thus falls to America and its allies to ensure that the many indigenous polities that host its global military presence feel appreciated for their contribution to the current international order. It is their hearts and minds that are essential to America’s continued ability to project military power globally, and to secure western values along the way.
This will require a continued and determined diplomatic effort, and a generosity of investment that can match China’s BRI. It is an arena of strategic competition with which it is intimately familiar, from its early global expansion through to the long, and successfully managed, Cold War. More recent challenges during the Global War on Terror, which presented a series of setbacks to American power on the global stage and precipitated a humbling crash course in counterinsurgency warfare and human terrain mapping, when considered amidst China’s strengthening rise and Moscow’s resurgence, suggest the coming global struggle for the hearts and minds of remote, indigenous islanders around the world – whose homelands are critical nodes for effective global naval operations – will not be easy, but that does not mean it is a lost cause. With a concerted effort, and a clarity of strategic vision – fueled by a proper understanding of maritime geopolitics and the continued (indeed, increasing) strategic saliency of island chains to international order – victory for the West is every bit as possible as it was during the Cold War.
Beyond Strategic Triangularity: Indigenous Peoples, Transnational Polities and the Human Terrain of the Arctic
As noted above, there has been much recent discussion of a triangular strategic competition in the Arctic between the United States (whose interests have remained, historically, in alignment with its democratic Arctic allies) on the one hand, and Russia, whose interests have recently overlapped (if not entirely aligned) with China on the other, as pioneered by Rob Huebert’s introduction of The New Arctic Strategic Triangle Environment (NASTE) [see Figure 6 below].[17] The latter pair of rivals to western influence are widely perceived to have the advantage of momentum, with the former playing catch-up. In this sense, the Arctic region, as it rejoins the world ocean with the continuing polar thaw, mirrors the strategic alignment between Beijing and Moscow evident across much of maritime and continental Eurasia. As Alaska Public Media reported last year, “China and Russia are teaming up to pursue their interests in the Arctic, and regional security expert Rebecca Pincus says the United States needs to pay more attention” – though, as Pincus noted, these “two countries have overlapping interests that don’t always align.”[19] In her Spring 2020 Strategic Studies Quarterly article, “Three-Way Power Dynamics in the Arctic,” Pincus further elaborates that the “Arctic is an important locus for great power competition and triangular balancing between the US, China, and Russia. It is what political science professor Rob Huebert has dubbed the ‘New Arctic Strategic Triangle Environment’ in which ‘the primary security requirements of the three most powerful states are now overlapping in the Arctic region,’ raising tension.”[20]
Figure 6: The US-Russia-China Strategic Triangle
The strategic triangle defined by the pendular diplomatic-strategic relationship between the United States, Russia, and China dates back to the Cold War, and has re-aligned several times. Currently, Canadian political scientist Rob Huebert sees it extending into the increasingly active Arctic basin. But the author of this article believes this overstates the importance of China in the Arctic, while understating the importance of the state-tribe interface across the Arctic basin to the region’s stability. Source: Liu Rui, “China-US-Russia Triangle,” Global Times, October 29, 2018.
While Huebert’s “‘New Arctic Strategic Triangle Environment” is an elegant concept, the reality of Arctic geopolitical competition is much more complex, multilevel, and asymmetrical than the parsimony of trinitarianism can explain. Indeed, instead of a tidy triangle of competing sovereign powers, the Arctic region’s strategic competition can be more accurately visualized as an irregular strategic polygon with a dynamic mix of (largely) stable bilateral, trilateral and multilateral interstate relations, with the added complexity of an overlapping but largely invisible (to outsiders) set of internal and transnational fault lines of conflict. Many of these underlying dynamics are indeed triangular, but at the regional level or interlinking a different trinity of actors. By focusing exclusively on the three-way great power dynamics as Huebert and Pincus do, one can miss the many important triangular dynamics at the regional and local levels that can pit state and non-state interests against one another. Indeed, if we apply tripolarity as a lens to understand Arctic power dynamics, it is essential that we do so at the regional and local level. By adjusting our focal length to identify regional and local power competitions across the Arctic, we will find it can be helpful to clarify what at a higher level looks like complexity – for instance, the Washington-Tokyo-Ryukyus (Okinawa) triangle, the Beijing-Tokyo-Moscow or Beijing-Tokyo-Washington triangles (each a subset of larger strategic quadrangle), or the Washington-Moscow-Aleut triangle – each of these regional triangles complicates the over-arching GPC triangle that Dr. Huebert pioneered, paving the way forward for an expanding conversation on strategic triangularity at multiple levels of analysis that overlap and interact in fascinating ways.
These yield a diverse but largely collaborative group of predominant stakeholders that includes Arctic and non-Arctic states (inclusive of their national, regional, and local governments and major economic actors), indigenous peoples’ organizations (some holding regional and local governing powers), and numerous issue-specific NGOs. These operate within an environment marked by dynamically shifting alignments of interests, and a complex patchwork of governing systems with extreme variance and volatility over time. This is especially evident when examined village by village, region by region, and country by country, yielding a complexity that eludes easy explanation or simple strategic dictum.[21] While triangularity may elegantly describe one of the many salient levels of analysis in Arctic geopolitics (that between the three major world powers), this trinity of major states comprised by the US, China and Russia is anything but equal when it comes to their relative power and influence in the Arctic. Indeed, there China, as a non-Arctic states, is in the most important ways not even a significant player, with no Arctic territory of its own, and no seat at the Arctic Council’s table owing to its status as an observer state. This is in marked contrast to Russia, whose Arctic territories are the world’s largest, or the United States, which in alignment with its Arctic NATO partners (Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Iceland and Norway) presents a formidable and historically united bloc [see Figure 7 below]. It is along these sovereign shores that all proposed marine shipping routes in a warming Arctic will pass [see Figure 8 below]. Indeed, as the Arctic continues its historic thaw, its archipelagic nature becomes increasingly apparent [see Figure 9 below].
