It’s a tricky business being a middling power geographically situated between two large powers.
For Canada, its business focus has been the larger traditionally friendly power to its south. But that Canadian focus for the past few years has shifted from negotiating trade and other mutually beneficial North American arrangements to mitigating the collateral damage from a belligerent protectionist U.S. regime. The large power on the other side of Canada’s far north, which moves in more circumspect ways than the United States, has been far less top of mind. But it’s long overdue for Canada to elevate Russia atop its political priority list. That is the warning in a new Macdonald-Laurier Institute research paper. Its image of the Russian bear migrating into the Arctic to claim to larger portions of the region’s vast resource potential should be a wake-up call to Canada and its Arctic sovereignty assumptions. The Cold Reality Behind Russia’s Charm Offensive: Why Canada Needs a Realistic Arctic Policy details why. Authors Aurel Braun and Stephen Blank note, for instance, that Russia has “pursued an aggressive legal policy in the Arctic, seeking, through UN channels, to claim over 1.2 million square kilometres of the Arctic sea shelf and an enormous expanse of the Arctic Ocean seabed. There is a risk of Russian unilateralism if this claim is rejected.” Considering how global warming threatens to open up the environmentally fragile Arctic to resource exploitation, especially by a global powerhouse like Russia that has a poor environmental record when it comes to extracting the energy resources its economy depends on, Canada needs to start proactively defending its stake in the Arctic. This is especially critical now considering that, as the report also notes, China, too, is becoming more engaged in Arctic exploitation. A middling power up against three larger powers needs to play its hand decisively and strategically if it is to have any hopes of staying in the game.
