Arctic politics are getting warmer

The Arctic is coming in from the cold. President-elect Donald Trump has reopened the question of the US acquiring Greenland. This is the third US attempt. The Trump comment has focussed attention on the growing importance generally of the Arctic region for global politics. 

In 1867 President Andrew Johnson tried to buy Greenland from Denmark around the time he bought Alaska from Russia. In the Cold War era of the 1940s, we now know that President Truman also tried unsuccessfully to buy it.

Therefore, there is some history behind Trump’s idea. At present it seems that Trump will be no more successful than his predecessors. 

A value of Trump’s suggestion is the attention it has given to the rising importance of that region for global politics.

A by-product of the speculation over climate change has been the suggestion that global warming will enable greater access to the Arctic’s considerable resources. This could trigger a new scramble for territory, similar to that of the 19th century’s scramble for Africa. 

The Arctic used to be of interest mainly to science. Now increasingly it is a matter of political, economic and legal interest.

Part of the Arctic’s political complexity comes from the fact that the Arctic is not one single landmass (unlike, say, Antarctica). The Arctic region is 14.5 million square km (5.5 million square miles). The region contains both the mainly ice-covered Arctic Ocean and some of the surrounding land, including all of Greenland and Spitsbergen (administered by Norway), and the northern parts of Alaska, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden. The Arctic Ocean is the planet’s smallest and least explored ocean.

Indigenous peoples have lived within the region for thousands of years. As can be expected with such a harsh environment, they tended to live a quiet, fairly nomadic, isolated, independent-minded subsistence existence. They had minimal contact with the outside world.

The neighbouring countries gradually expanded northwards. The Russians, for example, reached Siberia in the 16th century. They now control the largest single amount of Arctic territory (ahead of Canada). They were particularly interested in the fur of the local animals. The Russians were rarely welcomed by the Indigenous peoples. The British had similar problems with subduing Indigenous peoples in northern Canada. 

British maritime exploration was mainly motivated by a desire to find a way through Canada to China and the Far East (and so avoid the Spanish and Portuguese fleets that patrolled their colonies in the rest of the Americas). 

The Arctic remained on the periphery of world politics. Ironically its bleakness was a source of security: neighbouring countries knew that they were at least safe from land invasion from the north. This isolation began to change in World War II with the opening up of aerial routes across the top of the Atlantic as a way for US and Canadian personnel and supplies to reach the Allies in the UK. 

Then the Arctic became a frontline in the Cold War. With the USSR’s acquisition of both long-range aircraft (later missiles) and nuclear weapons, and the US co-operated with its allies to create an elaborate “early warning system” across the region. A World War III would have been fought with bombers and missiles flying over the Arctic.