Sec. of State Mike Pompeo meets Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen, Copenhagen 22 July 2020. 

It was a tiny piece of news, almost no news at all.

Denmark’s national news agency put out only the slightest of items — I almost missed it — when Danish Defense minister Trine Bramsen announced on her way to Nuuk in early August that she would bring with her a political advisor who was to remain in Greenland’s capital as a new intermediary between the minister, her staff in Copenhagen and the administration in Greenland, 3,500 kilometers to the north.

She flatly rejected a suggestion that this unusual arrangement had anything to do with the fact that the U.S. consulate in Nuuk has just reopened after more than 60 years of deep sleep.

“I made this decision long ago, so it does not have anything to do with that. This is about cooperation between Denmark and Greenland,” the minister said.

“I have decided that from now on we will have a political advisor in Greenland. This is in light of the increasing developments in the Arctic security- and defense-wise,” she said.

This was deftly put. The minister managed to remain truthful and at the same time diplomatically obfuscate the issue. In fact, the placement of a political advisor of this sort in Nuuk has very much to do with the mushrooming U.S. involvement in Greenland, but the minister was also right to indicate that the great change in the Arctic, which has now necessitated her placement of a special Danish advisor on military affairs in Nuuk, happened long before the reopening of the U.S. consulate in Greenland this summer.

The rapid increase in U.S. attention to the Arctic has long manifested itself in our European part of the Arctic and it is has in many ways direct impact on the political environments, as indicated not only by the reopening of the U.S. consulate in Nuuk, but also, for instance, by the stationing of U.S. marines in northern Norway since 2017 (although this will soon be discontinued), the return of the U.S. military to Keflavik, the former air base in Iceland, or, as in this recent case, by the placing of a political advisor to the Danish minister of defense in Nuuk.

In May, four U.S. naval ships, accompanied by a British vessel, sailed into the Barents Sea north of Norway to conduct maritime security operations closer to Russian waters than any exercise of its kind since the Cold War in the mid-eighties. According to a U.S. Navy press release, the operation included three Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyers, Donald Cook, Porter and Roosevelt, all designed to launch guided missiles, supported by a fast combat support ship.

In June, a school of Norwegian F-16s and F-35s fighter jets trained with one of the largest bombers in the U.S. Air Force, a B-52H Stratofortress, during a long-range, long duration strategic bomber task mission throughout Europe and the Arctic region. The flying fortress flew closer to Russian air space in the Arctic than any other of its kind in recent years.

In late July the Roosevelt, one of the destroyers mentioned, was back in the Arctic, sailing as far north as 78 degrees:

“Today my crew has operated above the 66th parallel for twenty-eight days and counting, and I am thrilled to award them the Navy Arctic Service Ribbon. This ribbon symbolizes Roosevelt’s exceptional maritime operations in the high north and a sustained U.S. naval presence in Arctic waters, ” said Ryan R. Kendall, commanding officer aboard Roosevelt, according to the Barents Observer.

“Maritime operations by USS Roosevelt are the most visible and persistent demonstrations of the Navy’s commitment to Arctic security,” he added.

I was reminded of a public speech by the Russian envoy to Copenhagen Vladimir Barbin last year, where he suggested that the impressive increase in Russian military spending in the Arctic, including the massive refurbishment of the Nagurskoye Air Base further north than any Russian military outpost, was spurred not the least by exactly such U.S. missions. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, statements like that from Russian representatives are often dismissed as half-truths or less, but the recent increase in western and U.S. military activity in the Arctic is indeed noteworthy.

No more talk of buying Greenland

Not long after the Roosevelt’s travels in the Far North, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Copenhagen. To many in the U.S., it may be hard to imagine how big an event such a visit is for a small country like Denmark, but take my word for it. A visit by the secretary of state of the U.S. is not taken lightly here at all. I was invited to sit on an all-day panel of commentators on one of our national broadcasters which provided non-stop coverage for more than eight hours of television. Pompeo was received by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and not only — as would normally be the case when a foreign secretary visits — by his Danish counterpart, Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod, with whom he had talks only after meeting with Frederiksen.

The secretary’s visit came less than a year after president Trump’s confirmation on TV that he and his staff had discussed for some time how the U.S. could perhaps buy Greenland, complete with its 57,000 inhabitants, from the Danish government.

“A large real estate deal” that would be “strategically nice for the US”, as the president put it in August 2019. Our prime minister dismissed the discussion as absurd, and president Trump consequently cancelled a state visit to Denmark.

In Copenhagen, Pompeo made no mention of Trump’s purchase suggestion, but it has, of course, hardly been forgotten here. Trump in essence indicated that the U.S. was no longer satisfied with running Thule Air Base in the north of Greenland or working with Denmark and semi-autonomous Greenland as the U.S. and its defense forces have done since the Second World War. This suggestion sent shockwaves through Copenhagen and Nuuk, and it led to rapid action. It was now clear that the U.S. strategic interest in Greenland has grown to a degree where status quo is no longer an option, and that Greenland is likely to remain a strategic U.S. priority long after the current U.S. administration is eventually replaced.

The Danish government acted firmly on this knowledge. Shortly after Trump’s suggestion, the government announced a hefty increase in funding for Denmark’s Arctic Command in Nuuk, a commitment reconfirmed by Kofod in a press briefing during Pompeo’s visit to Copenhagen.

The practical examples of such Danish follow-ups on the renewed U.S. focus on the Arctic keep coming. Only last week, Maj. Gen. Anders Rex, commander of Air Command Denmark for the Royal Danish Air Force, wrote in Defense News, a U.S. based news outlet, how several of Denmark’s newly acquired F-35 fighter jets will be equipped to work in the Arctic.

“The F-35 will be pivotal in the execution of Danish air defense and sovereignty. Whether it will also perform missions in the Arctic is undecided, but some of the Danish F-35s will have provision for a drag chute to enable operations from icy runways. Coupled with the Greenlandic decision to extend a number of air fields to more than 2,000 meters, it gives vastly increased operational opportunities for fighter operations,” the commander explained.

