Why the Arctic is a new source of global tension

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If I ask you to picture the North Pole, what comes to mind? Maybe Santa and his elves? Maybe a vast frozen expanse with a pole of some kind marking the very top of the world? Well, our guest today, Rana Forooharp, says you should be thinking about a navigable ocean, and we all should be thinking about it a lot more than we used to. Climate change is melting the polar ice and opening up new shipping routes across the Arctic, which means that the region is increasingly becoming a zone for great power competition and potentially conflict. It turns out that a shipping route across the Arctic is a time- and money-saving shortcut for a lot of international commerce. Forooharp notes that 90% of global trade moves through ships, and the Arctic may well become as critical an avenue for world shipping as the Suez or Panama Canals. Beyond that, beneath the Arctic waters are large deposits of oil, natural gas, and rare earth minerals, as well as underwater cables, which carry 95% of the world's intercontinental information flow. So China and Russia are increasing their maritime presence in the Arctic, and Forooharp writes that while the United States wants to get in the game, it's way behind China in the number of vessels it builds, and especially in icebreakers, critical to navigating the Arctic. In researching her book, Forooharp got to embed on what at the time was the United States' only Arctic icebreaking ship, the USS Healy. She writes that if the United States is to hold its own in the growing competition with China, it will need to aggressively revive its shipbuilding industry. Rana Forooharp is a global business columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times and CNN's global economic analyst. She's the author of three previous books. Her latest is Sea Change, America's New Great Game in the Arctic Circle. Rana Forooharp, welcome to Fresh Air. Rana Forooharp Oh, thank you, Dave. Thanks for having me. Rana Forooharp You know, a lot of books begin with a compelling quote or an anecdote. Yours begins with a map, which I confess was startling to me. It's the same old planet Earth, but different. I'd like you to just briefly describe this map and the story it tells. Rana Forooharp Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, when I went on the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, one of the very first things I noticed was that every single map on the vessel, looks at the world from the top down. So you see the North Pole in the center, and then you're looking outward at the Arctic Circle. And let me tell you, when you look at the world that way, it looks very different. One of the things that you notice right away is that Russia takes up more than half of the space on the map. It is enormous. It is the dominant geographic power, one might say, in the Arctic. Canada is big. Greenland is big. Canada is a lot bigger and more important than you might think. And the U.S. actually looks pretty small. You know, Alaska is a big state, but when you compare it to what else is up there, it kind of dims by comparison. And if you look a little further down, you begin to realize Japan's pretty close. China's not as far away as you might think. So we know that maps often portray great powers in the way that great powers would like to be portrayed. And there's all kinds of stories about maps being redone and resized to account for that. But looking at the world from the top down just gives you a totally different sense of what matters, which country matters, and what's navigable. Right. And you can focus on this emerging area of competition and get its context a lot better. Let's begin with what exactly has changed in the Arctic Circle. I mean, we all have heard about global warming and polar ice melting. How much of it is navigable? And for how much of the year? So it's a really great question. Nobody, including me, quite frankly, really cared too much about the Arctic until recently. And that's because it was mostly frozen solid for most of the year. You know, obviously, you have areas around Canada, around Russia that you can get through with ice breakers, which are specially designed ships. They have special steel reinforced hulls that can break through ice. But generally. If you're talking about going across the North Pole, that has been largely conceptual until quite recently. But we are getting to a point with polar ice melting where even a trans polar route is becoming a real possibility for two to three weeks a year. The rest of the ways that you get across the Arctic, there's two very real other routes, the northern sea route, which is largely controlled by Russia, which is claiming a lot of that. That route now is its own territorial waters and the Northwest Passage, which goes through U.S. and Canadian waters. And you can get through those areas for months at a time. Now, it's slower going than, say, trying to go through the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal. But as some of those other waterways become choke points, the Panama