Figure 7: The Arctic 8 (A8) Span from West to East across the North
This map illustrates the relative scale of Arctic territories of the “A8,” the founding states with full membership in the Arctic Council since its formation in 1996. China is not only not an Arctic state, but its status at the Arctic Council is only as an observer, a rank shared with states as small and far from the Arctic Circle as Singapore, and only since 2016. Source: Drishti IAS, “Arctic Council,” September 17, 2019, DrishtiIAS.com, https://www.drishtiias.com/important-institutions/drishti-specials-important-institutions-international-institution/arctic-council.
Figure 8a: Archipelagos and Emergent Arctic Sea Lanes
As the Arctic opens to increasing maritime traffic, and new shipping lanes emerge, the archipelagic nature of a warmer Arctic becomes increasingly clear, as does the strategic importance of the Arctic’s many islands, archipelagos, and increasingly strategic island chains. The defense and security of these islands, and the shipping lanes they abut, has been of increasingly recognized by the Arctic states as a strategic priority. Source: Source: NOAA, The Arctic Institute.
Figure 8b: Archipelagos and Arctic Defense Modernization
As the Arctic basin becomes increasingly active, and perceived to be of increasing value, Arctic states are redoubling their efforts to defend their Arctic territories, both on their mainlands and offshore, as depicted by Gary K. Busch below. Source: Gary K. Busch, “Russia’s New Arctic Military Bases,” Lima Charlie News, https://limacharlienews.com/russia/russia-arctic-military-bases/
Figure 9: Archipelagos and an Ice-Free Arctic
The Arctic without ice, though unlikely to be experienced before mid-century and then only briefly, reveals a maritime domain defined by islands, archipelagos and increasingly strategic island chains comparable to the Pacific and Atlantic.
If there is going to be a rumble for the Arctic and for control over its emergent sea lanes and vast, untapped repositories of natural resources, it will be a more complex, nuanced, and asymmetrical struggle. Indeed, it is likely to be defined by a concerted multilateral (if not fully aligned) effort by all eight sovereign Arctic states (inclusive of Russia) in response to rising external interest and pressures from an expanding group of non-Arctic states (inclusive of China). All eight Arctic states will not only endeavor to assert effective and meaningful sovereign control over their respective portions of the Arctic, but to also persuasively demonstrate both their individual and collective capacity to secure and defend their Arctic claims from future external threats. And at the same time, the seven Arctic states (all but Iceland) with an indigenous population will endeavor to successfully manage indigenous claims and aspirations for greater domestic engagement and inclusion that, if left unresolved and without achievement of a stable domestic alignment of state and tribal interests, could be exploited by these very same external states looking north to their future economic and strategic needs. It is this potential for exploitation of indigenous claims and aspirations by non-Arctic states that presents the greatest threat to Arctic stability, and which could become the contested battlespace for a future Arctic Cold War.
Foundations for Arctic Stability: Multilateralism at the Top of the World
With all eight of the Arctic states accepting the international legal framework established by the Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC), even without, as in our case, formally signing onto the treaty – with particular enthusiasm at and since the first Arctic Oceans Summit at Ilulissat over a decade ago, where the “A5” states littoral to the Arctic basin mutually pledged to adhere to LOSC – the region as a whole remains remarkably stable, and largely uncontested with the exception of several persistent but relatively low-intensity border disputes over the finer details of baselines and maritime boundaries. And though of some economic significance (such as the effect of the boundary demarcation on ownership of offshore petroleum reserves in the Beaufort Sea along the Alaska-Yukon northern boundary), with the universal and mutual circumpolar embrace of LOSC, these lingering border disagreements present virtually no escalation risk, in marked contrast to the transformation of the maritime geopolitics of the South China Sea due to Beijing’s unilateral fortification of numerous contested islands.
Consequently, the United States and Canada can continue to disagree over their Beaufort Sea boundary as well as the legal status of the Northwest Passage while at the same time jointly participating in undersea mapping (in preparation for their respective LOSC claims), search and rescue, and joint military exercises across the region. And, Canada and Denmark (Greenland) can continue to disagree over who governs Hans Island, the tiny outcropping of rock midway between the two, while maintaining a strong, friendly, and growing bilateral diplomatic relationship and partnership within NATO. Additionally, Russia and Norway can amicably settle their historic border dispute amidst intensifying tensions between Russia and NATO,[22] and Russia and the United States, principal adversaries during the Cold War era, can jointly manage their long, and thus far stable, maritime boundary between Alaska and Siberia.[23] (In 2017, Russia and the United States established a joint management regime for safe shipping,[24] through what might otherwise present a geopolitical vulnerability with potential to become every bit as significant and worrisome as that found in the Malacca Strait, presenting a narrow strategic chokepoint right at the Pacific gateway to both the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage.[25])
Local tensions may rise and fall, but the broader tenor of amicable international Arctic relations remains notably stable when compared to other regions of the world, and the role of China is at best a peripheral player in the Arctic basin. The multilateral cooperative tradition between Arctic states is nicely illustrated by the 2011 Arctic Search and Rescue (SAR) Agreement agreed to by the eight member states of the Arctic Council, which coordinates SAR coverage and response in the Arctic, and establishes areas of SAR responsibility for each state party – again without any role to play for non-Arctic states, inclusive of China. Parallel to the Arctic Council in structure is the Arctic Coast Guard Forum (ACGF), which provides a forum for the coast guards of all eight Arctic states, which despite rising diplomatic and military tensions, have sustained strong bilateral cooperation in their maritime relations.