During Pompeo’s visit to Copenhagen, the idea that the U.S. might indeed buy Greenland was all but invisible. It has clearly been shoved firmly back on the shelf, but it served as an ever-present reminder and left nobody in doubt of Secretary Pompeo’s seriousness when he spoke of Greenland:

“Quite simply, it’s a new day for the United States and Greenland. Reopening the U.S. consulate in Nuuk reinvigorates an American presence that was dormant for far too long,” he said during the press briefing.

“The United States has also signed new memorandums of understanding to cooperate with our partners in the Kingdom of Denmark that cover a wide range of areas, like growing Greenland’s mining and energy sectors through transparent investment, helping manage land and fisheries, increasing tourism, and much, much more,” he added, indicating again how significant the renewed U.S. engagement in Greenland is.

At no point before 2019 has the U.S. been involved like this in civil affairs in Greenland. Now, with an initial input of $12 million in aid, technical advisors from the U.S., including USAID, are to manage civil development projects in several locations in Greenland, all based on a set of deals entered into directly between Nuuk and the Trump administration in Washington without any direct involvement of the Danish government in Copenhagen. Many see this more direct U.S. approach to Greenland as a host of new opportunities; others are busy ruminating about possible hidden U.S. motives.

During his visit to Copenhagen, Pompeo announced that one of the next steps in the renewed U.S. involvement in the Arctic will be the opening of similar political avenues of formal communication between Washington and Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, which like Greenland is a semi-autonomous part of the Danish kingdom that has never before enjoyed such attention from the U.S.

Only days before, after a visit to Tórshavn by the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Carla Sands, the media reported that U.S. naval ships would likely become much more frequent in Faroese ports. In a nation with only 51,000 inhabitants, this is important news, both politically and from a business perspective, and while Pompeo did not comment in Copenhagen on this issue of potential U.S. military use of the Faroese ports, he did highlight the formalization of new U.S.-Faroese links:

“I’m pleased to announce today that the United States and the Faroe Islands have agreed to start a formal dialogue to talk about key issues like healthy fisheries and enhanced commercial engagement,” he said.

During his one-day visit to Copenhagen, Pompeo met directly with representatives of the administrations in Nuuk and Torshavn. Steen Lynge, the minister of foreign affairs of Greenland, and Jenis av Rana, his Faroese colleague, were both invited to parts of the meetings by the Danish government — which brings us back to the new Nuuk-based political advisor to Denmark’s defense minister.

As Bramsen indicated in her announcement last week, her new advisor is to bring up to speed coordination between Nuuk and Copenhagen. Also, it is fair to assume, the advisor is to make sure that the administration in Nuuk feels that it is  fully informed about all relevant negotiations between the U.S. and Copenhagen — a matter which was not previously always resolved to Nuuk’s satisfaction.

According to the intricate ways of the Danish Kingdom, Greenland and the Faroe Islands cannot pursue their own separate policies when it comes to matters of defense or security. And since Pompeo and Sands have been very clear that the U.S. engagement in the Arctic is very much designed to defend the U.S. itself against Russian aggression and to counteract Chinese advances in the Arctic, it is not always easy to find out exactly what the Faroese and Greenlandic leaders are authorized to talk to the US envoys about and what they are not.

The new political advisor in Nuuk is there to sort out exactly such questions and to make sure that upcoming military developments in Greenland — whether funded by U.S. or Denmark — happens in tight coordination between Copenhagen and the Nuuk’s self-rule government. This is a must if the leaders in Greenland are to remain satisfied with the existing power-sharing within the Kingdom of Denmark and it is important for the maintenance of both Denmark’s and Greenland’s vital relations with the U.S. at this time of the American pivot to the North.

SAINT PETERSBURG — Last week at Russia’s small but magnificent Arctic museum, which has existed since 1933 in an old church in Saint Petersburg, I found the key to the North Pole — literally.

In dark and heavy wrought iron, about 20 centimeters long and coupled to an equally heavy iron chain, this ceremonial key was presented back in 1937 to the crew of Station 1, the very first of many Soviet research stations set up over the years on drift ice near the North Pole.

I will get back to the key, but for now let us accept it as a symbol of Russia’s deep attachment to the Arctic.

It helped me grasp a little more of the renewed great power rivalry in the Arctic and added to a rough outline presented to me recently by a Russian official: When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and its republics and dependencies in Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltics and Eastern Europe were lost, Russia took some time to collect itself and then turned all eyes to the north.

In the vast and snowy provinces from Murmansk in the west to the Pacific in the east there was still plenty of room for national expansion, economic advancement, Russian greatness, scientific leaps and hopes for the future. In hindsight the turn to the north was almost destined.

“For Russia, in many aspects geography is destiny. It is very important to understand that the Arctic is an integral part of Russia’s identity and that Russia views itself as an Arctic nation,” Marya Rozanova-Smith, an Arctic researcher and lecturer tells me in Saint Petersburg.

“The Arctic is a great source of national pride in Russia and deeply rooted in its past achievements. What else does the Russian people have to be so proud of today?” she says.

Six months every year Marya Rozanova-Smith lectures on Arctic Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington D.C. The rest of the year she spends on Arctic projects at the Russian State Hydrometeorological University in Saint Petersburg, her hometown, or guest lecturing elsewhere. We met at one of the annual Arctic gatherings in Russia, the IX International Forum: Arctic – Today and the Future in a gigantic conference center outside Saint Petersburg.

[Local skepticism meets government optimism at a major Arctic event in Russia]

Some 1,000 governors, politicians and others from Russia’s Arctic provinces and districts gathered here under 10-meter-high ceilings to learn from each other and make themselves heard by the throngs of  VIPs dispatched by the central government in Moscow. Many have flown 6 to 8 hours from Yakutia, Chukotka, Krasnoyarsk or other points in the north for this opportunity; a few wear clothing of the more than 40 officially recognized Indigenous peoples in the Russian Arctic.

About a third of Russia’s land mass is Arctic and the rapid decrease in polar sea ice — and the insistent focus by President Vladimir Putin on the riches in the Arctic — has led to significant economic and military developments along Russia’s north and some 20,000 kilometers of Arctic coastline. This is an Arctic revival which changes the lives of those who live there and which provides significant backdrop for the current signs of increased great power rivalry in the Arctic.

