“Thanks to global warming, the Arctic icecap is rapidly melting, opening up access to massive natural resources and creating shipping shortcuts that could save billions of dollars a year. But there are currently no clear rules governing this economically and strategically vital region. Unless Washington leads the way towards a multilateral diplomatic solution, the Arctic could descend into armed conflict.”
That's the summary of a recent paper in Foreign Affairs, published by the US Council on Foreign Relations. Written by retired US Coast Guard officer Scott Borgerson, it was sent to me by an American friend who wanted my opinion. That summary made me blink.
Borgerson argues that global warming means that the fabled Northwest Passage will soon be ice-free in summer and, with icebreakers, navigable year-round. The melt will continue even if we stop greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow. Furthermore, the Arctic is rich in resources. The Russian offshore alone may contain oil reserves twice as large as Saudi Arabia's.
Five nations border the Arctic – Russia, the US, Norway, Denmark and Canada. There is no established agreement about where Arctic boundaries lie, as witness our contretemps with Denmark over tiny Hans Island. Do we really care about that minute pile of rock? No – but we do care about the adjacent seabed resources.
No legal framework determines who owns such resources, because they were always thought inaccessible. But now the rush is on. Russia has claimed 460,000 square miles of Arctic waters, has taken to flying strategic bombers over the Arctic, and recently planted a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole.
And are the waters of the Arctic archipelago, including the Northwest Passage, international waters open to the shipping of all nations – or territorial waterways belonging to Canada? Canadians assume that Canada owns all that territory, including considerable parts of the ocean – but the US and the European Union disagree. The point is not academic. A navigable Northwest Passage would cut 2000 nautical miles off a voyage from Seattle to Rotterdam and would shave about $3.5 million from its cost. And hundreds of ice-class ships are coming into service.
Borgerson aims to wake up the US, which has never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and thus cannot formally assert its Arctic rights. Worse, says Borgerson, although the US navy is larger than the world's next 17 navies combined, it has only one usable icebreaker. Russia has 18. Canada plans to build up to eight new icebreakers, and is installing a satellite surveillance system. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, the US is in trouble.
Overall, says Borgerson, “the combination of new shipping routes, trillions of dollars in possible oil and gas resources, and a poorly defined picture of state ownership makes a toxic brew.” The US should ratify UNCLOS, build icebreakers and strike a deal with Canada to create an Arctic seaway management commission comparable to the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation. And it should lead the way to peace by convening a conference of Arctic nations to create “an overarching treaty that guarantees an orderly and collective approach to extracting the region's wealth.”
It all sounds good – but that's not how the US normally behaves. The notion that the US is needed to keep the peace between Canada and Denmark is deeply amusing, though the Russians are no joke. When it comes to national security and oil-supply issues, however, the US is generally the problem, not the solution. If the US wants unimpeded access to the Northwest Passage, it will declare that it is bringing peace and democracy to the Inuit, and it will send the navy, not the negotiators.
Borgerson's argument is a good one – but he's got the wrong country. Canada has the most to lose in the Arctic, and – as in the Cold War – it is sandwiched between the world's most formidable military powers. It would be folly for Canada – or Norway, or Denmark – to take up arms in the Arctic. Instead, Canada should combine with the Scandinavians to initiate a comprehensive Arctic treaty conference, inviting the Russians and the Americans to participate.
Canada could offer to internationalize the Northwest Passage and manage it collectively – in return for a declaration that the Arctic archipelago itself is Canadian. We should also note that nature may not consent to be managed, that the consequences of the Arctic melt are unpredictable, and that the Arctic nations should insist that any new cache of fossil fuels be rationed, not squandered. Our reckless use of fossil fuels got us into this mess. If the new resources will only get us in deeper, their rapid exploitation should be resisted.
The Arctic could be our last chance, as a species, to act with intelligence. Canada can play a key role. It's a rare opportunity. Let's seize it.
-- 30 --
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Sunday, December 16, 2007
The End of the American Century
“I'm glad I have a property in Canada,” said my American neighbour, “because I know I have a place to go when the brown hits the blades in the States.”
Wait a minute. This is not some pinko dope-smokin' hipoid radical kid. This is a prosperous middle-aged businessman, an armed forces veteran, whose general political orientation is probably Republican.
And yes, I heard such talk 40 years ago, when the US was in flames: inner cities burning, campus riots, an endless slaughter in Vietnam. Today, with a dishonorable war slowly being lost in Iraq and a lunatic presidency spoiling to start another one in Iran, you might expect the same symptoms. But they aren't there.
True, many patriotic Americans are deeply sad and angry. Read the passionate anti-war speech by Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, for example, at http://www.slcgov.com/mayor/. But the Democrats are both complicit and cowardly, and the streets and campuses are not ripping out the country's entrails as they once did. So what is my friend worried about? What does he mean?
“I'm not sure what I mean,” he replies. “But the United States has not discharged its responsibilities well either domestically or internationally, and my intuition tells me that we'll be called to account for that. I don't know whether it will be a lot more al-Quaeda attacks or what it may be. But I'm glad to have a place to go with my family.”
Well.
Soon after that, I read John Risley's investment advice in Atlantic Business. Risley, you'll recall, started out selling lobsters from the back of an old pickup truck. His Clearwater Fine Foods group is now the dominant player in what's left of the Atlantic Canadian fishery. Risley is a very wealthy investor.