As described by Andreas Østhagen on the website of The Arctic Institute, “For both Norway and the US, coast guard cooperation with Russia is placed in the context of long-standing bilateral relationships as maritime neighbors in the Arctic. Having formalized cooperation through the exchange of information and joint exercises, the cost of tearing down decades of relationship-building in the Arctic was considered too high by both Norway and the United States. Neighboring states are dependent on dialogue across borders which, in turn, must be kept somewhat separate from the domain of overarching international diplomacy. That this cooperation survived the tensions over the on-going conflict in Ukraine is indicative of as much.”[26] And yet, even amidst this strong tradition of intra-Arctic cooperation between once and future rivals, there has been a marked shift in strategy by the Arctic states in recent years, and a return of a more pragmatic and defensive realism, with national interests again driving decision making. This is illustrated by Washington’s recent policy and budgetary recommitment to an icebreaker modernization program to enhance its capacity to assert sovereignty further offshore in the rapidly warming Arctic, and in its flurry of new bilateral diplomatic initiatives with the world’s largest island, Greenland, standing guard over North America’s northeast flank.
This is equally illustrated by Moscow’s recent fortification of its long-ignored offshore Arctic islands, newly perceived to be a vulnerable island chain of increasingly strategic importance to Russia’s resource and trade economy, and to the territorial integrity of Russia’s mainland. A key driver of these efforts is, of course, the Arctic climate, and in particular the rapidity of the polar thaw. One need not make any assumptions about either the cause, or the end state, of the dynamic climate instability observed in recent years across the Arctic to recognize the military implications of a warming Arctic, and the risks, uncertainties and insecurities revealed with the continuing thaw.
Hearts and Minds: The Looming Battle for the Arctic’s Human Terrain
If there is a system-wide vulnerability that could be exploited by a diplomatically skilled and economically powerful external actor, it would most likely be found in the least populous and most remote areas of the Arctic, such as Canada’s vast Arctic archipelago north of the Canadian mainland, where the Inuit have in recent decades steadily gained more powers, and in 1999 achieved the formation of their own autonomous territory, Nunavut, a vast territory of increasingly strategic lands and waters with a tiny population of just over 40,000. Also vulnerable to external machinations is neighboring Greenland, which has been undergoing its own incremental (and thus far amicable) process of decolonization between its majority Inuit populace and its colonial sovereign, Denmark – and whose small population (just over 50,000) lacks the domestic capacity to effectively defend its vast EEZ (a challenge even for Denmark, itself a small state with a population under six million).
One can envision a comparable vulnerability on both the Arctic mainland of North America and Eurasia, where many struggling interior and coastal villages dot these vast, underpopulated, and disconnected regions, forming isolated islands of humanity separated by vast distances of open, unoccupied space, with an insularity that is as isolating as that on the populated offshore Arctic islands. In these vast archipelagos, real or metaphoric (in much the same way that renown Russian literary giant, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, perceived Siberia, hence the title to his classic book, The Gulag Archipelago), a struggle to win over the hearts and minds, and thus the loyalty, of the locally predominant indigenous peoples there, and which continue to share a distinctive isolation, largely absent of the same intensity of settler pressures as experienced in more populous regions to the south, could emerge as the next salient fault line of conflict, internally dividing each of the otherwise stable Arctic states.
A similar fault line is now apparent, particularly retrospectively, in the outer Aleutians three quarters of a century ago when Japan invaded and occupied the predominantly Unangax̂ (Aleut) islands of Attu and Kiska, and bombed Dutch Harbor on Amaknak Island, home to the Dutch Harbor Naval Operating Base, and U.S. Army’s Fort Mears.[27] As a an example of what was perceived as a “triangular” strategic contest between the armed forces of imperial Japan on the one hand, and the United States and Canada on the other, the indigenous Unangax̂ people were caught in the middle and at the time perceived by combatants on both sides as peripheral to the conflict, the opposite of the “human flagpoles” resettled to Canada’s unoccupied high Arctic Queen Elizabeth Islands in that they were displaced by both warring parties to distant detention centers, with some forcibly relocated to Japan for the remainder of the war (where around half perished), while most were forcibly relocated (ostensibly for their own protection) by American forces – their very own sovereign protectors – to distant, cold and excessively damp detention camps in Southeast Alaska. There, some ten percent of the population died, and many of the survivors were later prevented from ever returning to their home villages, deemed to be economically unviable in the post-war era.[28]
Such tragic consequences to an indigenous populace caught in a war zone between the armed forces of Imperial Japan and the United States were, unfortunately, all too common in World War II, from the liberation of the Aleutians, the first island chain to be retaken from the Japanese in 1943, all the way to the final battle of Okinawa, where once more, the determined forces of the United States wrestled back from Japanese control the Ryukyu Islands, better known as Okinawa, at high cost to the local indigenous population that found itself trapped between these two warring parties much the way the Unangax̂ were. In the case of the Ryukyuans, and endured staggering losses estimated at half their prewar population of 300,000, far more than the 110,000 Japanese and 12,500 American soldiers lost. In the postwar years, America’s military presence in Okinawa, essential to both Cold War and post-Cold War security in the Pacific, has continued to face determined local opposition, as the rift created during the Battle of Okinawa has never completely healed, even three quarters of a century later.
Similar tales of dispossession and exile took place across the Canadian Arctic and in Greenland as well, creating rifts between the Inuit and Ottawa as well as Copenhagen (and Washington, too, which was responsible for the defense of Greenland during World War II and the Cold War, resulting in some displacement of the Inuit of Thule) comparable to that caused by the Unangax̂ displacement in the Aleutians during World War II, and just as slow to heal.[29] The consequences were universally tragic for the Inuit and Unangax̂. As the Qikiqtani Truth Commission has described: “For Inuit, the loss of home is more than the loss of a dwelling — it is a disruption of a critical relationship of people with the land and animals. It represents the loss of independence and replacement of a way of life.”[30]
Understanding the historical context and near universality of this internal fault line across the Arctic thus elevates the strategic saliency of this internal fault line of conflict within the Arctic states, and present a potentially exploitable vector for external manipulation and destabilization that could disrupt the internal balance of power between far-away national and regional governments of the “center” on the one hand, and the isolated indigenous villages (whether on the continental mainland, or offshore – each in its own regional archipelago of sorts) of the “periphery” – forging a new axis of conflict that could come into play during a period of intensified strategic competition in the Arctic. This is true whether a campaign of hybrid warfare of the sort mastered by Moscow in recent years, or the “pocket book” diplomacy (or, the more malicious “debt-trap” diplomacy) favored by China, or the less likely scenario of a formal state of war between rival states for control of the Arctic domain, as experienced during World War II with the Japanese occupation of the outer Aleutians, and narrowly avoided by allied successes in both the Battle of Britain, and the Battle of the Atlantic, which prevented German expansion toward North America [see Figure 10 below].
