7. Conclusion
It is no longer quiet on the Northern Front.165 Because climate change is not a linear process, annual variations in the extent of ice floes will be unpredictable, and this will have an impact on coastal states in unprecedented ways. The Arctic today will not be the same as the Arctic that Russia and other coastal states will experience by the 2040s and 2050s, when the Arctic Ocean will be navigable.
It seems that the golden era of ‘low tension’ is slowly coming to an end: the Arctic is now a place of growing military security wariness, albeit with enduring scope for cooperation. It is time to puncture the myth of ‘Arctic exceptionalism’ and recognize that the region can no longer be insulated from the broader military security context.
It is yet to be determined whether Arctic nations will continue their cooperative course, or whether strategic competition will increase in the polar seas. Just as space conquest was a venting mechanism for great-power competition during the Cold War, the Arctic could very well become the arena for the new ‘Great Game’ of the 21st century.
Arctic matters will remain on the Russian policy agenda and will outlast the tenure of President Vladimir Putin. The nature of economic and military activities, however, will depend on how the Kremlin manages to turn political and symbolic rhetoric into economic dividends. In the future, this could push Moscow into altering, to an extent, its cooperative approach with other Arctic nations. This would have serious security implications. Although not a given, military build-up could very well become an escape strategy for the Kremlin, or even potentially an end in itself. The ‘militarization’ of the Russian Arctic, for now defensive in nature, would then have a more offensive contour in respect of NATO and its partners.
So far, Russia has been acting as a status quo power and a reluctant rule-follower in the Arctic, partly because international law plays in its favour, and partly because the Kremlin values a cooperative stance and it is in its interest to preserve the current arrangements. Despite growing tension, cooperation is likely to endure. For the West, working continuously with Russia, especially on military security affairs, will avoid transferring the current security tensions into the Arctic.
Russia will chair the Arctic Council and the Arctic Coast Guard Forum (ACGF) between 2021 and 2023, taking over from Iceland. There might now be a window of opportunity to prepare the ground for a more inclusive debate around military security in the region. This would send a powerful signal that cooperation should remain an absolute priority for all Arctic states, and that maintaining the ‘low tension’ status takes action, not just words.
165 See the ongoing ‘play on words’ in Åtland (2011), ‘Russia’s Armed Forces and the Arctic’. See also Klimenko (2016), Russia’s Arctic Security Policy; and Buchanan, E. (2019), ‘Not All Is Quiet on the Arctic Front’, The Moscow Times, 25 March 2019, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/03/25/not-all-is-quiet-on-the-arctic-front-a64904 (accessed 15 May 2019).