The ice silk road

“The Arctic is the national resource base for the whole of Russia. Ultimately, it is not just about national pride, not just about identity or about the peoples living in the Arctic, but also about the country’s future economic prosperity” Rozanova-Smith says.

More than 10 percent of Russia’s GDP and some 20 percent of all Russian exports are generated in the Arctic.

The world’s first floating nuclear power station now provides electricity to the 4,000 people in Pevek, a small East Siberian town on the coast and to mining and oil operations in the vicinity.

The new nuclear-powered icebreaker Arktika, so far the largest and most powerful in the world took its first trial run from Saint Petersburg on Thursday. Its sisters Ural and Sibir will follow soon and two more have been commissioned. Beginning in April 2020 Arktika will serve the Northern Sea Route, where forward-looking shipowners, not least Chinese, are eyeing the shortest ever route between Europe and Asia, thousands of kilometers shorter than the route through the Suez Canal.

[The world’s largest nuclear icebreaker starts sea trials]

The Northern Sea Route is among the main sources of inspiration for the Russian vision of Arctic might, prosperity and future power.

The Russians have sailed on their Arctic seas and in their Arctic rivers to the hinterland since the 17the century. On some of the grimmest stretches in Siberia the icebreakers at times still fight in vain in the deep winter, but otherwise climate change has opened the waters there so that the amounts of cargo travelling here are now doubling each year.

Last May, Putin issued orders that the amount of goods travelling in the Northern Sea Route must hit 80 million tons per year in 2024. That is more than triple the current traffic, or almost 10 percent of the annual traffic in the Suez Canal, and no one here at the event in Saint Petersburg seems to question the president’s seemingly apocryphal target setting.

“Many Russians remember the Soviet era of the Arctic exploration and how they established cities and big industrial complexes in areas where you can barely survive. Russians often romanticize the Polar region and the political narratives describe it as a land of strong men, who can serve as role models for the next generations,” says Rozanova-Smith.

Stalin and other Soviet leaders used the conquering of the Arctic as proof of the invincible state. The Russians moved north (or were sent to labor camps there; those are not mentioned at the conference), while Soviet pilots in leather helmets were the first to land on the North Pole.

Rozanova-Smith takes me one more step back: “Already in the 18th century Peter the Great sensed the geopolitical importance of the Arctic. He saw Russia as a great, expanding nation,” she says.

She recounts how the emperor and his successors funded Arctic maritime explorations, including a grueling 10-year expedition from Saint Petersburg to Kamchatka with more than 3,000 men. Led by Vitus Bering, a Dane, they travelled under extreme conditions along the Northern Sea Route and eventually across what is now the Bering Strait to Alaska.

“It cost Peter the Great a sixth of the entire budget of the Russian Empire. Probably no other country has put so many human lives, so many resources and such large funds at risk for the sake of the Arctic. For other Arctic nations, that do not have the same historical legacy, perhaps the Arctic does not have the same meaning, but for Russians the Arctic will always be a land they are ready to stand up for,” Rozanova-Smith says.

At the conference in Saint Petersburg, envoys from the Arctic provinces and representatives of companies such as Gazprom, Rosatom, and Novatek explain, how harbors along the Northern Sea Route are now being deepened, railways made longer, new rails laid, pipelines constructed, shipyards expanded and billions of rubles mobilized. In November this year, Rosatom, which already manages Russia’s nuclear icebreakers, announced that it intends to buy 55 container ships for use along the Northern Sea Route.

This was another surprise for western skeptics.

In 2018, a Danish ship Venta Mærsk attracted global attention as the first ever container ship to make the trip from China to Europe along the Northern Sea Route. But Maersk Shipping, the owner, still agrees with most independent observers that running containers between Europe and Asia along the route will not be a viable business for many years to come.

The ice still prohibits the punctuality demanded by modern customers and the hefty price on Russia’s compulsory icebreaker assistance further complicates matters. When Rosatom thinks differently, one Russian observer told me, it is most likely because the company wants to please President Putin and because it relies on domestic Russian cargo, cheap state insurance and free icebreaker service from its own fleet of icebreakers.

All this growth on the Northern Sea Route comes with a pressing security dimension. The U.S. and others accuse Russia of violating international law, by insisting that the Northern Sea Route only of internal Russian waters and that Russia is entitled to regulate — and if necessary prohibit with force — the passage of vessels from other nations. The U.S. and likeminded nations maintain that large tracts of water along the passage are international waters and the age-old right of free passage at the seas must be respected — for instance, in the case of U.S. merchant and naval vessels.

Gas for China

The largest growth in the Russian Arctic is presently from natural gas, in particular gas from the Yamal Peninsula, home of the largest deposits of natural gas in the world. From the new harbor in Sabetta on the Kara Sea, a brand new fleet of icebreaking tankers take liquefied natural gas to the world market. The huge plant at Sabetta and an a even bigger plant planned for the nearby Gydan Peninsula are presently the largest industrial projects in the Arctic. During construction of the Sabetta plant the local population grew from some 300 to 30,000.

The skeptics maintain that the huge investments in Russia’s Arctic fossil resources will prove to be less than sound as the world turns to renewable energy, but so far Russia has found plenty of interested investors and customers.

After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ensuing war in Eastern Ukraine, Europe and the U.S. have to some degree turned their backs on Russia, but there are plenty of takers in Asia, where demand for natural gas surpasses that of Europe. China’s state-owned China National Production Company (CNPC), and the Chinese Belt and Road investment fund provided more than 25 percent of the 27 billion dollars it took to build the Sabetta plant and the Chinese now own 27 percent of the enterprise, while France’s Total owns 20 percent. Japan followed suit recently and made its largest ever investment in Russia — also in Yamal natural gas.

Further south but still in the frozen regions of Russia’s Far East, some 3,000 kilometers of new pipelines will transport natural gas from plants in Kovykta and Chayanada to  Blagoveshchensk on the Chinese border. Chinese pipelines will eventually lead the gas to Shanghai in China’s central regions.

