Arctic Security: Neither a Great Game nor a Scramble

By Matthew Willis
26 Jan 2010

It has become fashionable to portray the Arctic as an emerging geopolitical battleground. In August 2007, for instance, The Times announced that ‘Arctic military bases signal [a] new Cold War’,1 while the Guardian blared that Canada was using its ‘military might’ in an ‘Arctic scramble’.2 In a paper delivered at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada last November, Daniel Fata, a former senior US defence official, asked whether the politics of Arctic security heralded the start of a ‘New Great Game’.3 Such facile analogies, favoured by mainstream commentators (and sometimes academics), aim to convey the gist of present realities by likening them to well known historical narratives. Unfortunately, they are largely false analogies, and they are threatening to frame the debate about the future of the Arctic. There is no question that the region is attracting the attention of many countries, but that does not mean it is destined to become a theatre of conflict. Points of friction are fewer and less stubborn than widely supposed, and frameworks for handling them exist. The continued portrayal of change as the emergence of risk is liable to fuel self-fulfilling prophesies of conflict at the expense of other, more plausible, and more positive, scenarios.

Further Analysis: International Institutions, NATO, Global Security Issues

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