Braun & Blank 17
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| Blank 17 [Stephen Blank is a senior fellow for Russia at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington. "The Arctic and Asia in Russian naval strategy." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322401234_The_Arctic_and_Asia_in_Russian_naval_strategy]
Most writing on the Arctic as a factor in Russian security and defense strategy understandably focuses on the European and North Atlantic dimensions of those issues. However, as this author observed in 2013, the most under-reported aspect of the Arctic’s growing importance is its impact upon Asia’s international relations.1 Not only has the Arctic’s future disposition entered into the agenda of Asian international relations, the problems posed by opening the Arctic due to climate change, and the expectations of expanded commercial exploitation of its waters and of an eventual energy bonanza create interesting parallels to other energy issues in Asia, particularly those connected with the South China Sea. Essentially if China can get away with its extensive and essentially unjustified claims to the South China Sea despite legal findings to the contrary by bodies like the International Court of Justice, then Russia will have a functioning precedent for acting equally unilaterally and forcefully in the Arctic and vice versa.2 Indeed, this writer has previously observed that, in many ways, the situation in the Arctic offers some interesting parallels and (inverted) mirror images of the energy and security tensions in the South China Sea. Russia’s move to extend its territorial waters and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) under the UN Commission on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is by no means unique, but reflects as well broader trends in world politics. And those trends do not apply solely to Europe but also to Asia and could materially affect Asian security agendas or even constitute a precedent for them. Consequently those trends, Asian security, and Russian policies are interrelated and must be seen in that light. Therefore, and since we noted above that Russia is the principal governmental actor driving the strategic transformation of the Arctic, we need to take a deeper account of the factors and mentality that are driving Moscow in its current direction and how they affect its equally compelling objective of exploiting climate change for commercial, if not political, advantage. Accordingly, this article focuses on how Russia’s increasing emphasis on the Arctic as a securitized domain of its overall policies affects its naval strategy in Asia and how Arctic and Asian precedents may interact with each other to generate further “precedents” that could cause major problems to Asian security. It sets broad precedent for SCS revisionism.Download 124.37 Kb. Share with your friends:
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