U.S. and European sanctions on Russia after Crimea put an extremely efficient brake on offshore oil developments in the Russian Arctic. Western oil companies have all but disappeared from the scene, and at the conference in Saint Petersburg the resulting frustrations ran thick. A plain-speaking younger official from Moscow, Magomed Gehaev, explained to a sizeable audience how Russia’s own oil sector is poorly organized and incapable of mounting any major new drilling in the Arctic without foreign technological input.

In the bigger picture, however, the potential for new discoveries remains very present in the minds of the central authorities, and the huge Prirazlomnoya platform in the Kara Sea is still the world’s only producing oil platform in such challenging ice conditions. Russia’s modern tankers, capable of breaking ice forward or backwards, carry oil from the Kara Sea to Rotterdam and other markets every day.

Military mobilization

On the military side, new missile-carrying submarines of hitherto unseen sophistication hum their way through the warmer and largely ice free waters around Russia’s naval bases on the Kola Peninsula close to Norway. Three new military icebreakers are on their way from the shipyards, also they will carry sophisticated missiles.

On the isles of Franz Josef Land only 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole Russian MIG fighter planes will soon take off from the refurbished Nagurskoye air base, the world’s northernmost military installation. The runway is 2,500 meters or long enough to receive almost all types of aircrafts and lies only a relatively short distance from the U.S. Air Force base at Thule in Greenland, with its radar — which is part of the U.S. missile defense system.

[Russia plans to set up an Arctic air defense ‘dome’ with S-400 missiles]

During the Cold War, the base at Nagurskoye, named after Yan Nagursky, one of Russia’s early aviation heroes, were home to numerous Russian bombers, and for the last two years the base has once again taken center stage in tensions between the US and Russia.

As the Canadian security analyst Rob Huebert puts it in the latest edition of The Arctic Yearbook:

“At the heart of the problem is a geographical proximity of the Soviet/Russian and American location connected by the Arctic region. This is combined with the existing weapon systems that place a premium on the Arctic as the best staging location for strikes against each other.”

“Thus it is not about an appearance of a new Cold War, it is simply the resurfacing of the ‘old’ Cold War,” he writes.

[Russia’s hypersonic missiles could be why Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland]

In November a MIG fighter plane exercising above the Barents Sea launched one of Russia’s new hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, which flies some eight to 10 times faster than all previously known ballistic missiles. Security analysts say that Russia’s Kinzhal and  Zhirkov missiles are so fast they will penetrate any known missile defense systems, including that of the US. President Putin has bragged about them in the Russian media, but in Saint Petersburg we are told that Russia’s Arctic military build-up is of course only there to maintain a deterrence against foreign (read: U.S. and NATO) aggressions and to defend Russia’s new assets in the Arctic. The head of Russia’s mighty Northern Fleet, vice admiral Aleksandr Moiseyev took the floor himself to make this very point (as relayed through the conference translators:)

“The Northern Fleet is the most powerful force in the world and our presence is a guarantee of peace in the Arctic. We seriously believe that no conflict will arise in the Arctic. For me that is the main priority. Our defensive missile systems are for the defense of our national interests,” he said while showing pictures and graphs of it all.

Denmark and Greenland’s role

The message from the Moscow authorities at the Saint Petersburg event was unambiguous: Russia’s leadership will continue to invest itself and its political and economic capital in the Russian Arctic.

And as we should not forget, Russia also stands to win the rights to substantial new parts of the seabed in the Arctic Ocean towards the North Pole simply by abiding by international law, namely the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Russia therefore has very much to lose and very little to gain from unrest, tension and conflict in the Arctic — or at least that is how Russia’s currently explains Arctic security. The central points were repeated recently at a public event in Copenhagen by Russia’s ambassador to Denmark, Vladimir Barbin, who was Russia’s primary Arctic diplomat for five years before taking up his post in Copenhagen.

European analysts, including analysts here in Copenhagen where I am based, have long tended to agree to most of this analysis and it still informs the latest Arctic analysis from the Danish Defence Intelligence Service, published in November: “Russia (has) an interest in maintaining stability and peace in the Arctic. This will benefit Russia’s security and economic interests in the region and create the most favorable conditions for negotiations for maritime delineation,” the report reads (my translation).

At the same time, however, significant adjustments towards a more hawkish approach to Russia seem to take sway here as well as in Norway, another Arctic country, which is much closer to Russia and deeply involved in renewed Arctic mobilization along the U.S. and Great Britain.

U.S. and British troops have been for the last year more or less permanently stationed in the Norwegian Arctic, and in Denmark our prime minister Mette Frederiksen recently announced a doubling or more to the budget of Denmark’s Arctic Command in Greenland. This followed U.S. complaints that Denmark is not doing enough in the Arctic, and in announcing the budget increase our prime minister made specific reference to Russia: ”We see a significant increase in Russia’s Arctic presence in the Arctic. This is why we need increased anti-submarine capacity. Secondly, we see increased Russian activity in the air. Therefore we need to make particular efforts in the air. Monitoring of our airspace by radar, satellite and planes is one option,” she said. “We have a special responsibility, and we need to lift that. There is reason to be vigilant. The Arctic is a low tension region and we want it to remain so. But should not be naive,” she told (my translation) Berlingske, a major daily newspaper.

As many will know, this followed U.S. President Donald Trump’s confirmation in August that conversations had been ongoing for some time at the White House about how the U.S. might possibly buy Greenland from Denmark. This was a tangible signal of the rapidly increasing strategic U.S. interest in the Arctic, spurred not the least by the Russian military build-up.

The trend of course is likely to continue, just as the Russian focus and dependence on economic growth in the Arctic will continue. Which is why the key to the North Pole at the museum in Saint Petersburg and the particular relationship between Russia and the Arctic, which it represents, calls for renewed attention.

As I now know from Mikhail Lamakin, deputy director for scientific work at the museum, the key to the North Pole was presented to crew of SP1, the first Russian drift ice research station, by the workers of another research station, Ostrov Rudolfa, located on Franz-Josef Land some 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole.

The island station was the key base for preparations before the crew of SP1 took off for the ice. During 1936 they built airfields and storage facilities around Rudolfa station and in May 1937 four large cargo planes carried the crew and their gear onto the ice near the North Pole and left them there to hoist the Soviet flag, turn the key and do their job.