Figure 10: The Arctic as a ‘Fourth World’ Defined by Continuing Indigenous Inequality
Challenging living conditions in the Arctic, and wealth and health gaps between Arctic communities and their southern counterparts, have given rise to the term “Fourth World”, as evident in the title of Sam Hall’s book, The Fourth World: The Heritage of the Arctic and its Destruction (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
Colonial States and Sovereignty by Proxy: Indigenous Polities and Political Order
Whether in the Arctic, or further south throughout the world ocean, such tensions and vulnerabilities are commonplace. Thus, some are felt by American forces in the Pacific, from Guam to Okinawa; and others by allied partners who maintain their own offshore bases on remote islands across Oceania. The Chinese, as they expand their influence, find themselves facing similar tensions and vulnerabilities along indigenous fault lines, creating a vast, interconnected theater of strategic competition where local indigenous polities gain what may seem to be outsized importance to the international order. While their populations and territories may be relatively small, they are nonetheless locally predominant, and essential partners to the security of the entire Pacific basin, just as they are to the security of the Arctic basin.
The perceived triangular strategic rivalry pitting Washington’s interests against those of Moscow and Beijing presumes an inherently “Westphalian” unity of the Arctic states, but this is far from the case in much of the Arctic, where most of the states are not unitary nation-states. They are instead former colonial states cobbled together in earlier centuries by the unitary states of the Westphalian core as they reached across the seas, leaving indigenous peoples and their local governing structures largely intact and enabling colonial rule via local (and for the most part, corporate trading) proxies. Limited in manpower and dependent upon native hunters and trappers to exploit the region’s bounty of furs, the colonial era chartered companies preserved intact prior power relationships and networks of the precolonial world that would be successfully leveraged in the interest of ascendant colonial powers. Because this remains a defining feature of most of today’s Arctic states, a lingering fault line remains between center and periphery, largely aligning with the settler elites in command of the state apparatus to the south, and the indigenous communities in the remote hinterland that have been gradually restoring their self-governing powers (with the one notable Arctic exception being Iceland, which was settled prior to the arrival of the eastward migrating Inuit, leaving this one Arctic state as a truly unitary Westphalian polity). Understanding this internal dynamic, and achieving a stable balance of interests through inclusive and respectful policies of native enrichment and empowerment, may be of momentous consequence in the event of external agitation by a non-Arctic state.
This historic struggle for the human terrain of the Arctic is thus of great importance to the future stability of the region, and requires forward thinking investment, respectful relationship-building and sustainment, and a continuous process of confidence-building measures to ensure that the legitimacy of the rule of the sovereign states of the Arctic remains intact and uncontested, lest a foreign interloper such as China seeks to destabilize the status quo. Because of the many socioeconomic challenges facing northern villages from one end of the Arctic to the other, this is a potential vulnerability that an external power could seek to exploit – and, some argue, has already become a target for exploitation by Beijing. Because these northern indigenous homelands have been imperfectly integrated with the political economies of the Arctic states, despite much progress and ongoing efforts in recent years, this remains a near universal fault line across the Arctic, and a challenge faced by the seven Arctic states that have indigenous populations engaged in long-term processes of cultural renewal, economic development, and restoration of land rights.
Progress on this front varies greatly by region and by state, offering an uneven opportunity for external exploitation. While Russia has in recent years mastered the art of hybrid warfare below the threshold of formally declared war, as demonstrated in its persistent but low-level interventions along the arc of what it once referred to as its “near abroad”[31] and with particularly effective results in Crimea, and Beijing has similarly deployed “checkbook diplomacy”[32] to coopt elites along the global network envisioned by its Belt + Road Initiative (BRI), including its northern component, the Polar Silk Road, the latter has faced strong blowback against what the United States and its allies have successfully reframed as “debt-trap diplomacy,”[33] while the former has on its own generated a near-universal distrust, particularly by states bordering Russia that fear they could become the next Crimea. In short, tactical blunders by both Moscow and Beijing, through their clumsy and overconfident efforts to coerce small polities and peoples, have blunted their capacity to project power into the Arctic (with the exception, of course, of Moscow’s own Arctic territories and waters, where its sovereignty remains uncontested, but where it remains far behind its democratic Arctic counterparts in reconciling state and tribal interests).
Indigenous Engagement and the Containment of China’s Arctic Ambitions
Intriguingly, the strengthening alignment of interests between indigenous peoples and their sovereigns across the non-Russian Arctic from Alaska to Finland can provide the democratic Arctic with an advantage over Russia, whose own native peoples remain marginalized, their lands and resources encroached upon or expropriated, and leaders remain exiled.[34] One can even imagine the democratic Arctic states mastering in turn the art of hybrid warfare, just as many by necessity re-mastered the art of counterinsurgency warfare during the long Global War on Terror (GWOT),[35] and by turning the tables on Moscow, winning the battle for the hearts and minds of Russia’s own oppressed native peoples, a process already underway to a limited degree with the warm diplomatic reception enjoyed by Russian indigenous leaders in Arctic governing institutions like the Arctic Council, where Arctic indigenous organizations enjoy a distinct membership status as Permanent Participants, second only to the founding member states (the A8), and superior in organizational status to the many observer organizations and states, among which China is included [see Figure 11 below].
