Russia’s actions in the Arctic, combined with incursions into Ukraine and Syria, have given Russia’s Arctic neighbors some genuine cause for alarm, especially the Norwegians, who also share a land border with Russia. New third-generation Abrams-type battle tanks are now being stored in the huge spaces carved out of Norway’s quartz and slate mountains. In 2010 Norway, the only NATO member with a permanent military base above the Arctic Circle, reopened its mountain stronghold in Bodø, which has fifty-four thousand square feet of tunnels and a five-story-high command center. At this stage, intelligence is still far more significant than the positioning of forces. “If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage during the Cold War…,” says James Bamford, a columnist for Foreign Policy, “it’s fair to say that the Arctic has become the crossroads of technical espionage today.”[331]
The Russians profess to feel threatened by the extension of NATO to their country’s very borders, a result of former Eastern Bloc countries joining the organization. At the North Pole, however, Russia faces four NATO countries, all of which were members from its very inception. These were not the long-suffering countries of Eastern Europe seeking refuge inside NATO’s castle, but core defenders of Western values and strategies. The Russians know how to rattle the Poles and the Baltic states, but find facing the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark a bit more worrisome. Still, with all its military bases and icebreakers—twenty-seven to the United States’ two—Russia is the powerhouse of the north. “We’re not even in the same league as Russia right now,” concedes Coast Guard commandant Paul Zukunft.[332]
That is the basic geopolitical lay of the land, but what matters even more here is the dynamic driving events. For the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark the Arctic is important whereas for Russia it has an edge of existential desperation. Since its land-based oil fields are browning, the promised resources of the Arctic could well mean the difference between power and collapse. If Russia loses “the battle for resources,” as Deputy Prime Minister Rogozin puts it, it will also lose “sovereignty and independence.”[333] Those resources lie principally in that immense undersea extension of its territory known as the Lomonosov Ridge. The submersible that planted the titanium flag on the seafloor under the North Pole was not all about propaganda and bravado—it was also collecting soil samples as part of the scientific evidence, including the acoustic and seismic, to support Russia’s claim, which was presented to the United Nations in August 2015, no quick answer anticipated.
And what if the UN rejects Russia’s claim? Then, given the right desperate economic conditions, it will quickly become apparent that for Russia the Arctic is not so much a Mecca as an undersea Crimea that must be seized and annexed in defiance of all law, even at the risk of war.
9
MANIFESTING DESTINY: ASIA
We are similar in character.
Russia is pivoting east just as China “marches west.” They could well collide in Central Asia.
Russia, of course, had burgeoning trade with China before the violent events in Crimea and Ukraine caused the rupture between Moscow and the West. Like other resource-rich countries, Russia saw the chance to profit by feeding the furnace of the Chinese economy, which, to take one measure of its scale, in the years 2011–13 poured more concrete than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. China had already surpassed Germany as Russia’s leading trading partner in 2011. In a pronouncement both ringing and clunky, Putin declared in 2012: “In the 21st century, the vector of Russia’s development is to the east.”[335]
For Russia the east has always been a vector of its manifest destiny. America’s great westward sweep was matched by Russia’s to the east, which even spilled over into the Western Hemisphere to include Alaska and parts of northern California. The Russians did not confront any great warlike nations like the Comanches, making their takeover of Siberia and the Far East a relatively easy conquest, not the source of both sagas and shame as the conquest of Indian territory was for America. The drive was so successful that three-quarters of Russia is in Asia.
It was Russia’s eastward expansion that gave it the territorial basis for its own sense of greatness, but the east also carries associations of tragic humiliation and defeat. The only successful invasion of Russia came from the east, Genghis Khan having succeeded where Napoleon and Hitler would fail. The destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese navy in the Tsushima Strait during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 still resonates in Russia. Billed as a “short, victorious war,”[336] a tonic for a society ailing from worker discontent and revolutionary assassination, the war had definite racist overtones. The Russian press called the Japanese “little yellow devils,” while the British and some other European powers equipped Tokyo and cheered “brave little”[337] Japan on. But the cheering stopped when the war ended with an ominous first—the first victory of an Asian nation over a white European one.
It was inevitable that Russia’s eastward expansion would cause it to come up against China. Russia is the only European country that borders China. In fact, it has two separate borders with China. One is quite long, a touch over 2,500 miles in length, whereas the second, only 24 miles long and located between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, will not be visible on any map of normal size, but may well play an outsized role in the coming years because of pipelines passing through the ecologically precious lands of the Golden Mountains of Altai. In any case, unlike the United States, Russia and China are both countries with many borders, fourteen each in fact.
The first treaty China ever concluded with the West (the Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689) was to begin establishing borders with Russia, a process that was only finally completed by Putin and Hu in 2004. But fear and grievances remain. Many Chinese believe that by force or the threat of force Russia imposed “unequal treaties”[338] on China and unjustly seized 1.5 million square kilometers. Mao espoused that view in 1964, and five years later Soviet and Chinese troops engaged in armed border clashes. “The Politburo was terrified that the Chinese might make a large-scale intrusion into the Soviet territory that China claimed. A nightmare vision of invasion by millions of Chinese made the Soviet leaders almost frantic,” wrote Arkady Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet diplomat ever to defect, in his book Breaking with Moscow.[339]
The fear behind the old Soviet quip—all quiet on the Finnish-Chinese border—continues to fuel Russian anxiety. Speaking off the record, a highly placed Russian government figure told me that he expects the next war to be a “resource war” and China to be the enemy. It’s a pity that Russian-American relations have sunk so low, he said, when we should be forging an alliance to counter the mounting Chinese threat.
Putin has said of Russian-Chinese relations: “We do not have a single irritating element in our ties.”[340] In fact, the relationship is fraught with tension. First and foremost is what could be called Russia’s demographobia. In the country’s vast Far East, there are only 7 million people, while China’s three northern provinces that border the Russian Far East contain more than 100 million. Many are already working in Russia, crossing the bordering as Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin puts it, “small groups of 5 million.”[341] Putin himself has said: “I don’t want to dramatize the situation, but if we do not make every real effort, even the indigenous population will soon speak mostly Japanese, Chinese and Korean.”[342]
333
“Battle for Arctic Key for Russia’s Sovereignty—Rogozin,”
335
“Putin: Russia’s development vector is directed eastward in the 21st century,” Interfax, December 12, 2012. Translation changed slightly.
337
Denis Warner and Peggy Warner,
338
“The Opening to China Part II,” Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, history@state.gov.
341
Alex Rodriguez, “Chinese Reap Opportunity, Rancor in Russia’s Far East,”