Historian Peter Frankopan on How the Arctic Became the Front Line of a New Cold War

In late May, the Christophe de Margerie departed Utrenneye, a remote port on the flat, treeless Siberian shoreline of the Kara Sea. Measuring 299 metres—about the length of three football pitches—the vessel is named for the French oil executive who died in a freak accident at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport in 2014.

The ship is a liquefied natural gas carrier, or LNG tanker, with insulated storage tanks capable of carrying more than 170,000 cubic metres of gas.

It is also an icebreaker. A reinforced double hull and three independently rotating propulsion units enable the Christophe de Margerie to push through ice more than two metres thick.

That capability is crucial for reaching isolated terminals such as Utrenneye, which conventional LNG carriers cannot access for much of the year.

After loading its cargo, the vessel headed east along the coast under the escort of a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker.

Ship-tracking data showed that it passed through the Bering Strait on June 8 before continuing to a floating storage unit off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. There, it unloaded its cargo, which was almost certainly destined for China.

The voyage was not the Christophe de Margerie’s first passage along the route commonly known as the Northern Sea Route. It was, however, the earliest known trip by a commercial vessel: before June, sea ice is usually considered too thick for such a crossing.

The sweeping transformation of the global climate is doing more than producing unusually warm summers in Britain. It is also reshaping geopolitics, with profound consequences for trade corridors, the world economy and national security.

Last week, Donald Trump effectively presented Greenland as an open field for American territorial expansion.

He signed an agreement with Denmark that apparently gives the United States complete responsibility for Greenland’s security. Under the terms described by Fox News, Washington could establish additional military bases there “as needed”.

It remains unclear whether the president’s boastful description will survive scrutiny of the agreement’s fine print. Danish commentators have quickly noted that the United States has long enjoyed broad military freedom of action in Greenland.

Still, Trump’s interest in the Arctic island is not without strategic logic. Over the coming decades, the barren, ice-bound High North is expected to become a geopolitical flashpoint, bringing together crucial shipping lanes, military power and rivalry among the world’s major powers. Against that backdrop, the Christophe de Margerie’s voyage last May may prove considerably more important.

For centuries, mariners were captivated by the prospect of a shorter northern route to Asia. The discovery in the 1490s of Atlantic crossings and a sea passage around Africa’s southern tip into the Indian Ocean opened entirely new horizons, helping trade evolve into a genuinely global system.

The discovery of the Americas had extraordinary consequences, but the routes to Asia offered the greater commercial prize. As today, Asia contained vast populations, prosperous cities and immense wealth waiting to be accessed.

Until the early 16th century, goods reached Europe through a complex web of routes now known as the Silk Roads. These land and maritime networks connected China and India with the Middle East and East Africa, linking societies across enormous distances.

Venice emerged as the principal beneficiary. Its riches enabled the city’s most powerful families to construct magnificent palaces rising from the lagoon at the northern end of the Adriatic.

For merchants in northern and western Europe, discovering a faster route to Asia was a matter not only of efficiency but also of security. The voyage around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope was lengthy and dangerous. It also required ships to sail near Spain and Portugal, whose fleets initially dominated the Atlantic.

By the 1550s, English expeditions were searching for a northeast passage along Scandinavia’s northern coast, through Russian waters and onward towards the Far East. Dutch explorers soon followed, driven by merchants eager to find alternative routes to Asian markets.

Willem Barents ventured furthest, reaching Novaya Zemlya in 1596. The vast Arctic archipelago, beyond Scandinavia and regarded as Europe’s easternmost point, became the limit of his expedition when ice trapped and eventually crushed his ship as winter set in. Barents and his crew endured the following months in extreme cold, constructing a makeshift shelter from timber and other salvaged materials. They survived the winter, but Barents died of illness the next year while attempting to return home. The sea at the Arctic’s western gateway still carries his name: the Barents Sea.

Other attempts fared little better, with the first successful transit not happening until the 1870s when the Finnish-Swedish aristocrat Erik Nordenskjold sailed eastwards, almost reaching the Bering Strait before ice closed around his vessel, the Vega.

Its specially reinforced hull survived the pressure and remained trapped for almost 11 months before the ice melted and the ship continued on, through the strait and down Russia’s Far East coast to Yokohama in Japan. It was the first successful navigation of the Northern Sea route.

Three things have changed today. First, improved technologies mean that ships – such as the Christophe de Margerie – can now push their way through ice during the summer months with relative ease. Second, warming conditions mean that ice is thinner and more broken up; indeed, some stretches are now increasingly ice-free for long durations in the summer.

Although there is some discussion about future projections, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the Arctic Ocean will experience its first practically ice-free summer by 2050. One recent study suggested this will happen as early as the 2030s given current warming patterns. This has major implications for shipping and trade.

Since the early 1990s, much of global manufacturing has moved to China, powering a period of astonishing growth and rising ambition. For those who buy

Chinese-made goods in Europe, the Northern Sea route promises quicker deliveries and lower prices: a journey from Shanghai to Felixstowe currently involves 11,000 miles and takes 35 days – involving a long route across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez

Canal and then transiting the Strait of Gibraltar.

The new northern route is much shorter: last year, Spirit of Istanbul sailed from Ningbo to Felixstowe in just 21 days on a journey almost 30 per cent shorter at just 8,000 miles. That means a quicker turn-around; it also means less fuel. Both mean reduced costs and better returns on capital.

