The changing global climate and melting ice caps in the Arctic now enable an evolving sea route that can be as consequential as the Straits of Malacca and Hormuz. It will not only be the shortest route between continents, it will also convey and carry goods and commodities, and influence for those who dominate the region. Russian missiles fly the fastest and the shortest over this region into their intended targets, likely the US and its bases in Alaska and Greenland. Denmark, which to date has been a nice, quiet place to retire in and have some fun with an easy life, is being stressed under this great power rivalry since it holds the keys and ownership to the two most critical real estate parcels in this region, Greenland and Iceland. The US wants those under it to forward deploy its defences and have an easy reach into the depths of the Arctic region to own and explore what riches are held locked down in its unravelling and melting terrain. The new great game has just been unleashed.
How it will impact Russia and China is yet to be determined. But the Chinese are known to have been navigating through these waters for some time now. The Russians have had naval and nuclear bases in the Kola Peninsula for a long time, which sits on the mouth of the Barents Sea in the Arctic Ocean. Other than the Black Sea, which connects to the Mediterranean, and where Russia has now been in a war with Ukraine to gain unchallenged domination over, the Kola Peninsula and the Arctic are the only accesses Russia has to Europe through the seas. Any American advance in this region, thus, is a direct challenge to Russia’s almost exclusive and uncontested presence in the region. The Chinese are exploring the same region to establish their presence through frequent visits, and to determine the feasibility for navigation and trade, and now minerals and rare earth elements. It makes for a three-way fight which will occupy the geostrategic space for the next few decades.
How it impacts the rest of the world is of imminent interest. Other than generic issues like global warming and climate change, and the future of fossils, the geostrategic impact will be huge. If the US and China, to a certain degree, are so heavily occupied in the Arctic region, will they still have the resources and effort to, for example, give to the South China Sea? With the US so thinly spread, will China find it opportune to venture into Taiwan? What might it entail on the American strategy to contain China through proxies – some noteworthy and huge like India, which, after having been led on the garden path of America’s favourite ally, is struggling to give another meaning to its relationship? An unexpected sidelining of India, a previously favoured nation among major powers of today and tomorrow, may point to a lack of certainty in India about its prospects as the future unfolds. It is certain to impact India’s political economy and, consequently, its politics. What changes it might ensue in its socio-politics are anyone’s guess, but changes are certain to follow in the next few years. How the new political flavour in India recalibrates its policies will determine how the rest of the region, Pakistan especially, must view its options.
Iran is on a boil, once again. This time it seems she will need to navigate the storm with utmost care and imagination, or the discord may carry the sell-by date for the Ayatollah’s regime of the last forty-six years. What is worse, there is no established or known figure attached to the agitating mobs around whom a coherent plan could be knit were the Ayatollahs to abdicate. An Iran left to ungoverned and unruly mobs can only be a spectre of self-annihilation through absence of organised and envisioned order – both as a state and society. Were it to fragment the tribal regionalism it might engender can only cause further chaos to its neighbouring territories which will include Pakistan. The conjoined existence of Sistan-Baluchestan in Iran and Pakistan’s Balochistan, both under strife, can only augment the strife that has ruled these regions for decades now. What if a broken, diffused and unravelled Iran were to fuse into an equally broken, diffused and unravelled Afghanistan as a region of persistent and uncontrolled chaos and turmoil? Pakistan can only dread the thought; yet it remains a possibility.
The entire world is in a reset. It will probably take the next couple of years to find its balance and shape the next few decades. Till then, though, it is only flux. In such an environment, no nation, even as assured as Pakistan seems today, can chart its roadmap to the future with any certainty. What pressures may the international environment and this three-way competition at the top for resources and influence have on Afghanistan or the need to stabilise Afghanistan? Will the international system once again ask Pakistan to carry this responsibility because of proximity? How might it impact internal ethnic and social dynamics of Pakistan or translate those into political complexities, further complicating the domestic matrix? An unravelling Iran, an expanding Russia in its near-abroad – trying to reclaim its lost influence in a renewed big-power competition – can only aggravate the security situation in the neighbourhood. China will seek to stamp its ownership of regions it has extended into with its BRI in the face of antiquated notions of territorial expansionism.
Pakistan will do well to take a pause. And reflect. Undoubtedly, the four-day war with India won us a new recognition and acceptability as a nation of consequence, but we remain at best a middling nation still heavily dependent on outside help for fiscal sustainability. The world is keen to speak to us and do business with us, and learn from us. But we must produce enough, of quality, to give these associations a meaningful purpose. These cannot be fleeting rendezvous. These will need heavy inputs of meagre resources in uncertain times. A rapidly evolving global and regional environment necessitates conservation than runaway exuberance. We need to solidify the inner front in all its manifestations, conserve energy, and power, and clout, and wait for the storm to pass over before we venture out to the world with far greater assurance and poise.