Why the Arctic is a new source of global tension

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Dave Davies (0:15)

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If I ask you to picture the North Pole, what comes to mind? Maybe Santa and his elves? Maybe a vast frozen expanse with a pole of some kind marking the very top of the world. Well, our guest today, Rana Foroohar, says you should be thinking about a navigable ocean. And we all should be thinking about it a lot more than we used to.

Climate change is melting the polar ice and opening up new shipping routes across the Arctic, which means that the region is increasingly becoming a zone for great power competition and potentially conflict. It turns out that a shipping route across the Arctic is a time and money saving shortcut for a lot of international commerce.

Foroohar notes that 90% of global trade moves through ships and the Arctic may well become as critical an avenue for world shipping as the Suez or Panama canals. Beyond that, beneath the Arctic waters are large deposits of oil, natural gas, and rare earth minerals, as well as underwater cables, which carry 95% of the world's intercontinental information flow.

So China and Russia are increasing their maritime presence in the Arctic, and Foroohar writes that while the United States wants to get in the game, it's way behind China in the number of vessels it builds and especially in icebreakers, critical to navigating the Arctic. In researching her book, Foroohar got to embed on what at the time was the United States' only Arctic icebreaking ship, the USS Healy. She writes that if the United States is to hold its own the growing competition with China, it will need to aggressively revive its shipbuilding industry.

Rana Foroohar is a global business columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times and CNN's global economic analyst. She's the author of three previous books. Her latest is Sea Change, America's New Great Game in the Arctic Circle. Rana Foroohar, welcome to Fresh Air.

Rana Foroohar (2:13)

Thank you, Dave. Thanks for having me.

Dave Davies (2:15)

You know, a lot of books begin with a compelling quote or an anecdote.

Yours begins with a map, which I confess was startling to me. It's the same old planet Earth, but different. I'd like you to just briefly describe this map and the story it tells.

Rana Foroohar (2:31)

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, when I went on the US. Coast Guard cutter Healy, one of the very first things I noticed was that every single map on the vessel looks at the world from the top down. So you see the North Pole in the center, and then you're looking outward at the Arctic Circle. And let me tell you, when you look at the world that way, it looks very different. One of the things that you notice right away is that Russia takes up more than half of the space on the map. It is enormous. It is the dominant geographic power, one might say, in the Arctic.

Canada is big. Greenland is a lot bigger and more important than you might think, and the US actually looks pretty small. You know, Alaska is a big state, but when you compare it to what else is up there, it kind of dims by comparison. And if you look a little further down, you begin to realize Japan is pretty close. China is not as far away as you might think. So we know that maps often portray great powers in the way that great powers would like to be portrayed, and there's all kinds of stories about maps being redone and resized to account for that. But looking at the world from the top down just gives you a totally different sense of what matters, which country matters, and what's navigable.

Dave Davies (3:58)

Right, and you can focus on this emerging area of competition and get its context a lot better. Let's begin with what exactly has changed in the Arctic Circle. I mean, we all have heard about global warming and polar ice melting. How much of it is navigable now, and for how much of the year?

Rana Foroohar (4:14)

So it's a really great question.

Nobody, including me, quite frankly, really cared too much about the Arctic until recently, and that's because it was mostly frozen solid for most of the year. You know, obviously, you have areas around Canada, around Russia that you can get through with icebreakers, which are specially designed ships. They have special steel-reinforced hulls that can break through ice. But generally, if you're talking about going across the North Pole, that has been largely conceptual until quite recently. But we are getting to a point with polar ice melting where even a trans-polar route is becoming a real possibility for two to three weeks a year.