Risley's first investment preference is Canada, with its natural resources, strong dollar, robust economy and orderly markets. But one should also diversify into foreign investments. He suggests looking first at London, which is “in the process of replacing New York as the world's financial capital. Why is that? Because the global financial powerhouses can move talent from around the world to their London offices. The paranoia resident within the US immigration policy prevents that from happening in New York.”
Richard Florida makes the same point on a broader scale. In The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida argues that the driving force in today's knowledge economy is human creativity, which flourishes in places that are tolerant, diverse, culturally and intellectually rich, hospitable to innovation.
Thus the US economy has been propelled by its ability to “energize and attract the best and the brightest, not just from our country but also from around the world.” Almost a third of the new businesses in Silicon Valley during the 1990s were created by immigrants from China or India. Enterprises founded by immigrants include Intel, Sun Microsystems and Google.
But, says Florida, Bush's Washington “has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views.” Think about stem cells and global warming. Washington has also “inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, 'You don't belong here.'”
So the brilliant young immigrants who once competed for entry to Harvard and Berkeley are applying to Cambridge and Copenhagen – and Toronto. Foreign students in the US “complain of being hounded by the immigration agencies as potential threats to security.” Scientists report that they can't hold international conferences in the US because foreign scientists can't get visas. Even distinguished American scholars are emigrating.
These huge trends reflect millions upon millions of individual choices. A Cape Breton couple decides to fly to Nassau via Toronto rather than New York in order to take some food to their hosts and avoid the hassles and delays at the US border. A Brazilian family chooses not to vacation near the Grand Canyon. An small Italian company expands in Germany, not the US.
So there's less demand for the US dollar, and it falls. Did the Canadian dollar strengthen? Yes, slightly – but this year the U.S. dollar has declined against 15 of the 16 most-actively traded currencies.
When George W. Bush took office, his neo-conservative buddies were touting a “New American Century” of world domination. American power seemed limitless. That was an illusion, of course, as unlimited power always is. But Bush behaved as though it were a reality. On his watch, the US has lost much of its power, economic, political, military and intellectual, along with its global good-will.
An increasingly-hostile world is learning to get along without the United States. The “New American Century” is ending. It didn't even last ten years.
-- 30 --
Wait a minute. This is not some pinko dope-smokin' hipoid radical kid. This is a prosperous middle-aged businessman, an armed forces veteran, whose general political orientation is probably Republican.
And yes, I heard such talk 40 years ago, when the US was in flames: inner cities burning, campus riots, an endless slaughter in Vietnam. Today, with a dishonorable war slowly being lost in Iraq and a lunatic presidency spoiling to start another one in Iran, you might expect the same symptoms. But they aren't there.
True, many patriotic Americans are deeply sad and angry. Read the passionate anti-war speech by Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, for example, at http://www.slcgov.com/mayor/. But the Democrats are both complicit and cowardly, and the streets and campuses are not ripping out the country's entrails as they once did. So what is my friend worried about? What does he mean?
“I'm not sure what I mean,” he replies. “But the United States has not discharged its responsibilities well either domestically or internationally, and my intuition tells me that we'll be called to account for that. I don't know whether it will be a lot more al-Quaeda attacks or what it may be. But I'm glad to have a place to go with my family.”
Well.
Soon after that, I read John Risley's investment advice in Atlantic Business. Risley, you'll recall, started out selling lobsters from the back of an old pickup truck. His Clearwater Fine Foods group is now the dominant player in what's left of the Atlantic Canadian fishery. Risley is a very wealthy investor.
Risley's first investment preference is Canada, with its natural resources, strong dollar, robust economy and orderly markets. But one should also diversify into foreign investments. He suggests looking first at London, which is “in the process of replacing New York as the world's financial capital. Why is that? Because the global financial powerhouses can move talent from around the world to their London offices. The paranoia resident within the US immigration policy prevents that from happening in New York.”
Richard Florida makes the same point on a broader scale. In The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida argues that the driving force in today's knowledge economy is human creativity, which flourishes in places that are tolerant, diverse, culturally and intellectually rich, hospitable to innovation.
Thus the US economy has been propelled by its ability to “energize and attract the best and the brightest, not just from our country but also from around the world.” Almost a third of the new businesses in Silicon Valley during the 1990s were created by immigrants from China or India. Enterprises founded by immigrants include Intel, Sun Microsystems and Google.
But, says Florida, Bush's Washington “has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views.” Think about stem cells and global warming. Washington has also “inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, 'You don't belong here.'”
So the brilliant young immigrants who once competed for entry to Harvard and Berkeley are applying to Cambridge and Copenhagen – and Toronto. Foreign students in the US “complain of being hounded by the immigration agencies as potential threats to security.” Scientists report that they can't hold international conferences in the US because foreign scientists can't get visas. Even distinguished American scholars are emigrating.
These huge trends reflect millions upon millions of individual choices. A Cape Breton couple decides to fly to Nassau via Toronto rather than New York in order to take some food to their hosts and avoid the hassles and delays at the US border. A Brazilian family chooses not to vacation near the Grand Canyon. An small Italian company expands in Germany, not the US.
So there's less demand for the US dollar, and it falls. Did the Canadian dollar strengthen? Yes, slightly – but this year the U.S. dollar has declined against 15 of the 16 most-actively traded currencies.
When George W. Bush took office, his neo-conservative buddies were touting a “New American Century” of world domination. American power seemed limitless. That was an illusion, of course, as unlimited power always is. But Bush behaved as though it were a reality. On his watch, the US has lost much of its power, economic, political, military and intellectual, along with its global good-will.
An increasingly-hostile world is learning to get along without the United States. The “New American Century” is ending. It didn't even last ten years.
-- 30 --
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