Canal, because of water shortage, actually, in the region is becoming less navigable for different parts of the year. The Suez Canal is becoming less navigable for different parts of the year. The Suez has been the subject of Houthi terrorism. And, of course, the Strait of Hormuz has now become the world's biggest global choke point with the war in Iran. So the Arctic is becoming an area that countries and companies are looking at and thinking, wow, let's try shipping more this way. And I can tell you that the Chinese and Russians are already doing quite a lot of that. And it's interesting. You can just see if you look at this map, if you wanted to get from the northern Pacific, you know, from China, Korea, you know, Seattle or whatever, you could just go. You could go through the Bering Strait past Alaska. And if you could cut right across the Arctic, in no time, you're sailing past Greenland and you're in the North Atlantic. So you can get to Europe or the East Coast. So potentially saving billions, trillions of dollars, I guess, in the aggregate, right? Right. I mean, in general, if you are taking one of these Arctic routes, you can save as much as 40 percent of the time it would take you to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And depending on the price of oil, that's a heck of a lot of money. It's also about safety increasingly, you know, with other routes being subject to terror or climate change. This is becoming a very, very real passage. And exponentially more Russian natural gas and Chinese trade is being done through this area than it was even just a couple of years ago. And we should note, at least in passing, potentially really valuable deposits of energy and rare earth minerals. Yep, for sure. Way down under the water, though, right? Way down under the water. Right. And that gets, again, to the fact that, you know, people have known for some time that there were natural resources in this area. But just as, you know, it's difficult to say drill for natural gas in Siberia. It's very expensive. It's, you know, it's impractical. It really wasn't a practical option until recently. But now with climate change happening so much more quickly and, frankly, the race for things like rare earth minerals becoming much more of an issue, China actually has ring fenced. Quite a lot of the rare earth minerals around the world. The Arctic Circle is one of the few areas, the high north, as it's also known, is one of the few areas where countries and companies can still go hunt for these things and have a chance of getting them and, you know, duke it out potentially with rivals. Well, you did a lot of research for this book about maritime competition and economics and other issues. But you also had this experience of embedding on this Coast Guard icebreaker. The Healy, which was a pretty remarkable experience. And I wondered if you'd read a little passage from the book just about what it looked like up there. Yeah, absolutely. I'll read from the introduction. The water all around us, stretching as far as an eye or a telescope can see, is gray. Slate gray, light gray, gray blue, gray green, gray speckled with white, steel gray, but always a color that reflects the utter lack of warmth below. The sun this far north can be surprisingly bright, leaving a streak of neon yellow on the water, but it never really changes the color of the sea itself. The ocean is vast and alive, roiling with waves and wind and motion. Even when the sea is calm, it is alive with movement. It's a picture you can stare at for minutes, hours even, and never get bored because you're never seeing the same thing twice. Looking out at the mesmerizing gray churn that turns into a pattern. If you stare at it long enough, I remember a book I once read about ancient Polynesian sailors. They were able to navigate across thousands of miles with no scientific equipment, no maps, sometimes not even the stars, by simply feeling the currents from the bottom of their canoes. We've come a long way since then with maritime technology, but in other ways not so far. The sea is still an undiscovered country whose mysteries we are only just beginning to understand. This is especially true here in the Arctic Ocean. The least explored water on Earth. Remarkable experience, wasn't it? Oh, boy. You know how you hear Native peoples have, you know, 40 words for snow? I now have 40 words for cold because I boarded the Healy. The Healy is actually docked, generally docked in Seattle. That's the home port. But I got on board the ship in Nome, Alaska. The crew had come back down from a tour that they had already taken and picked up me and some scientists, climate scientists. scientist in Nome, Alaska. And I thought Nome was pretty cold, but by the time you travel up through the Bering Strait, through the Chukchi Sea, into the Beaufort Sea, and, you know, pretty close to the top of the world, you begin to realize what cold really is. And it's very, very beautiful. I have been lucky enough as a foreign correspondent and a reporter for over 30 years to go to a lot of unique places. You know, I've been in markets in Nigeria, and I've