Putin’s ambition: A northern land grab

A Danish ambassador to Peter the Great was asked by the czar to point out his country on the map. Embarrassed at the size of his homeland compared to the vast Russian expanse, the ambassador evaded the question, and rather than point to the Lilliputian Scandinavian country from which he hailed, he put his finger on Greenland, the world’s biggest island. “Let me show you one of our colonies,” he said slyly, but truthfully. Peter the Great, of course, was suitably impressed.
Today, the North Pole is again an object of international competition, thanks mainly to the putative consequences of global warming, and Russia and Denmark are among the countries competing for territorial claims to its landmass. The other nations include Norway, Canada and the United States. Russia has launched a pre-emptive claim to the so-far-frozen north, to the point of reviving Cold War military tactics, causing other nations on the edge of the Arctic circle to scramble.

To reinforce its claim, Russia has started flying military missions over the North Pole, reviving its policy from Cold War days, approaching close to U.S. airspace. The Russians discontinued the missions in 1992 because of the lack of funding and have now revived a fleet of obsolete Tupolev bombers to establish the principle of their right to the airspace. Norwegians have had to scramble to send up their own aircraft to fend off Russian incursions. The whole scenario is straight out of a Cold War spy movie.

By American estimates, 25 percent of the world’s oil and mineral deposits are locked beneath the northern ice cap, but will become available if the world warms enough. It would not be the first time that the Arctic has been free of ice. Analysis of soil samples drilled beneath the mile-thick ice cover have shown that Greenland was in the past rich in forests, vegetation and animal life.

If in fact the Earth warms as much as the environmentalist scaremongers insist it will, one benefit will be that in time – which may be as much as 50 years from now – the North Pole could be accessible and so could the Northwest Passage through the Bering Strait, which is situated between Russia and Alaska. This would mean huge savings for the world’s shipping.

The Washington Times