Biden's Icebreaker Remark Reveals Cracks in Arctic Strategy
The ice recedes, and the competition for control of the Arctic quickens.
Russia sailed its navy to the region last summer to carry out its largest war-game exercises ever, while a hungry China has made its Arctic aims known, arguing that despite its mainland lying thousands of miles away, climate change legitimizes its vaunted “Polar Silk Road” initiative. Perhaps more than ever before, then, the region has become a geopolitical convergence point where a nation’s ambitions can rise and fall, quite literally, on the reinforced-steel bow of a boat.
Enter the icebreaker, the instrument of Arctic dominance needed to carve sailing lanes through the frozen sea. Russia has more than 50 such vessels, some nuclear-powered and many reportedly armed. The United States has two. Only one can still sail.
At the U.S. Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, President Biden addressed the importance of the frigid zone where these ships are most needed. “In the Arctic,” he told graduating cadets, “the Coast Guard is the prow of American presence in the region, rapidly growing in strategic importance as ice recedes and new sea lanes open.”
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The U.S. icebreakers are operated by the Coast Guard, hence Biden’s reference to them at the academy. The first is the USS Polar Star. Commissioned during the Ford administration, it has 75,000-horsepower engines and can split ice 21 feet thick. The second is the much smaller but newer USS Healy. Commissioned in 1999, it later became the first surface vessel to reach the North Pole unaccompanied. But a fire in its engine bay has left the ship inoperable since last August.
The Biden administration inherited this problem. Congress authorized additions to the fleet in December, and the first new icebreaker is expected to put to sea in 2025. “Between now and then we're just kind of keeping our fingers crossed and hoping for the best that we don't have some kind of malfunction on either of our two icebreakers,” Rockford Weitz, director of the Fletcher Maritime Studies Program at Tufts University, told RCP.