been in the Himalayas. But Alaska and the parts of the world that the Healy traverses in the high north are some of the most remote and really geographically unique parts of the world. And the Healy was singular. You know, when I was on board the ship, it was the only icebreaker in the Arctic Circle for the U.S. And so if there's a problem, man, you're on your own up there. It's really something. It's very sobering. The first time that we actually got into the ice, because we sailed for some time, and we'd see either no ice or patches of ice, which was actually kind of concerning to some of the climate scientists that were on board. But eventually, we got into ice, and you began to feel and hear the ice as it is being broken by the ship. And I remember being down on the mess hall, which is a couple floors down from the waterline, and I was sitting eating my lunch. And you begin to hear this kind of sound. And then it becomes squeaky, like fingers on chalkboard. And you can kind of feel vibration, and it gets louder and louder. And you're like, wow, there are only 12 inches of reinforced steel between me and death. That's very sobering. Right. It was remarkable. And you talked about being with one of these sailors, a woman who was at the forward lookout post, where she would sort of guide the ship through these different patterns of ice. Did you see wildlife out there? We did. I mean, one of the most amazing things was seeing a huge herd of walruses swim up to the boat at one point. And it was incredible, because they're big. I mean, their tusks alone looked about two feet long. And, you know, they just swim right up. They're so curious. And there were maybe 20 of them, and they're just playfully going around the ship. And the captain, Michelle Shallop, told me that one of the things she loved most, about being on this boat and, you know, being in the Arctic in general, was seeing the wildlife. People will report seeing polar bears. I saw any number of whales, dolphins, porpoises. And the ice itself is so different. I mean, sometimes it looks kind of like a patchwork quilt. Other times, it's much more solid. And if you're breaking through it, it's really kind of more art than science. You know, you have to look and you have to find what are called seams. It's kind of openings in the ice that you can glide the boat onto so that it can kind of find that and then push it apart. There's also the possibility when you get into solid ice of the boat actually going up on top of the ice and then using its entire weight to kind of break the ice, heavy ice. And the Healy can actually go through, you know, multiple feet of ice. Did you experience that? We did not get to that kind of level of ice, which again was, you know, part of the mission that we were there to investigate was climate science. And there were several climate scientists who had waited for years to get onto this vessel to do their work. And one of the things that they were measuring was ice levels, salinity, temperature, plankton, all of which is giving you information about the health of the water. And I actually touched base with some of those scientists several months after we had come off of the Healy. And they were starting to go through that. And they were saying, you know, we've got to do this. We've got to go through that data and look at it. And there is some real scientific data showing that these areas are changing. They are warming. They are becoming different than they have been in the past. And that affects all kinds of things. It affects the kind of fish that could live there. It affects the wind and wave patterns that you might get, which could in turn affect things like the Canadian boreal forest fires that, you know, I experience in my home in Brooklyn, New York. You would think that has nothing to do with the Arctic, but it actually has everything to do with what's happening in the high north. The icebreaker that you were on, the USS Healy, was a Coast Guard vessel. It's not part of the Navy. The Coast Guard is part of the Commerce Department. Their job is not to wage war, but to rescue folks at sea who are in trouble and also to protect U.S. shipping. And the work it was doing here, a lot of it was research. There was environmental research and also mapping of the ocean. You said earlier that this was the least explored water on Earth. And it's interesting that the Northwest Passage, which is this route that closely hews to Canada across the Arctic, was not fully mapped. What does that mean? What were they looking for? What did they discover? Yeah, this was one of the most surprising things to me. So every second that we were on board the ship, it was mapping the seabed floor. And that was being done by a separate team of scientists who actually were. Gaging the depth and putting that on a map? Is that what they did? Depth, yes, but also more, you know, very specific information. About what is actually on the seabed floor. You know, you can map with satellite technology, but that will not give you a sense of every single detail of what might be on the seabed floor. And that detailed mapping matters because