US "Northern Doctrine" decided to take the Arctic away from Russia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Social parasites from the United States have called the Arctic a zone of national security interests. Not without Washington's no less impudent idea - to make the Northern Sea Route common. But Russia has shown that they will not succeed …

The shooting in Chukotka was not a separate signal, but a new reality designed to show the United States the result of the military-industrial complex's efforts to create a network of anti-aircraft and coastal missile systems, early warning radars, rescue centers, ports, means of obtaining data on the maritime situation and even floating nuclear power plants. In addition, our country is expanding the world's largest icebreaker fleet, and by 2020 it plans to deploy a permanent inter-service grouping of troops in the Arctic.

In past centuries, as well as today, the Western world considered itself to be the center of universal enlightenment, and therefore believed that it was necessary to convey the "truth" to humanity just as it is today to impose American "democracy". If the reality did not coincide with the logic of the "civilizers", it was not they who were wrong, but the laws of nature.

The apotheosis of this egocentrism was the decision of the Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences, which ruled in the 18th century that a meteorite that fell in France was a "peasant fiction", since the object is a stone, and stones cannot fall from heaven, because the sky is not solid. The decision was to notify the non-European world of the "obvious" discovery, and at the same time to convey to the dark peoples that all the numerous art paintings, chronicles and legends that have recorded the "starfall" for centuries are uncivilized heresy.

Likewise, in 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo presented a new "democratic truth" to the Arctic Council member states. The entire Arctic within the framework of the "Pompeo Doctrine" was called the zone of US national security interests, and other countries - "predatory" powers, from which Washington plans to defend the region for the sake of "freedom of navigation."

In May 2019, at a meeting of the states bordering the Arctic, Pompeo told Canadian officials that they should forget about the right to the Northwest Arctic Corridor. China should close stations in Iceland and Norway, ceasing to invest in the infrastructure of the Russian NSR, and Moscow, accordingly, should play back the militarization of territories and the development of its Arctic North.

Not without Washington's no less impudent idea - to make the Northern Sea Route common. By August, Donald Trump joined this process, expressing interest in buying the semi-autonomous region of Greenland from Denmark. And at the beginning of the year, US Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said that the current task of the US Navy is to build up forces in Arctic waters, open new strategic ports (in the Bering Sea region) and expand military facilities in Alaska.

Due to the scatter of dates, many perceived these events separately, the first, as the personal opinion of the Secretary of State, the second, as another example of Trump's unpredictability, and third, as the traditional attempts of the militarists to inflate the budget. In fact, people in the American power vertical set out points of the same strategy - a new concept of the Ministry of Defense for the Arctic region, or the "Arctic Doctrine".

Its recent version replaced an outdated document from 2016 and was a consequence of the National Security Strategy adopted in 2017, where the return of the "Arctic" rivalry with Russia and China was mentioned for the first time. In the fall of 2019, the polemics and threats from Washington reached a peak, and an indicator of the actualization of the agenda was the fact that the rhetoric of all official departments on this issue sounded emphatically the same.

Top American functionaries unanimously began to ignore Article 234 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which secures the Northern Sea Route to Russia (as internal waters) and recognizes Canada's right to the Northwest Passage. Both of these given are now called "claims", and America's mission turned out to be "ensuring freedom of navigation in disputed areas and on sea routes."

The price of the issue

The figures themselves speak in favor of the inevitable transition of the Arctic region from neutral status to a platform for competition. The Arctic ice cover covers half the territory of the United States, Russia owns the largest part of the Arctic coast, temperatures in the region are rising twice as fast as the world average, the melting of the polar cap is exposing once-inaccessible waters and islands for commercial use, and oil and natural gas reserves have already been discovered in those areas that were previously covered by sea ice for most of the year.

All this means that in 20-25 years (by 2040) the Arctic Ocean will be more or less accessible for shipping and will turn into a new Persian Gulf. This would not be a problem in itself if the Arctic were evenly freed from the ice cover, but the melting of glaciers makes only two main routes available, which means that, regardless of the place of extraction, cargo will have to be transported along them.

The first is the "Russian" Northeast Corridor, the most convenient and most worrisome for America. The second is the Northwest Route, which runs along the coast of Canada. Both directions begin their journey in Asia and together reach the Dezhnev Strait (now the Bering Strait between Chukotka and Alaska), but then turn in different directions.

The SVP (in our country referred to as the Northern Sea Route) goes to the left, that is, to the west along the Russian coast, and the Northwest Passage turns to the right, to the east along the coast of Alaska, then winding between the numerous islands of the Canadian archipelago. There are practically no infrastructure facilities near the Northwest (Canadian) Passage, the temperature is lower, there is more sea ice, and there is no single route. Therefore, of the three directions (the third is the through route through the North Pole), it is the Russian NSR that is the most preferable.

Moreover, the Northern Sea Route also makes a tasty target because the rates and extent of warming are different within the Arctic. The North American part (segment of the USA and Canada) has a more severe climate, and the Russian (European) territory is more often ice-free, since it is affected by the Gulf Stream. That is, Washington hopes by its actions to create a base in order to come to anything ready - to take the Canadian direction and make the NSR equipped by Russia "common".

In addition, the Northern Sea Route is important for the United States and as a means of powerful anti-Russian pressure, since for our country the NSR is not just an international logistics corridor, but also an internal junction, the development of which will allow to unite the numerous internal waters of the eastern and northern parts of the country.