This was successfully completed in February 1938, some 274 cold days later, as the ice broke up and the crew was evacuated by ship.

—

Or do we owe the North Pole our respect and recognition, perhaps even our protection, for its part in the build-up of our civilization and intellectual wealth, so urgently needed in an age of climate change and other challenges? Does the North Pole belong to our common cultural heritage as a phenomena we must cherish, even as more entrepreneurial agents zoom in on the pole’s potential for fish, oil, gas and minerals (potential which is, by the way, still undocumented)?

Three nations, Russia, Canada and Denmark — with Greenland — all argue that  the rights to the ressources at the North Pole and the seabed surrounding it belong to them. All three have invested substantial time, effort and finances in their quests to provide proof of ownership. Never before has any nation come this close to claiming ownership to the North Pole. Icebreakers, planes, submarines and scores of scientists have been mobilized, but throughout these campaigns the key question of how to understand the cultural, intellectual and historical value of the North Pole has been notably absent.

I know for sure that in Denmark, my own country, nobody at government level has so far aired any thinking on the subject, and I am still to learn of any such contemplation within official circles in Moscow and Ottawa. Should any reader know of such, I would be pleased to receive notice.

The beginning of time

Luckily, those interested in the intricate issues of the intellectual and historical value of the North Pole now have easy access to passionate and expert assistance. In a lucid new analysis of how the North Pole have inspired natural scientists, philosophers, cartographers and others from ancient Greece to our days, Michael Bravo, who is a scholar of the history of science and head of Circumpolar History and Public Policy Research at the Scott Polar Research Institute at University of Cambridge, lights a thrilling path in the dark.

In his recent book ”North Pole: Nature and Culture,” he deftly extinguishes any remaining doubts about the North Pole’s current cultural, historic and phenomenological significance:

“I offer the reader a way to understand why the North Pole truly matters to anyone who knows that our home, planet Earth, is a globe,” he writes. The North Pole, he finds, “has refracted our understanding of the planet on which we live and the quest to master or knowledge of who we are.”

“Spatially, when standing at the North Pole, every direction faces south. Temporally, the North Pole is timeless and has to this day no allocated longitude or time zone. This is no coincidence: The North Pole can be thought of as the origin of time because all lines of longitude, which define time zones, pass through North Pole. Emperors and philosophers through the centuries have recognized the North Pole’s special significance as a point that defines global time, but is not itself subject to it,” Bravo writes and as I talk to him on the phone from Cambridge, he continues:

“Every frontier is a moving boundary, that has two sides. So if economic national expansion is pushing on the northern frontier, what is it pushing against? That is a question for the present day, because the question of what pushes back against expansion, is also a question about the conditions on which we inhabit the Earth today,” he says.

“The North Pole and the Arctic is the temporal and spatial framework in which we understand our economic, geographical, cultural place in the world,” he says. ”So as nation states negotiate new national boundaries and rights to access resources, the North Pole reminds us that we live on a planet with limits. If we talk about going beyond the pole, it becomes a paradox, because you cannot go further than the North Pole.  The idea of travelling ’beyond the Pole’ implies a space where the world is transformed. It leads us to understand our human limits in rather different terms. The North Pole shows us the limits of the world we inhabit, but it also challenges us to ask how is it that the world is made whole? How is this an inhabitable world? The North Pole, this placeless place, has been and remains integral to our understanding of our human condition and the way we are bounded to the surface of this planet,” he says.

At the heart of cosmos

In his book, Bravo explains how “for Greek and Arab astronomers, poles were at the heart of the architecture of the entire cosmos.”

I wish I had known earlier. In 2012, I learned of an entirely different approach. I was at the North Pole covering the Danish-Greenlandic attempts to secure proof that the Arctic seabed is irrefutably connected to the bedrock of Greenland and that the rights to the resources on the bottom should therefore belong to Greenland and indirectly to Denmark, which still holds sovereignty over Greenland. Travelling for weeks on an icebreaker, I was told that the North Pole has essentially of no value or significance in our time and age. It is, I learned at that time, basically an irrelevant spot in a bucket of water.

I know now from Michael Bravo’s book that the learned and wise in ancient Persia, Egypt, India and Greece were all deeply preoccupied with understanding the North Pole. Or, more precisely, they were first and foremost preoccupied with the North Pole’s even more revered celestial sister, which they imagined as a fixed entity close to the pole star on the inner surface of the shell that encapsulated the universe. Our earth was the eternal and entirely still center of the universe; solidly positioned on the axis that ran from the celestial North Pole down through the North Pole of our planet.

“Any astrologer worth his salt was on the lookout for divine conjunctions of constellations and stars, and omens or portents of dangers ahead. Hence the importance of the geographical North Pole came about first because of the celestial North Pole and its pole star, and our knowledge of the Earth’s grid of latitude and longitude was a projection derived from mapping the celestial realm,“ Bravo writes.

A new view of the world

In the 15th and 16th centuries the North Pole again took on a lead role in the evolution of a new view of the world and in the development of our ability to navigate the globe.

“Without poles there could be no geography and crucially, no system of orientation for navigation,” Bravo writes.

The creation of new ways to understand the architecture of the globe spun around the North Pole, and facilitated new empires, colonization, trade routes and other features of early globalization.

“Thus the North Pole provided one of the main keys to help unlock the basic question of human orientation — to know where we are at any moment in time and to know on what course we are heading,” Bravo writes.

Renaissance artisans, mathematicians, cosmographers and cartographers, in Vienna and Venice not the least, created beautiful immaculate globes and maps on which the North Pole shone as the center of new illuminations of our divine connections. Suddenly Europeans were learning to see the world in an entirely new light. They were taught how to see themselves and the planet they inhabited from above; a completely new perspective, which was particularly helpful in an age where many struggled to comprehend the astonishing voyages of the likes of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan.

“These special polar maps conferred beauty and prestige on atlases in a unique way. These projections acquired an aesthetic significance and prominence that became synonymous with a new way of viewing the world, as though gazing down on the world from the celestial pole,” Bravo writes. In this way and with the North Pole very much in the center of things, cartographers like Peter Apian (1495-1552) and his successors helped much of Europe to an intellectual leap, long before any European had been anywhere close to the North Pole.