Figure 11: The Battle for Indigenous Hearts and Minds
Human terrain mapping (HTM) became central to U.S. strategy during the Global War on Terror and its many battles to win indigenous hearts and minds. In 2010, James Der Derian (with David and Michael Udris) released “Human Terrain,” a film that explores the US Army’s Human Terrain Teams and its ‘cultural turn’ in counterinsurgency. In the United States’ intensifying strategic competition with Russia and China, worldwide and in the Arctic, HTM may once again provide a strategic advantage. Source: https://geographicalimaginations.com/2012/12/18/project-z/
But more likely, Russia will eventually realize that its security will be better strengthened by achieving parity with its democratic counterparts on the Arctic Council in the area of native rights and empowerment – already evident in its latest Arctic strategic outlook to the year 2035 (with indigenous issues are mentioned at least 13 times)[xxxvi] – and in so doing, the inter-Arctic collaborative dynamic can be strengthened – further eroding the significance and saliency of the triangularity described above.
With its deep pockets, China may take the opportunity to retool its approach, shifting away from the naked power grab of debt-trap diplomacy to foster a more mutually beneficial model of Arctic economic development, positioning Beijing to more adeptly exploit any failures by the Arctic states to sufficiently support and re-empower their own indigenous peoples, who are intimately aware of any unevenness in Arctic social, cultural and economic development, a shift already achieved at the rhetorical/articulated-policy level in its 2018 Arctic white paper but not yet evident in its ground game. So a triumph by the democratic Arctic states is by no means guaranteed with regard to the battle for indigenous hearts and minds; but they still have many advantages over Russia and China that could make it impossible for either of these rivals to meaningfully undermine western influence in the region, or to dilute the sovereignty they have over their respective Arctic territories.
Thus, if there is indeed a new Cold War in the Arctic region – and many believe there already is one – the home front in each of the Arctic states, where continued gains in native development will be crucial for the political legitimacy, territorial integrity, and political sovereignty they assert, will be an important arena of engagement, one where the United States and its allies have many advantages that provide the opportunity to consolidate victory and ensure unrivaled regional supremacy through more inclusive and effective governance – in partnership with the indigenous peoples of the Arctic [see Figure 12 below].
Figure 12: Alaska Territorial Guard: “Guardians of the North”
Left: “Guardians of the North” (left) as depicted by Mort Kunstler. Source: Guardians of the North, https://www.nationalguard.mil/Resources/Image-Gallery/Historical-Paintings/Heritage-Series/Guardians/; Right: Alaska Territorial Guard map by Jay Griffin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_Territorial_Guard_map.jpg. The ATG, also known as the Eskimo Scouts, was a military reserve force component of the U.S. Army, organized in 1942 in response to Japan’s attacks on Pearl Harbor and later the Aleutian Islands. Its members represented 107 Alaska communities with Aleut, Athabaskan, Inupiaq, Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Yupik, and non-native peoples united in their common defense of Alaska, with official membership topping six thousand, and unofficial counts exceeding 20,000.
References
[1] For a current discussion of Arctic geopolitics, see Nebojša Vuković, “Do we need revision of the key geopolitical paradigms?” Medjunarodni Problemi (International Problems, published by the Institute of International Politics and Economics, Belgrade, Serbia)72, No. 1 (2020): 15-36. In the author’s Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom: The Geopolitics of Climate Change in the Arctic, Mackinder’s conceptual vocabulary is discussed in application to the warming Arctic. There is a robust literature on geopolitical theory that discussed Mackinder and Spykman, including their own influential works, including Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (New York: Holt, 1919), reissued in 1996 by NDU Press, and his “The Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal, Volume 23 (1904), 421–37, as well as his final work, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” Foreign Affairs, Volume 21 (1943), 595–605 are a good place to begin, as is Nicholas J. Spykman’s The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944) and America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942) along with his articles, “Geography and Foreign Policy, I,” American Political Science Review (1938, Issue 1) and “Geography and Foreign Policy, II,” American Political Science Review (1938, issue 2), (with A. A. Rollins) “Geographic Objectives in Foreign Policy, I,” American Political Science Review (1939, issue 3), (with A. A. Rollins), “Geographic Objectives in Foreign Policy, II,” The American Political Science Review (1939, issue 4), and “Frontiers, Security, and International Organization,” Geographical Review 1942, issue 3. Spykman’s scholarly contribution was remarkably prolific given his untimely death in June 1943.
[2] Dan Levin, “Canada and Denmark Fight Over Island With Whisky and Schnapps,” New York Times, November 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/world/what-in-the-world/canada-denmark-hans-island-whisky-schnapps.html
[3] For detailed histories of Canada’s Inuit “exiles”, see Melanie McGrath, The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic (New York: Vintage, 2008), or for a more critical view of the conventional narrative, see Gerard I. Kenney, Arctic Smoke and Mirrors (Ottawa: Voyageur Publications, 1994).
[4] For a detailed history of the island, see John Bockstoce, White Fox and Icy Seas in the Western Arctic: The Fur Trade, Transportation, and Change in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) and Peter J. Usher, The Bankslanders: Economy and Ecology of a Frontier Trapping Community (Ottawa: Northern Science Research Group: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1970)
[5] See Rob Huebert, “The New Arctic Strategic Triangle Environment (NASTE): Ramifications for Canada,” Special Senate Committee on the Arctic, Ottawa, April 3, 2019.
[6] For more on China’s rebuffed efforts to coopt Greenland, see Drew Hinshaw and Jeremy Page, “How the Pentagon Countered China’s Designs on Greenland,” Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-pentagon-countered-chinas-designs-on-greenland-11549812296.
