Security Prospects in the High North: Geostrategic Thaw Or Freeze?

COVER F.P. n 7:Layout 1 12/06/09 16:15 Pagina 1 009 NATO Defense College 7 Collège de Défense de l’OTAN Contributors: Clive Archer Samantha L. Arnolds Alyson J.K. Bailes Alf Håkon Hoel Sven G. Holtsmark Karl-Heinz Kamp Security prospects Frédéric Lasserre Kristine Offerdal in the High North: Stéphane Roussel Brooke A. Smith-Windsor geostrategic thaw Katarzyna Zysk‘ or freeze? Edited by Sven G. Holtsmark and Brooke A. Smith-Windsor NDC FORUM PAPER NDC FORUM PAPER NDC FORUM 7 Security thaw or freeze? Research Division - Rome, May 2 prospects in the High North: geostrategic PAPER Research Division • Rome, May 2009 NATO DEFENSE COLLEGE COLLEGE DE DEFENSE DE L’OTAN Research Division Division Recherche SECURITY PROSPECTS IN THE HIGH NORTH: GEOSTRATEGIC THAW OR FREEZE? Rome, May 2009 NATO DEFENSE COLLEGE NATO Defense College Cataloguing-in-Publication-Data: “SECURITY PROSPECTS IN THE HIGH NORTH. GEOSTRATE- GIC THAW OR FREEZE?” Editors: Sven G. Holtsmark and Brooke A. Smith-Windsor (NATO Defense College “NDC Forum Papers Series”) Series editor: Maria Di Martino The views expressed in NDC Forum Papers are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the NATO Defense College or the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Extracts of this NDC Forum Paper for academic purposes may be quoted or reprinted without special permission, provided that a standard source credit line is included. To copy, to republish or to post on the world wide web, requires the permission from the NATO Defense College. © NDC 2009 all rights reserved Copies of this NDC Forum Paper may be obtained directly from the NATO Defense College, Research Division Via Giorgio Pelosi, 1 - 00143 Rome, Italy Fax +39-06-50 52 57 97 E-mail: [email protected] Web site: http://www.ndc.nato.int Printed and bound by Tipografia Facciotti s.r.l. – Vicolo Pian Due Torri, 74 – 00146 Roma 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Forword .................................................................................................... 4 Karl-Heinz Kamp Introduction ..............................................................................................6 Sven G. Holtsmark and Brooke A. Smith-Windsor Options for Closer Cooperation in the High North: What is Needed? ...28 Alyson J.K. Bailes Expanding the Canada-US Security Regime to the North?...............58 Samantha L. Arnold and Stéphane Roussel The High North Legal-Political Regime...............................................81 Alf Håkon Hoel Russia and the High-North: Security and Defence Perspectives .....102 Katarzyna Zy´sk Security Prospects in the High North and the United Kingdom.....130 Clive Archer High North Energy: Myths and Realities ..........................................151 Kristine Offerdal High North Shipping: Myths and Realities.........................................179 Frédéric Lasserre 4 FORWORD The present volume contains selected papers from the Academic Roundtable “Security Prospects in the High North: Geostrategic Thaw or Freeze?” organised in Reykjavik by the NATO Defense College (NDC) with the support of the University of Iceland on 30 January 2009. The Roundtable gathered participants from a number of NATO and Partner countries to address the security implications of changes underway in the Arctic in this, NATO’s 60th Anniversary year. The Roundtable was linked to a NATO Seminar of officials and invited specialists to address the same topic. The authors were expected to raise important questions rather than to supply easy answers about the evolving security environment of the High North and NATO’s role within it. They were encouraged to cast a crit- ical eye over the facts and processes at hand rather than draw hasty con- clusions if these were not clearly supported by solid empirical evidence. As a consequence, some of the contributions explicitly question wide- spread but not always well-founded images of recent Arctic developments related to legal and economic issues as well as security. Regarding the prospects for continued regional and international cooperation in the Arctic, the underlying message is one of guarded optimism rather than alarmism, warranting a deliberate yet measured NATO response. There was broad consensus both at the official Seminar and the Academic Roundtable about some key elements that must be in place if the Arctic is to remain a region of peace and prosperity. One of them is the continued unequivocal support for international law, most importantly by the Arctic states themselves, but also by outside actors, as the only possible framework for resolution of remaining jurisdictional disputes. Another is the understanding by all interested parties, including international organisations like NATO, that Arctic policies