that's how you see something which we did, in fact, discover while I was on board the ship, an underwater volcano that had methane coming from its plume. And that's coming up off the seabed floor. So you definitely want to have a map so that a ship that might be passing in that area won't crash into it, for starters. But also, you get a sense of, wow, all right, is there a natural resource here? So it was interesting. Megan McGovern, who was the NOAA captain that was doing that mapping and working, I was sitting with her, actually, when that feature, as they call it, was found. And she kind of paused and said, hmm, this is interesting. It looks like a methane plume volcano. And I said, does that mean there might be natural gas? And she said, might be. And she noted that it was near a native whaling ground. So then you start to get into issues that we've all read about, about whose Arctic is it? Who gets the right? Do native peoples that still make their living fishing and whaling, do they have right of passage here? Does an American oil company that wants to come up and explore have first dibs here? Or is there some Russian or Chinese company that's going to come in using open source data, you know, and get this information and exploit these resources? But these are the reasons that you need to map. And only 15% of the Arctic seabed is actually mapped in this way. So one of the big missions, while I was on board the Healy, was to try and map this portion of the Northwest Passage in much more detail, in anticipation of the fact that there will be more commerce done in this area. One of the interesting things about this voyage was that it had a woman on it, Clarissa Zeller, who was a scientist and the official native observer of the mission. And so she would, for example, take note if activity was occurring too close to native whaling areas. I wonder if that would still be true if you went out on the boat today under the second Trump administration. You know, it's a great point. And it was something I did try and engage, not just Clarissa, but I tried to engage many of the members of the crew in talking about politics. And of course, they are very, very specifically and officially apolitical. And I think most of them are, you know, pretty apolitical in general. I mean, they are people that are dedicated to service. They do their jobs, no matter who's in charge. But Clarissa did make the point, as did others on board the ship, that actually this collaboration that the U.S. Coast Guard had at that point with native peoples, there was always what's called a native observer on board the ship that would both take the information that scientists would be gathering and give it back to tribes, but also share information from tribes. What's the difference what's happening in certain areas of fishing? You know, what are the behaviors of the wildlife in a certain area? Native peoples have actually oral histories, detailed oral histories about weather patterns, water patterns, wildlife that go back generations. And they've actually, in some cases, helped both U.S. and Canadian officials chart new passages and explore areas and really kind of helped with that process. So that's a competitive advantage for both sides. And it's something that's not to say that it's not a competitive advantage for both sides. Typically done, say, by the Russians or Chinese, it is not the top priority of the Trump administration. But I will say, I was even more interested in whether the climate science could be done today. And I did speak to some of the scientists that had been on board the ship. And I said, look, could you guys sell that research today? Would you be able to get passage on the Healy? Because there's a big competition to get on board because it's about $70,000 a day to run this thing. So it's priority. And they said, well, you'd be surprised, you know, the same experiment that you might bill under a progressive administration as this is climate science, you might build under the Trump administration as this is mapping the seabed and we're discovering new natural resources or we're charting weather patterns that might help, you know, commercial ships with safety and risk. So there are different ways to package the same thing. Let's take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Rana Foroohar. She is a global business columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times and CNN's global economic analyst. Her new book is Sea Change, America's New Great Game in the Arctic Circle. She'll be back to talk more after this short break. For a peek behind the scenes at Fresh Air and recommendations from our producers, sign up for our free newsletter at whyy.org slash fresh air. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. Okay, now China has declared itself a near Arctic nation. I mean, I don't know if that's some formal designation by the UN or anything. What does it mean? What are they doing? Well, it's really interesting. China made that declaration a few years ago, and it was very much part of a larger Chinese strategy. You may have heard of the One Belt, One Road strategy, which China came up with again several years ago. It was about recreating the old Silk Route through Asia, through Central Asia, through the Middle Asia, parts of the Middle East, Southern Europe even. And it was really about rebuilding Chinese trade power and influence. Some years after that strategy was first announced, China announced it was going to be a near Arctic nation, and it would look for a polar Silk Road, which basically connects this larger global ambition to the Arctic specifically. Now, if you look pretty closely, thinking about that map, looking at the world top, down, I mean, China is still pretty far away from having certainly the position that Russia or even the U.S. does in the Arctic. But Russia is, I would argue, I think many, many experts would say, Russia is a vassal state to China. Russia has a lot of resources. It has a lot of territory. But essentially, it is dancing to the Chinese tune because China is the largest purchaser of Russian energy, and it is certainly the biggest strategic partner for Russia. So China and Russia together are clearly trying to make the top of the world an area over which they have the most interest. And that's very interesting because it starts to dovetail with something that's happening in U.S. policy, which is more of a sense of we need to protect what's close to home. And so if you look at things that way, then you have the U.S. and China coming into much closer geographic conflict. I mean, whether or not it would ever be a hot conflict, I hope not, but certainly competition in that area. Now, the United States used to build a lot of ships, and it really doesn't anymore. And one of the points you make is that China has a huge lead in commercial shipping vessels. How big a lead? Dave, it is huge. I was actually stunned, and I had to fact check these numbers several times when I first came across them. China has about 5,500 ocean-going vessels, those are commercial vessels that might be cargo freighters or tankers or sometimes dual-use military and civilian vessels. The U.S. has under 200, and that's a generous count. Some people might market more under 100 if you look at what's actually out there in the ocean right now. But let's err on the side of being generous and say it's under 200. Compare that to 5,500 ocean-going vessels, and that's a lot more than just a few. But let's err on the side of being generous and say it's under 200, and that's a lot more than just a few. So fiber optic cable is what 90% of the world's communication runs on. You know, we think about Elon Musk and satellite technology, but the fact of the matter is most data still goes on undersea cables. And undersea cables have become a real touchstone in wars and conflicts around the world. You know, you're seeing as part of efforts, Russian efforts around the war in Ukraine, you've seen snapping of cables in the Baltic area. You've seen snapping of cables in the South China Sea. This is something, it's almost like underwater terrorism that nations now do to cut off information flows. So where can you lay these things more safely? Where can you police them in a way that's more effective? And the Arctic is one of those areas. So you are seeing a race to lay down new cable and who can get there fastest, and then who can potentially commercialize and even militarize areas where those cables have been laid. Now, I'm picturing ships going through the water, unspooling the water. I'm picturing ships going through the water, unspooling the massive cables where they eventually sink to the bottom. How does militarizing those areas, I mean, what does that look like? Well, that looks like more submarines patrolling. It looks like more ports that might have military operations or munitions. This is actually one of the reasons why Greenland has become so important. And again, this is kind of one of these areas where Donald Trump comes to something important in a totally wrongheaded way. I mean, Greenland has been a big, big area for defense, for NATO. It's a NATO watch station. It's kind of in some ways the front lines of security in the high north. It has been that way since the Cold War. Now, does the idea of threatening to take it over actually help American or NATO security? Absolutely not. It simply splits Europe and makes them not like the U.S. But Greenland is important, and many other parts of the high north are going to become important territorially as the area becomes just more central economically and politically. Right. And we should note that there's a possibility that Greenland will become an independent nation, right, in a few years and might seek its own alliances with China or whoever, right? Right. That's one of the things that I think got lost in the very provocative debate that Trump started over Greenland. Defense hawks on both sides of the aisle have worried for some time that if Greenland declares independence from Denmark, which Greenlanders have said that they might want to do by 2030, 2032, which direction would they go then? Right, right. And I think that's one of the things that we need to think about politically. Could you see, say, a