The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

world’s eyes were transfixed by that flag, not sediment samples. The great global economic contraction was still a year away. Energy demand was soaring and resurgent Russia, fueled by hundred-dollars-a-barrel oil and Putin’s steely gaze, was growing increasingly assertive on the world stage.

Two months later, when the news hit about the record-shattering low in the amount of summertime Arctic sea ice,³²⁵ the image of uncorked shipping lanes, vast new energy reserves, and Russians planting flags in a brand-new ocean proved too much to resist. Arctic fever went viral. Headlines and pundits declared that a new colonial race for the frontier—a “mad scramble” for control of the Arctic Ocean and its vast presumed resources—had begun.³²⁶

The perception that vast quantities of valuable natural resources lie awaiting in the North is not without merit. Most of its land surface has yet to be prospected for minerals; the Arctic Ocean seafloor is among the least mapped on Earth. Some of the world’s biggest mines are dug into Alaska and Siberia; one of the purest iron ores ever found was recently discovered on Canada’s Baffin Island.³²⁷ The discovery of diamonds in the Northwest Territories in 1991 sparked the biggest North American staking rush since the Klondike and propelled Canada from having no diamonds at all to becoming the world’s third-largest producer almost overnight. No one really knows what the new Arctic Ocean biology will be, but a longer open-water season can only mean more photosynthesis, more complex food webs, and the prospect of valuable new fisheries there. There are staggering volumes of gas hydrate—a sort of solid methane dry-ice that accumulates in the pore spaces of ocean sediments and permafrost—which no one has yet figured out how to recover but is plausibly a coveted fossil fuel of the future.

The plainest prize of all is natural gas and oil. The Arctic’s broad continental shelves are draped in thick sequences of shale-rich sedimentary rock, an ideal geological setting for finding oil and gas. Prospects for natural gas are particularly high. In 2008 and 2009, the U.S. Geological Survey released new assessments concluding that about 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of its undiscovered oil lies in the Arctic, mostly offshore in less than five hundred meters of water.³²⁸ These numbers are huge considering the region as a whole covers just 4% of the globe. The USGS assessments conclude it is more than 95% probable that the Arctic holds at least 770 trillion cubic feet of gas, with a fifty-fifty chance it contains more than double that. To put these numbers into perspective, the total proved gas reserves of the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined is about 313 trillion cubic feet of gas. The global economy consumes some 110 trillion cubic feet per year.

Between the 2007 and 2008 sea-ice retreats, the Russian flag-planting, and the new USGS hydrocarbon assessments, it didn’t take long to hear rumbles about an arms race—or even outright war—over the Arctic Ocean. “There is simply no comparable historical example of a saltwater space with such ambiguous ownership, such a dramatically mutating seascape, and such extraordinary economic promise. Without U.S. leadership . . . the region could erupt in an armed mad dash for its resources,” offered Council on Foreign Relations (a prominent American think tank) analyst Scott Borgerson, writing in Foreign Affairs. “The rapid melt is also rekindling numerous interstate rivalries and attracting energy-hungry newcomers, such as China, to the region. The Arctic powers are fast approaching diplomatic gridlock, and that could eventually lead to the sort of armed brinkmanship that plagues other territories.”³²⁹ Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, asserted, “The Arctic must become Russia’s main strategic resource base,” and “it cannot be ruled out that the battle for raw materials will be waged with military means.”³³⁰ The prestigious Jane’s Intelligence Review concluded, “Military competition is likely to increase, with Russia and Canada increasing their deployments and exercises, while there appears little opportunity for diplomatic resolution of the disputes.”³³¹

Could competition for hydrocarbons really spark a military buildup in the Arctic? Militarization has happened there before, after all. During the Cold War, it was a place where American and Russian forces played cat-and- mouse war games with spy planes and nuclear-armed subs, and built remote outposts to detect long-range bombers. It was a theater of military intrigue and brinkmanship, the stuff of spy novels and movie thrillers like Ice Station Zebra with Rock Hudson and K-19: The Widowmaker with Harrison Ford.

The end of the Cold War marked the end of the thriller plots, and Arctic countries quickly downsized their militaries and lost interest in the region. Canada canceled its plan to buy as many as a dozen nuclear-powered submarines. The United States canceled a new class of Seawolf attack subs designed to fight beneath the sea ice. Most dramatically, the former Soviet Union simply parked its northern fleet in Murmansk and walked away.³³² But by 2009, nearly two decades later, a military revival was stirring. All eight NORC countries—Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—were either rebuilding their militaries and coast guards or at least pondering new security arrangements in the region.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was speaking often about reasserting Canada’s sovereignty over her northern territories and the Northwest Passage,³³³ and backing it up with new ice-strengthened patrol ships, a military training base in Resolute Bay, and a $720 million icebreaker. Norway was acquiring five new frigates armed with Aegis integrated weapons systems, and nearly fifty American-made F-35 fighter jets. Russia had refurbished its northern fleet and announced plans to expand it with new attack submarines, nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, and enough ships to man five or six aircraft carrier battle groups by the 2020s. Russia had also resumed long-range bomber patrols along the airspaces of Canada, Alaska, and the Nordic countries for the first time since the Cold War. On the eve of U.S. president Barack Obama’s first visit to Canada, two Canadian Air Force jets were scrambled—perhaps overzealously—to meet an approaching Russian bomber.³³⁴ Even Iceland, nearly bankrupted by the global financial crisis, was pondering how to bolster its security. Finland, Denmark, and Sweden were considering new alliances with each other, or even possible membership in NATO.³³⁵

The United States—dubbed the “reluctant Arctic power” by political scientist Rob Huebert at the University of Calgary³³⁶—was not growing its northern military power as noticeably. Its Polar Star icebreaker was out of service; a replacement was scrapped from the Obama administration’s omnibus stimulus bill.³³⁷ However, America had never downsized its northern forces as much as the other Arctic countries after the Cold War. It still maintained some twenty-five thousand army, air force, and coast guard personnel in Alaska and had even begun conducting naval exercises offshore.³³⁸ One of the United States’ two controversial missile defense complexes (intended to shoot down incoming ICBM missiles) was installed at Fort Greely in Alaska. Perhaps most telling of all was a presidential directive quietly issued in January 2009, during the final days of the Bush administration. This little-noticed document sharply redefined U.S. policy in the Arctic for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

This “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 66, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD 25,” or, more compactly, “Arctic Region Policy,”³³⁹ was crafted exclusively for the Arctic, a significant change because all previous directives had lumped it and Antarctica together. Equally significant was its elevation of “National security and homeland security needs” to priority position #1 (out of six)—a return to Cold War prioritization. To political scientists, these changes are significant and signal a growing American strategic interest in the region.

War in the Arctic?

We’ve seen that current trends in rhetoric, defense spending, and written policy all point to a renewed militarization of the North. That is the trend. But what about war? Huebert believes that the world is beginning to perceive the Arctic as the “next Middle East” in terms of fossil hydrocarbon energy.³⁴⁰ Is it also the next Middle East in terms of fault lines for conflict? After all, jostling militaries imply heightened risk of incident; and conflicts needn’t even be about the Arctic to erupt there—the region could also become an expanded theater for global tensions and antagonism, as happened during the Cold War.

This last scenario is certainly not the case today. Whether it develops in the future depends on the choices of future political leaders and thus lies outside the bounds of our thought experiment. But what of intrinsic pressures within the Arctic itself ? Is the “mad scramble” so fevered, the oil and gas