should as far as possible be transparent and inclusive. A reinvigorated role for the Alliance in the Arctic can only be envisaged in close cooperation with civil authorities and 5 NATO’s Partner nations. In this respect, Russia’s role as a pre-eminent Arctic power deserves special recognition. The contributions to the volume have been selected on the basis of merit, relevance and with a view to the coherence of the volume. All the views expressed, including those by the editors in the Introduction, are those of the authors only, and should not be attributed to NATO, the NDC or any of the institutions or governments represented by the contributors. Rome, 27 March 2009 Dr. Karl-Heinz Kamp Director, NDC Research Division 6 INTRODUCTION Sven G. Holtsmark and Brooke A. Smith-Windsor* Security Prospects in the High North. Geostrategic Thaw or Freeze? is a collection of essays on some of the issues that in the years and decades ahead will be instrumental in defining the Arctic security environment. It comes on the occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the Alliance takes stock of the prevailing and project- ed security environment and its role within it, including in the High North. At the time of writing, a new Declaration on Alliance Security is in the offing, and a new Strategic Concept perhaps not too far off. So this volume may be considered a contribution to a much wider debate about NATO’s purpose as a political-military security organization in the early 21st Century. The term “security” as used in this volume, however, clearly goes beyond traditional military security with its focus on issues of state sovereignty and interests. “Security” in the contemporary sense is ultimately about maintaining the preconditions for human prosperity and develop- ment, and “security challenges” correspondingly are developments or actions that threaten to undermine these preconditions in the shorter and longer term. “Hard military security”, as demonstrated by some of the papers in this collection, will for the foreseeable future retain its impor- tance and visible role in the High North. However, it soon becomes evident that some of the most pressing challenges facing the region – from the need to protect the fragile Arctic environment to the possibility of terror- * Sven G. Holtsmark is Deputy Director at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies. He co-edited this volume while a visiting Research Fellow at the Research Division of the NATO Defense College. E-mail address: [email protected] Brooke A. Smith-Windsor is Canada’s Senior National Representative at the NATO Defense College. He co-edited this volume in his capacity as Deputy Director of the Research Division. E-mail address: [email protected] 7 ist activity – have less to do with traditional approaches to the defence of state sovereignty than with addressing with a variety of instruments, challenges that transcend state borders. Within this general framework the essays that follow address two broad sets of questions. The first set relates to the background, nature and the implications of High North challenges. Among the key words in this respect are climate change and its implications for off-shore petroleum extraction and the opening of new Arctic Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs). The other set of questions is about the major actors’ response, individually as states or through international organisations like NATO, the United Nations (UN) and its subordinated organizations, and the European Union (EU). Here the focus turns to the roles of regimes and institutions, but also to the steps individual states take to handle what they perceive as fundamental national security interests. The essays discuss the role of multilateral legal regimes like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), regional political institutions like the Arctic Council, but also still unresolved bilateral issues of delimitation and jurisdiction. As will become clear from the essays, fundamentally the Arctic policy axis may be said to revolve around the management of two interrelated issues: the management of perceptions of the threats and opportunities that lay within the region, and the management of relationships among the pletho- ra of local, state, regional and multilateral stakeholders. In the NATO per- spective, this pertains to the management of relationships among Allies themselves, but even more importantly to relations with outside actors. This volume does not pretend to include a comprehensive review of Arctic security challenges. In particular, readers may notice that there is no paper specifically devoted to the United States’ Arctic policy. This is due to the simple fact that the essays were commissioned and written

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