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Scott Borgerson, F03, Urges United States to Step Up Arctic Policy

Scott Borgerson F03, one of the nation’s leading experts on Arctic policy, regaled a Fletcher crowd at a September 30th luncheon sponsored buy the Program on Southwest Asia and Islamic Civilizations with tales of his push for an international park in the Arctic, his experiences writing provocative op-eds and how, if not for Fletcher, he might be a bar owner in Key Largo.

Borgerson, a cheery former seaman who went from being the youngest ship captain in the Coast Guard to earning a MALD and a Ph.D. at Fletcher, is now a visiting fellow for ocean governance at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Borgerson said he was urged to consider Fletcher by an alum. “My other plan was to open a bar in Key Largo,” he said. A meeting with Professor Andrew Hess, he said, helped convince him to come to The Fletcher School.

Fletcher was a “transforming and life-changing” place for Borgerson, who traces the path to his career to a “science-fiction” style paper he wrote for a class: He tackled the idea of what would happen if the Arctic ice melted.

At the time, people were predicting that the Arctic ice would melt by 2100; he thought it might melt by 2050. Now, he predicts, “we’ll be ice-free in summer in five years.”

As that ice melts, the Arctic will become increasingly important, for the world environment, for trade routes and for resource exploration, he argued. Nearly a quarter of the untapped oil and gas left on Earth is in the Arctic, said Borgerson, who urged students to bone up on their Arctic place names.

This month, Borgerson noted, for the “first time in history” a commercial ship made the journey through the Arctic Ocean from Vladivostok, Russia to Rotterdam in the Netherlands – shaving an estimated 9,000 miles off that route.

“Get to know the geography because it’s going to be more important,” he urged. The changing climate may have even more unexpected effects, he said, saying he’d recently seen the “Greenlandic revolutionary fervor” of folks from the northern isle now considered a part of Denmark. “Greenland is going to be the first country born of climate change,” Borgerson predicted.

As for the broader question of the division of Arctic territory, Borgerson has spearheaded a push to create an international park in the Arctic to promote cooperation and research; earlier this year, he made his case on the op-ed page of The New York Times [Read the op-ed].

To date, Borgerson said, the United States has been far behind the curve on Arctic policy, exemplified by its disadvantage in heavy icebreaker ships: the U.S. has one “jalopy” on duty in both the Arctic and Antarctic, while Russia has “20 nuclear-powered, awesome humvees.”

The United States enjoys an unrivalled force under the ice, via its nuclear fleet, and over the ice, with an unrivalled Air Force. “On the ice, we are – I think the Fletcher technical term is – screwed,” Borgerson said.

The United States is also one of only a handful in the world that has yet to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty that has many important ramifications, from high-sea law enforcement to deep-sea mining.

While the United States has virtual hegemony on the seas via the U.S. Navy, law-enforcement actions that rely on the Law of the Sea – like stopping pirates off the coast of Somalia – now put the United States in an “uncomfortable” position. Earlier this year, Borgerson testified before the U.S. Senate about the Law of the Sea and he wrote a research paper for the Council on Foreign Relations arguing that it is in the United States national interests to ratify that treaty.

Signing that treaty, he said, gives participants a place in the process of drawing borders in the continental shelf. “Literally, you cannot have a seat at the table of that process if you are not a party” to the Law of the Sea, he said.

As with all treaties, the United States can’t officially sign on until it passes the Senate by a two-thirds vote. Borgerson was sanguine about the treaty’s prospects in the year to come; he cited the support of President Barack Obama, Sen. John Kerry and many others now in leadership positions.