[7] For an in-depth discussion of these macro-level systemic changes to the Arctic, see the author’s Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom: The Geopolitics of Climate Change in the Arctic (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2010). For an understanding of the interconnected geopolitics of islands and archipelagos and its significance to world politics, consider the pioneering contributions and analytical framework of Sir Halford J. Mackinder, in addition to more recent critical geographical approaches that share an underlying appreciation of the role of islands and their security in international order. To help island studies, also known as nissology, take form as an academic discipline, the International Small Islands Studies Association (ISISA) was formally established in 1992 and this past summer (2020), the very first ISISA Global Island Studies Webinar (GISW) was held on June 24-25, 2020, with 31 consecutive hours of panel presentations in nearly every time zone, with the author participating on a panel discussing the future of Greenland chaired by his colleague from the University of Akureyri’s Polar Law Centre, Jonathan Wood, who is also contributing to this special issue of NoMe. For a discussion of the origins of the field of nissology, see Oscar Campomanes, “The Islandic in the Postcolonial Critique of American Empire,” https://uchri.org/foundry/the-islandic-in-the-postcolonial-critique-of-american-empire/, an essay that emerged from the Fall 2017 meeting of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI)’s Asia Theories Network, “Island Life.” Campomanes notes that nissology is “derived from the Greek root for island, nisos and study of, logos,” and “is defined as ‘the study of islands on their own terms.’ This field has multiple centers in unlikely locations, often islandic themselves, and therefore not in the metropolitan ‘mainstreams’ of theoretical and practical knowledge-production.”
[8] This is true not only of the Arctic ocean, but also as far south as the Austral (Antarctic) Ocean , where the security implications of the alliance integration of so many isolated islands, archipelagos, and island chains bears a striking similarity to these respective challenges facing the top of the world today, as they do to the challenges of remote maritime regions around the world. Numerous observers over the centuries have been outspoken and articulate evangelists for appreciating the strategic importance of Alaska and the Arctic to American security, from the architect of the 1867 purchase himself, Secretary of State William H. Seward, to the early apostle of air power and founding father of the USAF, CDR William L. “Billy” Mitchell, along with veteran Arctic scholars such as Oran R. Young, a pioneer in the study of global environmental governance and regime theory in international relations, with regional expertise in the Arctic.
[9] See the prolific work of James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, including Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010), in addition to their many articles, such as “Responding to China’s Rising Sea Power,” Orbis, Volume 61, Issue 1, 2017, Pages 91-100; “Asymmetric Warfare, American Style,” Proceedings, April 2012 (Vol. 138), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2012/april/asymmetric-warfare-american-style; and “Responding to China’s Rising Sea Power,” Orbis, Volume 61, Issue 1, 2017, Pages 91-100; and Toshi Yoshihara, “China’s Vision of Its Seascape: The First Island Chain and Chinese Seapower,” Asian Politics and Policy Volume 4, Issue 3 (July 2012), Special Issue: How China’s Rise Is Changing Asia’s Landscape and Seascape, 293-314, among others.
[10] In fact, it was General Douglas MacArthur’s public articulation of an island-chain strategy for America in the postwar Pacific in 1950, amidst hostilities in South Korea and asserting the strategic importance of Formosa (Taiwan) as part of an allied island chain linking the Philippines to Okinawa, that precipitated his dismissal by President Truman. See “Texts of Controversial MacArthur Message and Truman’s Formosa Statement,” New York Times, August 29, 1950, 16. Such an island chain, MacArthur argued, if “properly maintained would be an invincible defense against aggression.” It is here that MacArthur famously described what is now known as Taiwan as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender” whose strategic importance had been clearly recognized and lethally leveraged by the Japanese at the “outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941,” and which, if it again falls to a power hostile to the West, “would repeat itself.” MacArthur’s vision reached beyond this first island chain to a hemispheric arc of islands pivotal to western security. In a widely cited quotation, Andrew S. Erickson and Joel Wuthnow write that “MacArthur convinced George Kennan that the US should obtain complete control of Okinawa in order to establish a ‘striking force’ positioned along ‘a U-shaped area embracing the Aleutians, Midway, the former Japanese mandated islands, Clark field in the Philippines, and above all Okinawa.’” See their “Barriers, Springboards and Benchmarks: China Conceptualizes the Pacific ‘Island Chains’,” The China Quarterly, January 2016, 6. In their “Why Islands Still Matter in Asia,” Erickson and Wuthnow note that MacArthur’s “island chain philosophy indeed encapsulates some important strategic thinking of the era,” adding, “Such thinking unquestionably influenced Chinese strategists as they sought to make sense of their nation’s geostrategic position, the security challenges it faced, and what it might do to address them.” See: “Why Islands Still Matter in Asia,” National Interest, February 5, 2016, https://nationaIinterest.org/print/feature/why-islands-still-matter-asia-15121.
[11] See the following for selected details: Michael O’Hanlon, “China’s Unsinkable Aircraft Carriers: While America builds carriers, China builds islands,” Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-unsinkable-aircraft-carriers-1438880237; Brad Lendon and Michelle Lim, “Japanese Island Could Become an Unsinkable US Aircraft Carrier,” CNN, December 6, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/06/asia/japan-us-military-base-island-intl-hnk/index.html; Fighter Jets World, “Here Are The Unsinkable Aircraft Carriers Of The World,” June 28, 2020, https://fighterjetsworld.com/weekly-article/here-are-the-unsinkable-aircraft-carriers-of-the-world/22478/.
