Editor's note: The following is part 2 of the piece entitled America's anti-China Arctic policy is divorced from strategic reality published on Jan. 10
In its 2024 Arctic Strategy, the Pentagon reveals its strategic obsession with China has clouded its judgment, not the first time American policy has been rooted in a grand illusion. This was evident during its tragic, two-decade long Vietnam intervention, as it was again during its tragic, two-decade long intervention in Afghanistan. Breaking with previous Arctic strategies, the United States Department of Defence's (DoD’s) 2024 strategy elevates non-Arctic China with not a hectare of Arctic territory under its flag to the top of its threat matrix, above even mighty Russia, the largest of the Arctic states with sovereign control over more than half the Arctic region.
Given China’s lack of Arctic territory, and the limited, seasonal, and mobile presence of its Arctic research community (whether by ice breaker, submarine, aircraft, or visiting researchers seasonally resident on the Arctic territory of a sovereign host nation), focusing on this illusory China threat to the Arctic seems, at best, a “sideshow” and its placement as the top concern presented in DoD’s 2024 Arctic strategy is at best illogical, and at worst a dangerous strategic distortion of reality. DoD’s Arctic Strategy further elaborates its concern with China’s Arctic interest and presence: “Although the vast majority of the Arctic is under the jurisdiction of sovereign states, the People's Republic of China (PRC) seeks to promote the Arctic region as a ‘global commons’ in order to shift Arctic governance in its favour. The PRC’s 2018 Arctic Policy claims non-Arctic states should contribute to the region’s ‘shared future for mankind’ due to the Arctic’s global significance. Its ‘Polar Silk Road’ has been used to gain a footing in the Arctic by pursuing investments in infrastructure and natural resources, including in the territory of NATO Allies.”
It should be mentioned that two-term Alaska governor Wally Hickel – who served as Interior Secretary in President Nixon’s cabinet and famously saw not only the Alaska Pipeline built (in just three years) on his watch but also welcomed the historic passage of the first comprehensive Arctic land claim settlement, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 – promoted Alaska and the Arctic as not only part of the global commons, but the solution to what ecologist Garrett Hardin called the “tragedy of the commons,” as Hickel developed in his 2002 book, Crisis in the Commons: The Alaska Solution.2 Viewing the Arctic as a global commons is not a nefarious plot to undermine American hegemony, but the logical outcome of a generation of globalization linking East and West since the Cold War ended; America’s strategic anxiety over a thawing Arctic’s central position in the globalized world and China’s embrace of this is, reveals weakness not strength, trepidation not confidence.
Indeed, the long-standing U.S. opposition to Moscow’s claim that the Northern Sea Route is internal to Russia and to Ottawa’s claim that the Northwest Passage is internal to Canada, counter-argues that these waterways are in fact part of the world ocean, and thus part of the global commons. It’s thus hypocritical of Washington to criticize China for advocating a similar view.
Indeed, if America and its allies sufficiently invested in their own Arctic territories, built sufficient Arctic infrastructure, and developed remote Arctic economies to lift Arctic peoples out of endemic and persistent poverty, they would be in a better position to defend such a view. But China’s pragmatic realization that there is mutual opportunity for investing in the Arctic that can benefit Arctic peoples long neglected by their sovereign states is only possible because of such neglect and long periods of Arctic disinterest in the United States and other Arctic states for their far northern peripheries.
If the Arctic less resembled the third world, having earned its own and even less developed designation as the “fourth world,” and more resembled the first or even the second worlds, such a position would have more legitimacy.
Indeed, there would be few inroads for China’s Polar Silk Road had America and its allies shown true and sustained interest in their respective Arctics – and had climate change not opened up so much of the Arctic to external access, it is likely that the region’s relative neglect would have continued.
If anything, China is rising to the challenge of Arctic development made possible by failures in the West to fully develop its own remote Arctic territories. China should therefore be welcomed as an economic partner that reflects China’s global stature and upon which so many western nations depend, and not as a spoiler intent on disrupting the Arctic status quo or tilting regional governance in its favour. Indeed, China’s participation in Arctic economic activities, and engaging regional governance structures as it does elsewhere in the world, is part and parcel of being a global power. It is time to put such anti-China prejudices aside.
Indeed, it is profoundly worrisome that America – universally considered the world’s greatest military power, but fresh from its 2021 strategic defeat in Afghanistan against the materially inferior Taliban; two decades after it invaded Iraq on faulty (or cherry-picked) intelligence of a non-existent WMD threat; and 70 years after it stumbled into its disastrous Vietnam intervention – still can’t get its priorities right or assess the strategic environment objectively in a manner that correlates with reality. With such a long string of military defeats to weaker adversaries from Vietnam to Afghanistan behind it, and a proxy war in Ukraine with Russia that has failed keep Ukraine whole while courting escalation to general war, it is disconcerting to find DoD’s 2024 Arctic policy so badly inverted, and so dangerously decoupled from strategic reality.
Barry Zellen is a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at UConn and a Senior Fellow (Arctic Security) at the Institute of the North. He is a former resident of Whitehorse, Inuvik, and Yellowknife.