The shorter routes also mean carbon dioxide emissions are reduced. The pirate-infested Strait of Malacca and Horn of Africa can be avoided. Supertankers that are too large for either the Suez or the Panama Canal and thus must sail about the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn will enjoy even greater reductions in time and distance.
But there are already problems. Canada claims full jurisdiction over the Northwest Passage as part of its territorial waters, which allows them to charge other nations for passing through them. The United States and the EU dispute that claim and are also against Russia’s charging for passage through the Northern Sea Route. There are also maritime border disputes between the United States and Russia.
Those disputes may all be settled peacefully as was one between Russia and Norway over a 175,000-square-kilometer area in the Barents Sea. Originally over fishing rights, the dispute expanded to include the gas and oil deposits, which could run to thirty-nine billion barrels. That dispute lasted several years but was settled amicably in September 2010. Russia needs Norwegian assistance in drilling in the Arctic, and Norway has the most experience in such climatic conditions.
“The Arctic … is just an ocean … governed by the law of the sea,” said Norwegian foreign minister Espen Barth Eide.[303] In the simplest terms that means that the treasures of the Arctic Ocean and any disputes arising over them are the exclusive business of the five nations with an Arctic coastline. Germany, however, contends that the rapid and dramatic climate changes occurring in the Arctic will affect everyone and therefore are everyone’s business.
Though the five Arctic countries can resolve their disputes multilaterally or even bilaterally, as Russia and Norway did, there are nevertheless two bodies for airing and resolving differences. The Arctic Council is an intergovernmental body with eight permanent members (the five Arctic Ocean states plus the Arctic Circle states Sweden, Finland, and Iceland). Germany has permanent observer status, to which China also now aspires. Six native peoples also have permanent observer status. The council does not have the power to enact or enforce laws, but has produced the council’s first binding pact delineating the Arctic Ocean for research-and-rescue operations.
The most serious problems relating to boundaries and sovereignty are currently dealt with by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). UNCLOS has already defined and delineated the power of any nation bordering a sea: within 12 nautical miles of its coastline a nation exercises sovereign rights and may arrest foreign ships entering those waters without permission. A nation’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extends 200 nautical miles. Within the EEZ, the coastal state has exclusive rights over the economic resources of the sea, seabed, and subsoil to the exclusion of other states. The real troubles begin with the continental shelf, which is the seabed and subsoil areas that can be shown to be an extension of the land of a given country. The continental shelf can extend 200 nautical miles and in some cases up to 350 if it can be demonstrated to be part of the “natural prolongation of the soil.”[304]
Two enormous problems arise here. Russia aggressively claims the continental shelf, which includes the underwater mountain ranges known as the Lomonosov Ridge and the Mendeleev Ridge, as the natural prolongation of Russia’s land. This vast territory (465,000 square miles or about three Californias) includes the North Pole, one reason that the titanium flag was planted there in 2007. If Moscow’s claims for the continental shelf are approved, Russia will not only be the largest country on earth but the largest underwater as well.
Russia’s first claim on this territory was rejected by the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf as being insufficiently demonstrated. In August 2015 it submitted a new claim. Denmark and Canada also claim part of it as belonging to their continental shelf.
Another major complication is that the United States is not yet an official signatory to the Law of the Sea Treaty. The motion died in the Senate in 2012 with Republicans declaring that “the treaty’s litigation exposure and impositions on U.S. sovereignty outweigh its potential benefits.”[305] Former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have been strong supporters of the treaty. Then defense secretary Leon Panetta has said: “Not since we acquired the lands of the American West and Alaska have we had such a great opportunity to expand U.S. sovereignty.”[306] By not being a signatory to the Law of the Sea, the United States does not have official claim to its territorial sea, Exclusive Economic Zone, or continental shelf.
Republican senator Richard Lugar, addressing the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said that the Law of the Sea had been “designated by the Bush Administration as one of five ‘urgent’ treaties deserving of ratification.”[307] He added:
As the world’s preeminent maritime power, the largest importer and exporter, the leader in the war on terrorism, and the owner of the largest Exclusive Economic Zone off our shores, the United States has more to gain than any other country from the establishment of order with respect to the oceans…. The Commander-in-Chief, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the United States Navy, in time of war, are asking the Senate to give its advice and consent to this treaty. Our uniformed commanders and civilian national security leadership are telling us, unanimously and without qualification, that U.S. accession to this treaty would help them do their job.[308]
Lugar also noted that Russia was already making “excessive claims in the Arctic.”[309]
The Russians, of course, don’t see their claims on the Arctic as excessive but as just and justified. And indeed there is considerable historical basis for the Russians to feel a special relationship with the Arctic. There is no question that they were the forerunners of scientific exploration in the region, establishing a tradition of intrepid researchers who set up their research stations on ice floes that could suddenly break apart, as described in this Soviet report from November 1954:
A crack in the ice passed through the camp. Most of them were asleep and only the man on watch heard the noise. Suddenly a blow was felt and the floe shuddered. Everyone woke up quickly and ran out of the tents. All went to pre-arranged places for “ice alarm.” The crack passed between the tents of the meteorologists and started visibly opening. It passed beneath the tent housing the magnetic instruments. The edge of the tent hung over the water, but tent and equipment were saved. In ten to fifteen minutes the floes had parted and there was open water 50 m. wide between them.[310]
As Britain’s leading expert on the Russian Arctic, Terence Armstrong, says in The Russians in the Arctic: “This sort of thing was not a rare occurrence.”[311] He points out that through their “boldly conceived expeditions, the Russians have made themselves the undisputed experts on the whole central Arctic region…,”[312] adding that almost “everything that is known about the circulation of water in the Arctic Ocean … was discovered by Russian work.”[313]
306
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s speech on the Law of the Sea, May 2012, Council on Foreign Relations, May 9, 2012.
307
UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Senator Richard G. Lugar Opening Statement, September 27, 2007. www.ceanlaw.org.
310
Terence Armstrong,