Obama’s Alaska trip

Slate has an article by Joshua Keating about President Obama's trip to Alaska:

Most of President Obama’s trip to the Arctic this week is about highlighting his administration’s agenda on climate change (flawed as it may be), but it’s also about a geopolitics. The Arctic has emerged as a potentially dangerous new area of competition with Russia.
The President proposed funding today for new icebreaker ships for the Coast Guard to navigate in frozen Arctic waters, noting that the US has only three icebreakers in its fleet, while Russia has forty, with an additional eleven planned. The announcement highlighted the growing sense that, as a lengthy article in The New York Times put it, the US is “playing catch-up with Russia in the scramble for the Arctic.”
A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies highlighted Russia’s military buildup in the region, which has included the reopening of fifty previously shuttered Soviet-era military bases. In March of 2015, Russia conducted military exercises in the Arctic involving 45,000 troops, fifteen submarines, and forty warships. The Arctic has also been the site of recent incursions by Russian jets into or near NATO airspace. Most importantly, Russia submitted a sovereignty claim to the United Nations in March of 2015 for a forty-thousand-square-mile area of Arctic territory, including the North Pole, making official the position it staked back in 2007 when a submersible dramatically planted a Russian flag on the Arctic seabed.
Russia’s newfound interest in the Arctic, which has been compared to the Red Arctic development push of the Stalin era, is closely related to the rapid environmental changes taking place in the region. The retreating sea ice opens up new shipping routes between Western Russia and Asia, as well as opportunities to drill for oil, natural gas, and minerals on the newly accessible Arctic seabed. While the Russian government has submitted a plan to reduce carbon emissions ahead of the UN conference on climate change in December of 2015, it also likely sees the melting of the Arctic as an opportunity as much as a crisis. Russia notably declined to sign on to a statement on reducing the effects of climate change in the Arctic presented by Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry at an international summit in Anchorage, Alaska this week, with RT noting that the “upcoming environmental deal brings additional costs to the oil and gas extraction industries”.
The Russian government has vowed that it’s willing to use military force if necessary to protect its Arctic interests, though so far the only semi-violent confrontation has been with the group of Greenpeace activists who scaled an oil platform in 2013. But there’s certainly potential for more conflict. Russia’s Arctic claim, the North Pole in particular, overlaps with area that Canada plans to claim. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is under increasing pressure to respond to Russia’s recent moves and is also moving military resources to the area. Denmark, an Arctic nation thanks to its administration of Greenland, and Norway both have significant Arctic claims as well. Russia’s military exercises in March of 2015 were partly in response to Norway’s own Joint Viking drills involving five thousand military personnel.
So far, the good news is that, despite the military buildup, all parties are calling dibs through legal means, filing territorial claims under the Law of the Sea Treaty to the United Nations, which will adjudicate them, likely several years from now, based on somewhat arbitrary geological criteria.
The US, however, is not really in that contest. The United States is an Arctic nation thanks to its decision to purchase Alaska from Russia nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, but today it’s handicapped in its ability to solidify or expand its territorial claims in the region: Thanks to congressional opposition to almost every international agreement and particularly those involving the UN, the US has not ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty and can’t stake Arctic territorial claims of its own.
Despite Obama’s environmental goals, the US does have interests in Arctic energy resources, as shown by the recent decision to allow Shell to begin drilling off Alaska. More broadly, the US wants to ensure freedom of navigation in newly accessible Arctic waters, contain Russia’s territorial ambitions, and prevent armed conflict on the roof of the world. Doing something to keep the whole place from melting into the sea might also be nice, though whether that’s also a priority will depend on who wins in 2016.

Rico says soon it'll be open ocean they're squabbling over...