Washington: US President Donald Trump, in a recent memo, asked executive departments to report back by early August on how they can develop a US “fleet” of icebreaking ships to navigate the frozen Arctic and Antarctic — marking yet another step in the administration’s efforts to strengthen US influence in the region as it faces challenges from Russia and China.
The memo ordered the State Department, Defence Department, Commerce Department and Office of Management and Budget to review how the US could acquire “at least three heavy polar-class security cutters,” better known as icebreakers.
The memo, which also considered using smaller icebreakers to support national security priorities like “unmanned aviation” and “space systems,” even flicked at the possibility of a more militarized presence.
Russia, meanwhile, has dozens of icebreakers, including several that are nuclear powered, multiple large icebreakers and what can legitimately be called a fleet of medium icebreakers. China has a handful of medium icebreakers and is angling for new ones as well.
“We really don’t have the ability to project the presence we need to project in both the Arctic and the Antarctic,” Vice Adm. Scott Buschman, the Coast Guard’s deputy commandant for operations, told Fox News of US capabilities with just the Polar Star and the Healy. Buschman’s rank is the equivalent of a three-star general.
Nick Solheim, the founder of the Wallace Institute for Arctic Security, told Fox News that although the US has little Arctic territory compared with Russia, and therefore it makes sense why Russia would have more icebreakers, America’s capabilities are woefully insufficient.
“There was an instance a couple of years back where an Alaskan city contracted a Russian icebreaker to deliver fuel and supplies so the city could continue running through the winter,” he said. “Because we were not able to get there. That’s alarming when you have to, as a city in the United States, as an American citizen with the same rights as every other American citizen, have to… charge a foreign country with supplying your own city. That’s absolutely insane.”
Buschman warned that the US needs to keep pace with its rivals in order to maintain all its responsibilities and guard its interests in the Arctic.
Solheim notes China’s increased activity on the Arctic Council, an international organization of Arctic countries, which China is not technically a member of, and its efforts to court individual members of the council as well. China in the last decade, for example, signed a free trade agreement with Iceland. It’s also tried to use its Confucious Institutes — Chinese government-programs that exist in American universities as well — to spread propaganda in Arctic countries.
China also tried to build airports in the Danish territory of Greenland before the US put the brakes on that enterprise, and in May gained majority control of a Norwegian airline through several degrees of corporations owning other corporations.