”For philosophers of the enlightenment like Kant, the human condition was one of being anchored to the Earth, like ants unable to escape the limitations of a field of vision placed very close to its surface,” Bravo writes. Cosmographers like Apian and his successors made the globe and its positioning in the universe easier to fathom and rulers and emperors like the Habsburgs in Austria and others with imperial visions readily adopted these tools for visualization of their ambitions. The North Pole’s significance grew and grew along a wide spectrum of sciences and the arts.

“It is the story about a wider circle of Europeans, mathematicians, cartographers, cosmographers not far removed from the contemporary circle of Renaissance artists and architects like Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci. The idea of looking on Earth from above is intimately connected to the story of the invention of linear perspective, which is much better known and celebrated in the world of art history of course,” Bravo tells me.

Paradise at the North Pole

In the 18th and 19th centuries much of the world followed with growing excitement how seafarers and explorers of many kinds travelled, at great peril, closer to the North Pole by ship, sledge, foot or balloon. Michael Bravo describes in detail how the narration of these endeavours, many of which did not achieve what they set out to do, became still more elaborate, and also how the idea that the North Pole was intimately connected to its celestial sister in Heaven continued to inspire more fantastic interpretations for a long time, including the one that Paradise was originally located at the North Pole.

“Safe from prying eyes, the Earth’s polar axis and poles possessed a strong appeal as places for locating narratives and symbols of absolute sacredness and purity,” Bravo writes. Even the colossal amounts of ice at the pole could be explained. With the fall of Eden, of course, man had called the freeze upon himself. The Boston University’s first president, William Warren (1833-1929), an esteemed professor of comparative religion, collected evidence from the new field of anthropology, from linguistics, archeology and from his own research into religious thought in Iran, China, Japan and elsewhere. He described in conclusion an antediluvian continent in the north with an unusually tall mountain centered at the North Pole. This he designated as the original site of Paradise and the very cradle of the human race.

In “Paradise Found” (1885) Warren explained how this antediluvian continent was first submerged by the biblical deluge and then by an ice sheet animated by an abrupt shift in the Earth’s polar axis and subsequent cooling. In Warren’s telling, refugees from these calamities fled south and soon established the first communities of white Aryans.

Today, Warren’s views would be subject to criticism because of his commitment to defending creationism against evolutionary theory. And even in his own time, his use of racial theory to explain historical migrations was controversial and widely contested. Michael Bravo, however, describes how North Pole variants of the history of Paradise penetrated far into a number of ethnonationalist movements in many countries, including strands of Hinduism in which a large Mount Meru at the North Pole plays a significant mythical role.

Powerful agents in Nazi Germany, such as Adolf Hitler’s close associate Rudolf Hess, also made use of North Pole Aryan mysticism in their Thule Gesellschaft, a influential private society that forged key elements of Nazi thinking.

“For National Socialism, the polar origins served as a repudiation of the traditional orientation of geography towards the sacred sites of the Judaic Mediterranean,” Bravo writes.

An American North Pole

He also uncovers how the polar projection of the North Pole emerged after World War II as though it were a surprising new projection:

“American writers in the 1940s began to write about polar projections and the view over the North Pole as though it were a new idea, adopting it to illustrate a new post-war vision of the world as a smaller connected global village.  America’s rethinking of its position in relationship to the whole globe made the North Pole important once again. Making the pole a symbol of American and Soviet foreign policy meant writing out its longer and more complex historical narratives,” he says.

Today, a few decades later, we talk more often about the North Pole as an object in the quests by Russia, Canada and Denmark/Greenland. The submissions by the three nations for the rights to the resources on the seabed of the Arctic Ocean are dealt with by the Commission on the Continental Shelf of the UN, and most observers expect the issue to be resolved peacefully within a decade or two, perhaps finally through direct negotiations between the three governments, since the commission is not mandated to solve the problem, if two or more nations have overlapping, valid claims.

In this elaborate diplomatic process, however, the more difficult question of the cultural value of the North Pole is not dealt with at all. The UN’s expert commission will not ask whether the dispute over potentially recognizing rights to the North Pole seabed as belonging to a single nation’s jurisdiction will somehow damage a phenomenon that is presently valuable to the whole of humanity. Will a precious gem of world heritage lose its thrill and value through this type of handling? Will whatever magic and substance that still remains be lost for future generations? Or is the cultural and historic value of the North Pole, now so thoroughly documented by Michael Bravo, perhaps immune to all we do today?

Wisely, Michael Bravo hardly comments on the current efforts or ambitions of the three states involved, and neither does he make suggestions as to whether a protective zone around the North Pole or the like would be desirable. His is the scholarly contribution, a rich and detailed account of the history and intellectual discovery of the pole, and we must then make up our own minds where this should all lead.

A view from Greenland

In the Danish Kingdom, only one key decisionmaker has ever made cohesive comment on the cultural value of the North Pole, namely the former Prime Minister of Greenland, Kuupik Kleist.

Not that the North Pole traditionally played any particular role in Greenland. Way back, the people of the very north of Greenland named the North Pole Qalasersuaq, the great navel. It lay far from the lands of humans, where only shamans could travel, and it was not a nice place, but rather a dangerous deep with no hunting to speak of. Since then, Qalasersuaq became a neutral, almost bland designation for the very point at 90 degrees North. As Michael Bravo explains in his book, the pole star was also never very significant as a means of navigation in the Arctic. This far north, the pole star shines too high in the sky to be very useful for laying a course.

Even so, Kuupik Kleist took a stand in Nuuk back in 2007: ”I believe that it is in the interest of Greenland that the North Pole and adjacent areas should not be given to any single state, but remain an area of common responsibility,” he wrote in a question to the Home Rule government in Nuuk.

In 2010, after taking office as Prime Minister in Greenland’s Self Rule government, his views became known in Copenhagen when I interviewed him for a book, and it was not much appreciated by the Danish government.  Nervousness arose that the delicate talks with Canada and Russia about the Arctic seabed might be disturbed, and within a day Kuupik Kleist explained to the public that his view was “private” and not that of Greenland’s government.