[12] For an introduction to EABO, see Marine Corps Association & Foundation, Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) Handbook 1.1, June 1, 2018, https://mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/Expeditionary-Advanced-Base-Operations-EABO-handbook-1.1.pdf. For a discussion of EABO, see Robbin Laird, “Reshaping Perimeter Defense: A New Pacific Island Strategy,” Defense.info, August 12, 2019, https://defense.info/re-thinking-strategy/2019/08/reshaping-perimeter-defense-a-new-pacific-island-strategy/ or Laird’s co-authored book with Edward Timperlake and Richard Weitz, Rebuilding American Military Power in the Pacific: A 21st Century Strategy (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio / Praeger Security International, 2013)
[13] This phrase generated worldwide headlines after being utilized in a speech by Admiral Harry B. Harris, Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra on March 31, 2015, in which he observed China was “creating a great wall of sand, with dredges and bulldozers, over the course of months.” See “Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr., 31 March 2015, As delivered,” https://www.cpf.navy.mil/leaders/harry-harris/speeches/2015/03/ASPI-Australia.pdf. For an example of media coverage of this, see BBC News, “China Building ‘Great Wall of Sand’ in South China Sea,” April 1, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-32126840. For a recent discussion the “String of Pearls,” see Pankaj Jha, “Countering Chinese String of Pearls, India’s ‘Double Fish Hook’ Strategy,” Modern Diplomacy, August 8, 2020, https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/08/08/countering-chinese-string-of-pearls-indias-double-fish-hook-strategy/.
[14] Gary K. Busch, “Russia’s New Arctic Military Bases,” Lima Charlies News, https://limacharlienews.com/russia/russia-arctic-military-bases/.
[15] The White House, “Memorandum on Safeguarding U.S. National Interests in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions,” June 9, 2020, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-safeguarding-u-s-national-interests-arctic-antarctic-regions/
[16] For further discussion of this initiative, see the author’s “Donald Trump is thinking of buying Greenland. That’s not necessarily a bad idea,” The Globe and Mail, August 18, 2019, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-donald-trump-is-thinking-of-buying-greenland-thats-not-necessarily-a/.
[17] For more details of the PSC program, see the USCG Polar Security Cutter program information page, https://www.dcms.uscg.mil/Our-Organization/Assistant-Commandant-for-Acquisitions-CG-9/Programs/Surface-Programs/Polar-Icebreaker/.
[18] Rob Huebert, “The New Arctic Strategic Triangle Environment (NASTE): Ramifications for Canada,” Special Senate Committee on the Arctic, Ottawa, April 3, 2019. Also see Rebecca Pincus, “Three-Way Power Dynamics in the Arctic,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, Spring 2020, 40-63.
[19] Liz Ruskin, “China, Russia Find Common Cause in Arctic,” Alaska Public Media, March 21, 2019, https://www.alaskapublic.org/2019/03/21/china-russia-find-common-cause-in-arctic/
[20] Pincus, “Three-Way Power Dynamics in the Arctic,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, Spring 2020, 40.
[21] A good introduction to the complexity of Arctic governance can be found in Mathieu Landriault, Andrew Chater, Elana Wilson Rowe, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, Governing Complexity in the Arctic Region (New York: Routledge, 2019).
[22] For more details on the joint US-Canada seabed mapping effort, see Sian Griffiths, “US-Canada Arctic Border Dispute Key to Maritime Riches,” BBC News, August 2, 2010, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-10834006; for a broader discussion of the multiple overlap disputes across the Arctic region, see Jessica Brown, “Thaw in accord: As Arctic Ice Melts, Territorial Disputes are Hotting Up, Too,” The Independent, March 1, https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/geopolitical-consequences-of-melting-arctic-ice-russia-canada-us-northern-sea-route-shipping-natural-a8229306.html. For a discussion of the history of American Arctic policy since the Cold War, see the author’s “U.S. Defense Policy and the North: The Emergent Arctic Power,” Chapter 12 in The Fast-Changing Arctic: Rethinking Arctic Security for a Warmer World, edited by Barry Scott Zellen (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, Northern Lights Series, 2013). or “Where East and West Converge: The US Embrace of Collaborative Security for the Arctic,” Chapter 28 in the Handbook of the Politics of the Arctic, edited by Leif Christian Jensen and Geir Hønneland (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015).
[23] Known as the Baker-Shevardnadze line since its formal demarcation by negotiation in 1990, it remains unratified on the Russian side due to the rapidity of the subsequent Soviet collapse, but has remained nonetheless adhered to throughout the post-Cold War era. See the UN, Agreement between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Maritime Boundary, June 1, 1990, https://www.un.org/Depts/los/LEGISLATIONANDTREATIES/PDFFILES/TREATIES/USA-RUS1990MB.PDF. In early 2020, it looked as if Moscow was contemplating ending its support of this still unratified agreement due to the Soviet collapse that quickly followed the treaty’s negotiation by then U.S. Secretary of State James A Baker, and his Soviet counterpart and last foreign minister of the USSR (and first leader of an independent Georgia), Eduard Shevardnadze, for whom the subsequent (and stable) “Baker-Shevardnadze Line” named. Paul Goble, “Moscow May Soon End ‘Provisional Enforcement’ of 1990 Bering Strait Accord With US,” Eurasia Daily Monitor, Volume 17, Issue 12 (January 30, 2020), https://jamestown.org/program/moscow-may-soon-end-provisional-enforcement-of-1990-bering-strait-accord-with-us/.
[24] For an excellent summary of the 2017 agreement, see Emily Russell, “US, Russia Agree on Shipping Standards for Bering Strait,” Alaska Public Media, June 6, 2018, https://www.alaskapublic.org/2018/06/06/us-russia-agree-on-shipping-standards-for-bering-strait/; for the full details of the agreement, see: IMO Sub-Committee on Navigation, Communications and Search And Rescue, “Routeing Measures And Mandatory Ship Reporting Systems: Establishment of two-way routes and precautionary areas in the Bering Sea and Bering Strait,” Submitted by the Russian Federation and the United States, 5th session, Agenda item 3, NCSR 5/3/7, November 17, 2017, https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/pdf/IMO/NCSR_5_3_7.pdf. – building upon the even longer tradition of amicable maritime border relations that has been sustained between the Cold War’s principal adversaries, both during and after the Cold War.