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But the Northern Sea route is not just about savings and profits. It is also a key part of a major reconfiguration that involves the world’s sea lanes, its trading patterns and changing priorities.

In 2005, Yang Huigen, one of China’s leading polar scientists, gave an interview in which he said that the country should aspire to become a ‘polar great power’. It is an ambition that China has pursued with gusto for more than two decades, championed by President Xi Jinping personally who has spoken repeatedly about the importance of the Arctic and Antarctic capabilities. Regular policy papers have stated that the polar regions – together with the seabed and outer space – are ‘strategic frontiers’ that have vital consequences for the country’s place in the world of the 21st century.

Such has been the investment of time, resources and planning that in 2018 China declared that it was a ‘near-Arctic state’, despite the most northern part of the country lying almost 1,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

This is a statement of intent more than an indication of territorial ambitions, underpinned in the first instance by the desire to be included in policy decisions and discussions of any international agreements that may have a major impact on China’s economic growth, its political stability and its military posture.

That in turn matters since, as events in other parts of the world have shown, the Northern Sea route is not just about shorter journey times or lower costs but about having options that are as essential as they are valuable.

Since 1869, the fastest way to move between Europe and Asia has been to transit the Suez Canal, a waterway around 120 miles long that saves ships from making the long journey around Africa. The canal – like the Bab al-Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea that links to the Indian Ocean – is one of the world’s great shipping routes.

Both are places where relatively minor disruptions can throttle the movement of ships and their cargoes. Their vulnerability makes them obvious pressure points for states, armed groups or terrorists seeking political leverage, ransom payments or demonstrations of power that bring attention to their cause both regionally and beyond.

For the past three years, the Houthis – an armed insurgent group closely aligned with Iran – have severely disrupted shipping going through the Red Sea, by threatening, seizing and attacking commercial vessels.

As well as pushing up insurance premiums, that has also led to a host of shipping companies avoiding this region altogether.

Taken with the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint since the US attacks on Iran in February, the need for alternative routes could not be more obvious.

This too raises the significance of the Northern Passage. So far, the number of ships taking this route remains modest, with around 100 vessels reported to have done so last year. But that number will rise in the future. As it does so, it presents commercial opportunities. It also presents challenges and concerns.

In December, the Royal Navy unveiled Atlantic Bastion, a programme combining ships and patrol aircraft with autonomous vessels and underwater sensors to track Russian submarines across the North Atlantic in what senior officers reminded was a return to familiar anxieties about the formidable challenges posed by the Soviet Union’s Northern Fleet during the Cold War.

Just last week, the First Sea Lord, Sir Gwyn Jenkins, gave an important speech warning of increased Russian activities in UK waters. The threats posed by Moscow, he said, are greater today than at any point since 1989 and ‘felt most acutely in the maritime domain, in the North Atlantic, in the High North’.

Just as Iran has understood that the Strait of Hormuz gives leverage, so too does Moscow recognise the influence it could wield as shipping lanes open up along its 15,000-mile Arctic coastline and become more important for global trade. Prowling the waters at either end of the Northern Sea Route are 12 of Russia’s nuclear-armed submarines – six stationed on the Kola Peninsula in the west and six operated by the Pacific Fleet based in Vilyuchinsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

In between, Russia has spent years reopening, modernising and fortifying military bases on its Siberian coast, making the route a formidable gauntlet for any rival power.

Most of the American forces in the region – some 22,000 military personnel – are concentrated on Alaska’s northern shore, across eight bases. Greenland, however, could become Washington’s hub of operations in the North Atlantic, if US forces move in following Trump’s agreement with the Danish.

America already operates the Pituffik Space Base on Greenland, and will want to resurrect several of its long-abandoned Second World War bases there to enhance missile warning, space surveillance and satellite capabilities. It was one of these derelict sites – at Gronnedal – that a Chinese firm wanted to buy in 2016, until Denmark blocked the deal on security grounds.

Elsewhere, Nato has a military presence on Canada’s Arctic islands and along Norway’s northern coast. The Norwegians have by far the strongest military presence in the Arctic among its Scandinavian neighbours, with four air bases, including one for its new F-35 fighter jets; two navy bases and a string of army bases.

It also runs the Trondelag Reception Centre, a military hub that can swiftly house Nato troops during an attack. Nearby is Camp Viking, Britain’s main toehold in the region – a hub for the UK’s Commando Force led by the Royal Marines, which is aiming to have a year-round presence there.

All of which is to say that the Arctic could become every bit as much of a tinderbox as the Middle East, were the Northern Passage to open to significant global trade.

Perhaps for that reason, Russia has been wary of over-involving China in its Arctic policy. Although there have been joint training exercises, Moscow has sought to keep its primary geopolitical partner at arm’s length when it comes to the High North.

That is now changing as Russia’s isolation from the West deepens: around half the transits last year either began or ended in China, while Chinese money supports Russian energy projects. Joint exercises also provide an indication of close collaboration across this region.

The Arctic as a whole is not just a new frontier for the study of climate change, for the extraction of minerals or for land grabs; it is a key part of the reality that control of trade routes has always been fundamental to power.

Here in the United Kingdom, as in Europe, there are lots of things we need to be doing to set our house in order.

One of the most important, though, is to understand what is changing, where and why. And another is to not only to look to the East and to the West, or even to the South – as we often do. We need to remember to look to the North too.

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University.