In May this year, however, he explained to me that he is still of the firm conviction that the North Pole and some section of its surrounding waters ought to be somehow protected for its cultural significance. “The North Pole is something special,” he said. But now he is no longer in politics and his view seems to have found no other real friends.

This text was first published on ArcticToday.com September 20  2019. It has been slightly edited for this blog.

For more than a week, journalists and commentators across the world have been regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks that he may consider buying Greenland, the world’s largest island, almost as a laughing matter.

Many elements in this spectacle fit the common picture of the president as a  leader who doesn’t forget his track record as a real estate broker, and a president with limited patience with conventions and a willingness to treat other nations with delicate disdain if he finds it in the interest of the U.S.

[Trump calls Danish PM’s rebuff of Greenland idea ‘nasty’ as trip cancellation stuns Danes]

It seems clear now, though, that the U.S. president may be dead serious. It is no longer possible to rule out that the idea of buying Greenland, including all its people and territory, may reflect a wish on the part of the president to take responsibility for a hardened U.S. analysis of Russian and Chinese intentions in the Arctic. The president’s idea to buy Greenland, even if it seems unimaginable, matches in many ways a series of other recent signs, in particular from agencies and institutions involved with U.S. security, of a rapid increase in U.S. interests in Greenland.

A real estate deal

For Denmark and Greenland, serious dilemmas could emerge if Trump is indeed aiming to alter the delicate balance of powers between these two nations and the U.S. in the Arctic. Since World War II, the division of power between Denmark, Greenland and the U.S. in Greenland has been more or less clear: The U.S. takes care of Greenland’s security and runs Thule Air Base in the far north of the island primarily in order to protect the U.S. itself against adversaries on the other side of the Arctic Ocean.

Denmark guards Greenland’s outer borders, including those at sea, and handles Greenland’s internal affairs in close cooperation with Greenland’s own elected leaders, who are acting with ever more autonomy. So far, this arrangement has generally served to the satisfaction of all, including the U.S., but now, as the last few days have shown, Trump may possibly want to change this intricate pattern. This may, potentially, challenge the fabric of the Danish Kingdom and fragile economic and social developments in Greenland. The whole episode may still, of course, all be forgotten in a few months, but to still more observers here in Denmark this now seems unlikely.

Essentially a real estate deal

On Sunday, Trump confirmed that he is interested in buying Greenland.

“Denmark essentially owns it. We’re very good allies with Denmark, we protect Denmark like we protect large portions of the world. So the concept came up and I said, ‘Certainly I’d be interested.’ Strategically it’s interesting and we’d be interested but we’ll talk to them a little bit. It’s not No. 1 on the burner, I can tell you that,” he said.

“Well, a lot of things can be done,” he said. “Essentially it’s a large real estate deal.” He indicated that a U.S. takeover might relieve Denmark of a financial burden, talking most likely about the annual grant with which Denmark supports Greenland: “Its hurting Denmark very badly because they’re losing almost $700 million a year carrying it. So they carry it at a great loss and strategically for the United States it would be very nice and we’re a big ally of Denmark, we protect Denmark and we help Denmark and we will,” he said.

‘An absurd discussion’

By coincidence, the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, was in Nuuk at the time and her reaction indicated well how precarious the situation now suddenly was. With only 5.5 million inhabitants, Denmark is a small country which can hardly afford even the smallest rift in its relations with the U.S., its second most important trading partner and for more than seven decades its most indispensable NATO partner and military ally. On the other hand, there is no way the prime minister could accommodate even the basic premise of the president’s suggestion that Greenland and its people, who are all Danish citizens, can be treated as a saleable commodity.

In an interview with the Danish Broadcasting corporation she dismissed the whole concept: “This is an absurd discussion, and of course (Greenland Premier) Kim Kielsen has made it clear that Greenland is not for sale, and the discussion stops there”.

The day after, however, at a press conference with Kielsen in Nuuk, she was already at pains to tell Washington and everyone else how strongly Denmark remained committed to the preservation of good relations with the U.S. In particular, she made strenuous efforts to stress Denmark’s strong commitment to continued security cooperation with the U.S. in Greenland. She foresaw “even stronger strategic cooperation”, and she remained open to any American wish to increase the U.S. military presence in Greenland in light of the changing security landscape in the Arctic: “As to the military presence, we have to follow developments,” she said.

At this stage it must have been clear to most watchers in Washington that Denmark remains ready to discuss any U.S. wish to increase its military presence in Greenland or to increase its own military efforts in Greenland. Kielsen, head of Naalakkersuisut, Greenland’s Self Rule Government, also acknowledged Greenland’s growing significance to U.S. security. The first U.S. bases in Greenland were established during World War II and Greenland’s leaders have no problem with the current U.S. military presence as long as it is followed by a respectful dialogue and as long as a reasonable benefits — jobs, infrastructure and so forth — keep flowing Greenland’s way.

No longer a joke

Two days later, however, on Wednesday, Trump cancelled a formal state visit to Denmark, scheduled for September 2-3, on Twitter: “Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time,” he wrote. (Later, he clarified that he had taken offense also by Frederiksen’s use of the word “absurd”).

The cancellation was unprecedented.

On Sept. 2, Trump was to be received by Queen Margrethe of Denmark, prime minister Frederiksen, by leaders of industry and by Kielsen, but now all was cancelled.

At this stage it is no longer possible to remain certain that the president’s thoughts of buying Greenland was a passing confusion, and again the reaction of prime minister Frederiksen illustrated the pressure the Danish government feels. In her response to a frenzy of global media attention, at a press conference in Copenhagen just hours after the president’s tweet, she spoke again of the close, warm and important relations with the U.S.:

“The U.S. is one of our absolutely most important allies,” she said. Again she focused on security: “Our desire for a more strategic and stronger cooperation with the US on the Arctic is completely untouched, and our invitation to the Americans regarding stronger cooperation remains standing,” she said. Only then did she repeat that Greenland is not for sale. Finally she said it all once again in English to make sure every syllable was legible to Washington.

