Preparing for a Sea Change

…But it was Bildt’s description of the strategic consequences of climate change that galvanized my attention when he spoke here to the Council for the United States and Italy. The rapid melting of the Arctic ice sheet at the North Pole will bring “revolutionary new transport possibilities between the Atlantic and the Pacific,” he told the gathering, expanding that thought for me later in an interview.

Bildt is not alone in studying the geopolitical consequences of climate change at the top of the world and elsewhere. The U.S. and Russian navies are also looking hard at how the projected disappearance of polar “summer ice” in a decade or two will influence their strategy and maritime practices and perhaps alter a relationship that is still marked by big-power rivalry and distrust.

President Obama hopes to chip away at that distrust in Moscow this week. Making cooperation on climate change a priority agenda item for this and future leadership meetings of the two countries would be a big step forward. Neither has until now taken seriously enough the risks that global warming, carbon emissions, pollution and other environmental hazards increasingly pose to global stability.

It is not only scientists who are ahead of the politicians. So are their military establishments, which realize that “warfare enterprises” will also be transformed by rising oceans, expanding deserts and shifting topography.

Russia, for example, will gradually lose a strategic asset if many environmental scientists are right and the Arctic ice sheet melts entirely in the next half-century. Russian submarines still regularly hide beneath the thick Arctic ice cover to avoid U.S. detection. They then stage surprise sudden ascents to practice launching the nuclear missiles they carry. Obama should ask his new best presidential friend, Dmitry Medvedev, if pursuing this closing window of Armageddon by stealth is really worth it.

Washington Post