[25] For more details on the joint US-Canada seabed mapping effort, see Sian Griffiths, “US-Canada Arctic Border Dispute Key to Maritime Riches,” BBC News, August 2, 2010, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-10834006; for a broader discussion of the multiple overlap disputes across the Arctic region, see Jessica Brown, “Thaw in accord: As Arctic Ice Melts, Territorial Disputes are Hotting Up, Too,” The Independent, March 1, https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/geopolitical-consequences-of-melting-arctic-ice-russia-canada-us-northern-sea-route-shipping-natural-a8229306.html. For a discussion of the history of American Arctic policy since the Cold War, see the author’s “U.S. Defense Policy and the North: The Emergent Arctic Power,” Chapter 12 in The Fast-Changing Arctic: Rethinking Arctic Security for a Warmer World, edited by Barry Scott Zellen (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, Northern Lights Series, 2013). or “Where East and West Converge: The US Embrace of Collaborative Security for the Arctic,” Chapter 28 in the Handbook of the Politics of the Arctic, edited by Leif Christian Jensen and Geir Hønneland (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015)
[26] Andreas Østhagen, “Coast Guard Cooperation with Russia in the Arctic,” The Arctic Institute, June 6, 2016, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/coast-guard-cooperation-with-russia-in-the-arctic/.
[27] For a seminal history of the war in the Aleutians, see Galen Roger Perras, Stepping Stones to Nowhere: The Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and American Military Strategy (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003).
[28] For a detailed and moving account of the Unangan displacement, see Carlene J. Arnold, The Legacy of Unjust and Illegal Treatment of Unangan, Master’s Thesis in Global Indigenous Nations Studies, University of Kansas, 2011.
[29] In addition to the publications cited in note 24 above, much insight can be gained from the documentary films by celebrated Inuit filmmaker, Zacharias Kunuk, including “Exile,” his 2009 documentary of the above-mentioned resettlement in the 1950s of Inuit from Kuujjuaq (then called Port Harrison) in northern Quebec to the then unsettled Queen Elizabeth Islands, over 1,000 nautical miles to the north, to found the communities of Resolute and Grise Fjord (Igloolik: Igloolik Isuma Productions, 2009, http://www.isuma.tv/isuma-productions/exile-0) and his 2018 documentary, Or his 2018 documentary, “Kivitoo: What They Thought of Us” (Igloolik: Igloolik Isuma Productions, 2018, http://www.isuma.tv/hwma/kivitoo/ep4kivitoo1) on the 1960s resettlement of the entire village of Kivitoo, on Baffin Island, to Qikiqtarjuaq, some 40 miles away.
[30] Qikiqtani Truth Commission. “Nuutauniq: Moves in Inuit Life. Thematic Reports and Special Studies Qikiqtani Inuit Association,” Qikiqtani Truth Commission website,
http://docplayer.net/55079820-Qikiqtani-truth-commission-nuutauniq-moves-in-inuit-life-thematic-reports-and-special-studies-qikiqtani-inuit-association.html.
[31] For discussions and definitions of hybrid warfare, see Jim Garamone, “Military Must Be Ready to Confront Hybrid Threats, Intel Official Says,” Defense.gov, September 4, 2019, https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/1952023/military-must-be-ready-to-confront-hybrid-threats-intelligence-official-says/; and Alex Deep, “Hybrid War: Old Concept, New Techniques,” Small Wars Journal, March 2, 2015, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/hybrid-war-old-concept-new-techniques. On the “Near Abroad,” see William Safire, “ON LANGUAGE; The Near Abroad,” New York Times Magazine, May 22, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/22/magazine/on-language-the-near-abroad.html.
[32] Daniel S. Hamilton, “Checkbook Diplomacy,” The Diplomatist (2016), as reposted by the Center for Transatlantic Relations, https://archive.transatlanticrelations.org/publication/checkbook-diplomacy-daniel-s-hamilton/.
[33] For a discussion of China’s BRI and its association with debt-trap diplomacy, see Hadeeka Taj, “China’s new Silk Road or debt-trap diplomacy?,” Global Risk Insights, May 5, 2019, https://globalriskinsights.com/2019/05/china-debt-diplomacy/. For a discussion of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s public rebuke of China in a speech during the Rovaniemi Arctic Council ministerial in May 2019, see Marc Lanteigne, “The US Throws Down the Gauntlet at the Arctic Council’s Finland Meeting,” Over the Circle, May 7, 2019, https://overthecircle.com/2019/05/07/the-us-throws-down-the-gauntlet-at-the-arctic-councils-finland-meeting/. The full text of Pompeo’s May 6, 2019 Rovaniemi speech, “Looking North: Sharpening America’s Arctic Focus,” can be found at https://www.state.gov/looking-north-sharpening-americas-arctic-focus/.
[34] On the struggles of Russia’s Arctic indigenous leadership, see Thomas Nilsen, “Russia Removes Critical Voices Ahead of Arctic Council Chairmanship, Claims Indigenous Peoples Expert,” The Barents Observer, November 27, 2019, https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/civil-society-and-media/2019/11/russia-makes-ready-arctic-council-chairmanship-removing-critical.
[35] For an historical and theoretical discussion of America’s long history of both insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare, and its relearning the art of COIN during the GWOT, see the author’s The Art of War in an Asymmetric World: Strategy for the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Bloomsbury Academy, 2012).
[36] See the translation by the Russian Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College, “Foundations of the Russian Federation State Policy in the Arctic for the Period up to 2035,” March 5, 2020, https://dnnlgwick.blob.core.windows.net/portals/0/NWCDepartments/Russia%20Maritime%20Studies%20Institute/ArcticPolicyFoundations2035_English_FINAL_21July2020.pdf?sr=b&si=DNNFileManagerPolicy&sig=DSkBpDNhHsgjOAvPILTRoxIfV%2FO02gR81NJSokwx2EM%3D