The day after, on Thursday, official word was issued that Frederiksen and Trump had spoken by phone, on Mette Frederiksen’s initative. At the time of this writing, little information about the content of the call has been disclosed, but not long after their conversation, in taking to the media, the president called Mette Frederiksen “a wonderful woman”.

Greenland as part of America

Apparently, offi

cial peace between the two leaders have been restored, but the episode leaves behind strong indications that the U.S. president acts on an entirely different perception of Greenland than do the governments in Denmark and Greenland.

According to international law, Greenland is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark. In the views of the Danish government it has been so for at least the last 300 years, or — as many will have it here — since Vikings settled in the south of Greenland in 985. Relations go deep. Many Danish and Greenlandic families are intertwined and the common history plays an important part in the national identity of both Danes and Greenlanders. Danish missionaries translated the Bible into Greenlandic by the 18th century. Danish colonial rule over Greenland, which lasted until 1953, was certainly not without problems, abuse of power and mistakes, but there was no slavery, no systematic use of violence and Greenland today is a well-functioning democratic welfare society mirroring the Nordic countries. About half the population speak Danish as well as Greenlandic.

Greenland enjoys self-rule and a great deal of autonomy, while security, foreign affairs, the royal house and a few other keys to power remain under Danish control. About two-thirds of the electorate in Greenland support the vision of independence from Denmark at some point in the future, but there is no deadline and relations with Denmark remain cordial, close and cooperative. One half of the public expenditure in Greenland is covered by the annual grant from Denmark. A fifth of all Greenlanders live in Denmark and few envisage that Greenland will sever all ties to Denmark, the royals, access to the Danish educational system and so forth, even if Greenland should one day formally become an independent state.

Thus, president Trump’s notion that Greenland, including all of its 57,000 inhabitants with their distinct language, unique culture, democratic institutions and the rest of it could be sold and bought as a simple piece of real estate collided head on with all current views in Denmark and Greenland of normality, the status of the kingdom, the value of history and respectful interchange between peoples as the foundation of the current order of our times.

The dilemma is, as we now have to assume, that to Trump and to those who first suggested the purchase to him, Greenland may mean something different — or at least something in addition to the above.

[Trump’s dream of a US Greenland purchase has a surprisingly long and complex history]

Since 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine was first conceived of in Washington, the U.S. has allowed no other powers to extend their sovereignty onto the American continent. In this sense, Greenland stands out. Trump explicitly recognizes that Greenland is a part of the Danish Kingdom — 99 percent of the Kingdom’s territory to be precise — but geographically and strategically Greenland’s 2.1 million square kilometers constitute part of the American continent. They form a crucial buffer-zone between the U.S. and several nations that are on its list of main adversaries: China, Russia and North Korea. During the Cold War, Greenland and the Arctic was heavily militarized, it was a buffer between the Soviet Union and the U.S., and the geography has not changed.

Also, we have to record that the president’s thoughts of buying Greenland is only the latest sign of rapidly increasing U.S. interests in Greenland. Washington is reopening its diplomatic office in Nuuk after 66 years of absence. The U.S. ambassador to Copenhagen, Carla Sands, is a frequent guest in Greenland; in July she studied uranium and rare earth minerals in the south of Greenland with representatives of the US State Department. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency under the U.S. Department of Defense is currently using satellites to map all ice free land in Greenland — an area the size of Sweden — in close cooperation with Denmark and Greenland. In September 2018, the U.S. Air Force let it be known that it is considering investing in new airport facilities in Greenland. Thule Air Base, including its large radar, crucial to American missile defense, is regularly upgraded.

Russia and China

Copenhagen and Nuuk are well aware that the U.S. is focused on Russian and Chinese activities in the Arctic.

Russia is re-militarizing its Arctic regions. New bases have been established along Russia’s Arctic coast and old bases have been reopened, including on Franz Josef Land, a group of islands some 900 kilometers from the North Pole. From here, theoretically, Russian fighter jets could reach Thule Air Base with conventional weapons and disable a central component of America’s missile defense — the radar at Thule — without igniting a nuclear Armageddon.

U.S. strategists are also focused on China’s push for more influence in the Arctic, access to natural resources and the Arctic sea lanes. China calls itself a “near-Arctic” state and has invested heavily in oil and gas in the Russian Arctic. For a time, China’s largest construction company, China Communications Construction Company, was among those bidding to build two large new airports in Greenland, potentially with Chinese state funding. Chinese involvement was thwarted in 2018 only after after consultations between Denmark and the U.S.

[How a dispute over China and Greenland’s airports worked its way toward a solution]

Several signals from the U.S. indicate that it aims to push back strongly against these Russian and Chinese developments in the Arctic. The U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo made a hardline speech in Finland in May to this effect, followed by a June 2019 Arctic Strategy paper from the U.S. Department of Defense.

Now, the governments in Copenhagen and Nuuk are reading Trump’s interest in Greenland in this security context and they remember that this is not the first U.S. offer to buy Greenland.

As an answer to Danish suggestions that the U.S. should vacate its bases in Greenland after World War II, then-U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes in a 1946 meeting with his Danish counterpart suggested exactly the same — that the U.S. should buy Greenland — and he was dead serious.

It was then that the Danish government understood that the US is not likely to leave Greenland ever. Denmark refused the sale, but in the following years the model we know today emerged. Denmark became a member of NATO, and in 1951 an accord, which still stands today as the key binding agreement on Greenland, was reached between Denmark and the U.S. Today, this accord provides the U.S. with rich opportunities for increasing its military presence in Greenland. Thule Air Base can be upgraded as new needs are identified, and new bases can be established as long as Denmark and Greenland agrees. Which — as Denmark’s prime minister and Greenland’s premier has clearly indicated — they are very likely to do.

Open for business

Looking at the bright side, the administration in Nuuk will no doubt celebrate how media from all over the world are suddenly asking what Greenland wants. Greenland is on a permanent hunt for foreign investors; a diplomatic office was opened in Washington in 2014 for this reason, and when the Wall Street Journal first broke the story of Donald Trump’s desire to perhaps buy Greenland, the Department of Foreign Affairs in Nuuk send out the following tweet: