“Arctic” to the competition arena – Al-Baath Media

News report – quoted from Al-Baath newspaper

The rapprochement between the Chinese and Russian allies has angered NATO, which has caused the latter to sound the alarm to gather its forces and gather the capabilities of its members for the necessity of preparing for fear of a conflict breaking out in the Arctic region.

This rapprochement has made the region an arena of competition between the great powers that is about to turn into a conflict, especially after the end of the Cold War and the absence of competition between the great powers. According to the American expert specializing in international and strategic affairs, Irina Tsukerman, over the past decades it has become a strategic geopolitical location, whether in terms of the race for natural resources or as geographical routes for international trade, including oil shipments, as the melting of the ice cap in the poles has made the region easier to ship and extract oil and gas, which has made neighboring and distant countries increasingly seeking it.

What has angered NATO, according to strategic analysts, is the sovereign rights granted to Russia and other countries under the Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920 in the Svalbard Islands, including the right to scientific and environmental research, exploration, exploitation of mines and fisheries, etc., in addition to disarmament and NATO’s inability to deploy any forces, even light ones, in the archipelago of the islands, as well as the strategic positioning of the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet, which is considered the most powerful naval fleet Moscow possesses, in a location closer to the archipelago than NATO’s position in the Barents Sea.

NATO’s concern was not without reason, according to the chairman of the alliance’s military committee, who warned of the development of relations between the Russian and Chinese sides, and alerted the alliance to the need to prepare for conflict in the Arctic region, because Russia has the ability to operate effectively there, at a time when the latter is strengthening its military capabilities, and Russia will respond to this with several measures, after it rejected the alliance’s accusations of militarization by employing large resources in air bases and other vital infrastructure facilities in the pole.

NATO members’ fears of Sino-Russian rapprochement were translated by a statement from NATO published by the Russian website “Newsry”, where the statement revealed that the deep strategic partnership between the two countries conflicts with NATO’s values ​​and interests. China considered this statement a distortion of its policy and reputation, indicating that NATO is looking for pretexts to expand in the Pacific Ocean.

All of this prompted NATO to call on its members to intensify cooperation with partners in Asia in order to confront China, at a time when it forgot its expansion in the Asia-Pacific region, thus exceeding the traditional geographical scope, especially when it calls itself a “regional organization.”

Alexander Lukin, scientific director of the Institute of Modern China and Asia of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that Beijing adopts Moscow’s thesis that NATO’s eastward expansion led to the Ukrainian conflict, and that Beijing has called for an end to the conflict in Ukraine and the search for a peaceful solution to the crisis.

In conclusion, there is no doubt that the Arctic is a Russian area of ​​influence in which Western countries aspire to find a foothold, after it was in the past a theater for military confrontations between the world’s major powers, the United States and the former Soviet Union, during the Cold War. Will NATO make this region an arena of conflict again after it plunged Ukraine into the Russian holocaust? Observers wonder.

Linda Tilly