The branching of infrastructure along the Northern Sea Route into the interior of the state will finally allow the colossal territories of the Far North and the Far East to be included in a single economic system, and their potential can become a real locomotive of domestic growth. Taking the example of China, which is in the same way paving its Belt and Road Initiative through the most difficult interior regions, the West is beginning to realize that the NSR is clearly becoming a similar base for Russia.

In other words, US attempts to hinder the development of the Northern Sea Route and prevent China from participating in this process are reduced not only to the competition of logistics routes, but also to the inhibition of the development of Russia itself. Blocking new drivers of economic growth during the Cold War and sanctions aggression.

Fortunately, given that the transport artery mainly passes through the Arctic seas - the Kara, Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi seas, that is, it runs mainly through Russian inland waters, Moscow takes this threat seriously. Moreover, the NSR at the initial segment rests against the neck of the Bering Strait, and it separates the United States (Alaska) from Russia (Chukotka) by literally several kilometers. In the final section, the Northern Sea Route runs along the coast of Norway, and this is a NATO country that goes to the Barents Sea.

Also of the eight circumpolar members of the Arctic Council, the United States maintains strong defense relationships with six. Four of them are allies of Washington in the North Atlantic Alliance: Canada, Denmark (including Greenland), Iceland and Norway; and the other two are partners in NATO's Enhanced Opportunities Partnership: Finland and Sweden.

Adding to this the fact that Washington's Arctic Doctrine aims to "oppose Russia and China," and the seventh paragraph explicitly states that "the network of allied relations and their capabilities" will become "the main strategic advantage of the United States" in competition, Moscow prudently took care of the early protection of its territories …

In particular, on September 27, she sent a signal to Washington, having carried out the first in the history of firing the "Bastion" ballistic missile system in Chukotka. The fact that this event became an example of invisible communication between countries is proved by the details of the conducted exercises. The target for the coastal anti-ship complex imitated an enemy warship, the place of detection was fixed on the line of the Northern Sea Route, and the missile of the system - "Onyx" (aka "aircraft carrier killer"), hit the target at a distance of over 200 km from the coast.

The minimum distance between Chukotka and Alaska (Ratmanov Island, owned by Russia and Kruzenshtern Island, owned by the United States) is only 4 km 160 meters, and the average width of the navigable part of the Northern Route is exactly overlapped by the range of this salvo. In addition, Bastion is only formally an anti-ship complex; in reality, its missiles are excellent at dealing with ground targets, that is, with potential US military infrastructure in Alaska.

If necessary, the Onyx missiles are also capable of covering significantly longer distances, and the artificial limitation of the recent launch was supposed to remind the United States of how the Pentagon drove the 3M14 KRBD (Caliber) into a stupor when, during the strikes on Syria, they exceeded the maximum range five times at once.

The relevance of these signals also determines that, with all warming trends, the melting of permafrost will be aggravated by storm waves and coastal erosion, and this will adversely affect the deployment of American and NATO infrastructure in the region. Russia, on the other hand, having land and territory bordering the entire length of the NSR, has advantages that it fully realizes.

In particular, our country is unprecedentedly stepping up its defense measures. In 2014, the Sever Joint Strategic Command of the RF Armed Forces was formed, the creation of new Arctic units, air defense zones, the modernization of Soviet infrastructure, the construction of new airfields, military bases and other facilities along the Arctic coast began.

Accordingly, the shooting in Chukotka was not a separate signal, but a new reality designed to show the United States the result of the military-industrial complex's efforts to create a network of anti-aircraft and coastal missile systems, early warning radars, rescue centers, ports, means of obtaining data on the maritime situation and even floating nuclear power plants. … In addition, our country is expanding the world's largest icebreaker fleet, and by 2020 it plans to deploy a permanent inter-service grouping of troops in the Arctic.

Washington sees that the Arctic already accounts for over 10% of all Russian investments since 2014 and the importance of the "Arctic factor" continues to grow. As a result, while Washington is hastily trying to catch up with Moscow in the military sector, Russia by the end of 2019 will adopt a new strategy for the development of the region until 2035. That is, it uses the acquired military reserve to combine the financing of military activities with civilian national projects and state programs, intensifying the inclusion of "new" territories in the general economic scheme.

Against this background, loud statements by Washington are intended to inspire the satellites with the idea that the United States still retains a "leading role" in the region, while in practice this logic has exhausted itself. In fact, the White House dominates only in international institutions, therefore even the tasks of the US armed forces are described in the doctrine in the most general phrases.

Washington is gradually expropriating part of the Arctic territories from Canada, but with modern Russia such methods do not work, and this is extremely unnerving for the White House. Until recently, in the 1990s, everyone who wanted to work in the sector of Russian polar possessions.

There have been dozens of maritime scientific expeditions violating the norms of international law on the part of the United States, Norway and Germany, scientific ships in Europe were openly accompanied by American nuclear submarines equipped with mapping systems, and the "research" itself was carried out almost within the boundaries of the 200-mile Russian economic zone.

Now Moscow not only does not allow this to be done, but, on the contrary, itself expands the shelf (the Lomonosov Ridge), which leads the United States to produce loud, but mostly empty rhetoric - demands to give up the Arctic voluntarily, since it is no longer possible to take it away from Russia by force. As they say, the ears of a dead donkey are for you, not the Arctic.