Echoes

Cold War echoes during Obama's Arctic trek

In addition to slowing global warming, the president hopes to impede Russia's northern ambitions. 

By Sarah Wheaton

The subtext of President Barack Obama’s trip to Alaska is as much Cold War as global warming.

Obama spoke in near apocalyptic terms about the effects of climate change shortly after arriving for a three-day trip to the Arctic region. He warned of villages sinking into the sea as the ice underneath them melts, of permafrost subsumed by fire. He urged immediate action to counteract the effects of carbon waste.

A lower-key announcement on Tuesday, however, about White House plans to speed up acquisition of new Coast Guard icebreakers, wasn’t so much about acts of nature as acts of Vladimir Putin.

“Russia’s got a ton of icebreakers,” Alaska’s independent governor, Bill Walker, told reporters on Air Force One ahead of the announcement. Specifically, according to the White House, Russia’s got 40 functioning icebreakers, with 11 in the works. The United States has three.

The issue is related to climate change. Arctic sea ice maxed out at the lowest level ever recorded this past winter, according to the White House and the melting at the top of the planet is causing a “dramatic increase expected in oceangoing sea traffic.” Russia has been leading the effort to take advantage, and its Northern Sea Route offers the only icebreaker escort service in the Arctic.

“Leaving Russia alone to shepherd shipping in the Arctic gives them even more dangerous leverage over global energy supplies,” warned Mead Treadwell, a former lieutenant governor of Alaska and energy official in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in a recent article for the Harvard International Review.

During a stop on Tuesday in Seward, Obama will propose to speed up acquisition of a replacement for the Coast Guard’s heavy icebreaker –- which is also deployed to Antarctica -- by two years, to 2020, as well as begin planning construction of new icebreakers. Crucially, he’ll call on Congress to fund this effort. There’s general agreement that new icebreakers are needed, but not on how to pay for it.

“That is really the billion dollar question right now,” Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft said a National Press Club event in Washington last month.

After speaking at a State Department conference on climate change in Anchorage , Obama is set to hike to Exit Glacier near Seward, as well as tour Kenai Fjords National Park by boat. It’s unusual departure for a president who more typically appreciates the great outdoors on the putting green. But on this trip -– which will make him the first president to travel above the Arctic circle -– Obama is channeling his inner Theodore Roosevelt with a modern twist, taking over the White House’s Instagram account with his own snapshots from The Last Frontier.

In addition to climate change, Alaskans feel the growing military threat from Russia more acutely than the rest of the country. As Walker noted, Walker said, it’s only 2.6 miles “landmass-to-landmass” from Alaska to Russia.

“It’s the biggest buildup of the Russian military since the Cold War. They’re re-opening 10 bases and building four more, and they’re all in the Arctic,” said Walker. “So here we are in the middle of the pond, feeling a little bit uncomfortable with the military drawdown.”

The White House’s icebreaker announcement stressed their need in a broad context that includes “global commerce and research” as well as “peace and stability,” and it only noted Russia when comparing fleet sizes. So with little sign of a thaw in relations, the icebreakers might be another reflection of Obama’s mindmeld with Roosevelt, who proposed to speak softly and carry a big stick.