Chinese infrastructure and mining company coming in and saying, well, you know what, we'll build towns for you if you give us preferential access to whatever mineral or gas resources might be in this territory. That's certainly a strategy that China has used in, say, West Africa and Latin America, parts of Asia. So that is not an irrational thought that you want to get ahead of any independence movement by getting more influence in the area. Right. So how do you do that in a more rational way than President Trump did? Yeah, it's really interesting. So three ways across the pole, you've got the northern sea route, which is largely controlled by Russia. And Russia is actually now specifically claiming it as its own territorial waters, which means that you could potentially come into conflict with Russia if you were, say, I don't know, a Dutch vessel or an American vessel trying to go through there. You would need a Russian escort, and that might not be forthcoming. China gets preferential treatment in the northern sea route to take its own cargo and its own resources through there. There's also the Northwest Passage, which is something that the U.S. and Canada could certainly develop more together. And then there's this large… China gets preferential treatment in the northern sea route to take its own cargo and its own resources through there. And then there's this large… writer and chef Ruth Reichel has blurbed this book, saying, I don't think I've ever laughed so hard. I second that blurb. Who among us wouldn't at least smile at digressions here that speculate on the backstory of Mr. Clean and his less obsessive twin, Mr. Clean Enough, or dare to explore what Chast calls the saddest part of her kitchen, also known as the cabinet above the refrigerator, filled with straws from 2004, forgotten marshmallows, and a pointlessly large bowl. Chast's and Katzenstein's senses of humor meld seamlessly. Both are master observers of what might be called the uncanny mundane, where everyday objects reveal their inner weirdness. Take a cartoon by Katzenstein of a refrigerator shelf, upon which sit two tiny plastic takeout containers. The thought bubble above one container reads, he's coming for me tomorrow. He just has to. The cartoon is entitled The Very Delusional Takeout Sauce. Those familiar with Chast's award-winning graphic memoir, can't we talk about something more? about coping with her aging parents, we'll be glad to know they make cameo appearances here. Chast's mother, we're told, shoved a soft-boiled egg into little Roz every day, believing eggs were brain food, and thus leaving Chast with lifelong texture issues about goopy or viscous food. Chast and Katzenstein occasionally turn their gaze to the fact that they're not alone. They're not alone. Chast's mother, we're told, shoves a soft-boiled egg into Little Roz every day, believing eggs were brain food, and thus leaving Chast with lifelong texture issues about goopy or viscous food. to the city outside their kitchens. Intriguingly, they share anxieties about being infantilized by New York, given that it's what Katzenstein calls the greatest takeout city on earth. If eating takeout allows Chast and Katzenstein the time to create more original, unpretentious, and hilarious books like this one, I say order on. Before we leave the subject of New York, and enjoying food that you don't have to cook, I want to mention that poet Edward Field died last month at 102. Field was gay and out in the 1950s, and like his friend Frank O'Hara, Field wrote simple, often funny poems, many about New York. Here's one of my favorites, called People Who Eat in New York. People Who Eat in Coffee Shops People who eat in coffee shops are not worried about nutrition. They order the toasted cheese sandwiches blithely, followed by chocolate egg creams, and plaster-of-Paris wedges of lemon meringue pie. They don't have parental, dental, or medical figures hovering full of warnings, or whip out dental floss immediately. They can live in furnished rooms, and whenever they want, go out and eat glazed donuts, along with innumerable coffees, dousing their cigarettes in sloppy saucers. Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed The Two Saddest Kitchens by Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein. On tomorrow's show, a look at the space race between billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. SpaceX and Blue Origin are competing to virtually dominate the space race. and an attempt to dominate a market unlike any other. The Atlantic's Josh Terengil discusses the rivalry between two men so powerful, the only real competition is with each other. I hope you can join us. And we have to offer hearty congratulations to Terry Gross, who was honored in New York Monday with the Radio-Television Digital News Association's Paul White Award. It's the association's highest honor, presented annually to recognize a lifetime, of achievement and service to the journalism profession. Way to go, Terry. To keep up with what's on our show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez, Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.