November drives another nail in the coffin for Arctic cooperation

This won’t be another post about what a Trump presidency will spell for the Arctic because quite honestly, since the election, I can’t quite bring myself to read the news yet each day. I see the headlines about incompetent individuals being appointed to some of the highest positions of power in the United States, and I feel despondent about the future of the nation, the planet, and the Arctic.

The election of a convicted felon to the presidency compounds what has already been a fairly disastrous decade for the world’s northernmost region. First, climate change has continued to accelerate, with temperatures soaring to record highs in the Arctic in summer 2023. Second, Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 set in motion the country’s separation from the Arctic’s seven liberal democracies and its pivot to the main autocracy in the east: China.

Post-Crimea, U.S. and European sanctions made projects like ExxonMobil’s exploratory drilling in the Kara Sea and American company Tyco Electronics Subsea Communications’ agreement to provide the fiber optic cable for the Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Submarine Cable System untenable. The latter project would have linked the United Kingdom, Japan, and China via Russia’s northern waters. Now, 500-year-old dreams of shortcuts between Europe and Asia are being put to rest. New projects are tying together the seven NATO members in the Arctic, on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other. Russia recently started laying a domestic submarine fiber optic cable under the Northern Sea Route using materials manufactured in China. The project exemplifies the growing schisms between the West and its two main rivals in both physical space and cyberspace.

Trump’s administration will be anti-environment and anti-multiculturalism – two pillars of the Arctic established in the heady years of the 1990s for the liberal international order. The 1996 Ottawa Declaration, the instrument that established the Arctic Council, sets out three key commitments in its preamble: to the well-being of the Arctic’s inhabitants, including its Indigenous Peoples; to sustainable development, including cultural well-being; and to the protection of the Arctic environment.

Trump’s policies will likely undermine all three of these commitments. But it’s important to situate whatever the next four years will bring within the ongoing erosion that these principles have already been suffering due to the decisions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who turned his back on Arctic multilateralism as well.

At the moment, I’m working with Klaus Dodds, a political geographer at Royal Holloway University London, to finish a book on geopolitical and ecological changes and trends in Arctic. Initially, its working title was The End of the Arctic. Though the book will now be published under a different name, there is a kernel of truth in the concept of the “end of the Arctic,” however moribund.

While doing research for the book, I keep coming across examples of programs from the 1990s like the Russian American Coordinating Group for Air Traffic Control (RACGAT). The bilateral effort formed in 1992 by the U.S. and a barely post-Soviet Russia sought to improve Russian air traffic services from the ground up so that international carriers could safely use the new air routes that were being planned over Siberia.

For over 10 years, RACGAT members met annually in an eclectic bunch of cities including Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Anchorage, and Las Vegas to work on tasks as granular as improving the English-language skills of Siberian air traffic controllers. I can only wonder what some of the afterparties on the Strip must have been like pairing ex-Soviet airport officials from Magadan with Federal Aviation Administration lifers from Maryland.

A 2005 report summarizing a discussion about air traffic control coordination for cross-polar and Siberian routes emphasizes preparing for cross-polar “peak traffic” in 2008 during the Beijing Olympics. That entire spectacle, and the admiration with which the West gazed upon China with its inaugural high-speed railway and “starchitecture” like the Zaha Hadid-designed Bird’s Nest stadium, seem part of an alternate timeline to which I wouldn’t mind rewinding.

Now, many European airlines have ended their direct flights to China in large part because Russia prohibits them from flying through their airspace. In early November 2024, Scandinavian Airlines ended its service between Copenhagen and Shanghai. Finnair has done away with marketing its flights as the fastest to Asia because they barely fly there anymore compared to pre-pandemic – and even when they do, they now take a whopping 15%-40% longer.

Just look at the route Finnair now must fly between Helsinki and Tokyo or Osaka, which goes all the way over the North Pole. At least window seat passengers get to see the top of the world as they fly for 14 hours – four more (or two movies more) than before.

The costly and inefficient re-routing along Russia’s northern or southern fringes that European airlines have to take to reach East Asia makes them uncompetitive with their Chinese counterparts, which are still allowed to transit the eleven-time-zone country. The world’s realignment is therefore even visible in the stratosphere. Whereas the official commencement of transpolar passenger flights in 1998 brought faster, more fuel-efficient flights between Europe, Asia, and North America, their decline a quarter-century later indicates just how fragile and fleeting connectivity can be.

The few flights visible over Siberia today are the odd Asian carrier making its way between the U.S. and Asia, like the Air India flight that had to make an emergency landing in Magadan last year. But other parts of the Arctic still have vestiges of cross-polar coordination. When I checked the real-time Flightradar24 map, I spotted an Uzbekistan Airways flight over Greenland as it made its way from New York City to Tashkent. When I refreshed the page an hour later, the Central Asian-bound plane was over Jan Mayen, trailed by a Pakistan International Airlines flight from New York to Islamabad. This Silk Road in the sky most definitely would not have existed prior to 1991.

The hard work of making Arctic communities more connected, equitable, and sustainable place continues. On Thursday, for instance, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, an Arctic Council working group, shared its Arctic Climate Change Update Report at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. And earlier that same day, as part of the Fulbright Arctic Initiative, I listened to several female leaders at health collectives across Greenland and Nunavut share their efforts with a group of scholars and practitioners from seven Arctic states. Still, big holes are emerging in the sea ice and in the skies, and in the cross-polar communities that have shrunk in scale.

The other day, a book I had ordered came in the mail. Called Bering Bridge: The Soviet-American Expedition from Siberia to Alaska by Paul Schurke, the publication covers the epic journey of 12 Soviet and American individuals, half of whom were Indigenous. The team traveled 1,000 miles by dogsled and skis 1,000 from Anadyr, Chukotka to Kotzebue, Alaska in 1989 as the Ice Curtain in the Bering Strait was finally being lifted. The book opens with heartfelt letters written by both Mikhail Gorbachev, then-General Secretary of the Soviet Union, and George Bush, former president of the U.S, in 1989.

Then, on page 1, the book describes:

“The Eskimo settlement we were approaching was on the Soviet coast of the Bering Sea. The villagers had been alerted to our arrival and, on this day in late March 1989, they awaited their first visitors from the Western world in nearly half a century.”

Besides the climate modelers, who knows what the Arctic will look like in 2074? One can only hope that we don’t need to wait quite so long for a cross-polar reunion, even if it might take place in freakishly open waters around the North Pole.