China will cause economic and military havoc in the Arctic if regional powers fail to curb Beijing’s “pattern of aggressive behavior,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Monday.
“We’re entering a new age of strategic engagement in the Arctic, complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate and to all of our interests in that region,” Pompeo said in a speech on the sidelines of the Arctic Council ministerial meeting in Finland. “The region has become an arena for power and for competition.”
“China’s pattern of aggressive behavior elsewhere should inform what we do and how it might treat the Arctic,” he said. “China’s words and actions raise doubts about its intentions.”
Pompeo’s address opened a new front in Washington’s war of words with Beijing, as he warned that the Communist power is trying to buy influence in a region where strategic significance is growing rapidly.
“It houses 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30% of its undiscovered gas, and an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources, fisheries galore,” Pompeo noted.
Melting ice is “opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade. This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days.” Arctic sea lanes, he said, could hold “the 21st-century Suez and Panama canals.”
Chinese investment in the region is welcome, Pompeo claimed — if the country plays fairly. Its financing there so far, he argued, “is part of a very familiar pattern: Beijing attempts to develop critical infrastructure using Chinese money, Chinese companies, and Chinese workers — in some cases, to establish a permanent Chinese security presence.”
Pompeo took his listeners on an around-the-world trip of Chinese influence-buying gone bad. “Let’s just ask ourselves: Do we want Arctic nations broadly, or indigenous communities specifically, to go the way of former government in Sri Lanka or Malaysia, ensnared by debt and corruption?” Pompeo asked. “Do we want crucial Arctic infrastructure to end up like Chinese-constructed roads in Ethiopia, crumbling and dangerous after only a few years? Do we want the Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing territorial claims?”
The Arctic address came just weeks after Pompeo’s tour of Latin America, where he lambasted China for worsening public corruption in the region. And in February, the top U.S. diplomat and former CIA director urged European allies to cut ties with Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications giants because they amount to proxies for Communist spy agencies.
China has established a joint research facility in Iceland and attempted to invest in airport projects in Greenland, stoking worries within the Pentagon that Beijing plans to expand military operations in the region, “which could include deploying submarines to the region as a deterrent against nuclear attacks,” according to a new Defense Department report.
Pompeo evoked those concerns while rebuffing China’s attempt to claim a larger political role in the Arctic. “Beijing claims to be a ‘near-Arctic state,’ yet the shortest distance between China and the Arctic is 900 miles,” he said. “There are only Arctic states and non-Arctic states. No third category exists, and claiming otherwise entitles China to exactly nothing.”
His Monday remarks could foreshadow a U.S. effort “to force China out of the region” before the Communist power establishes a major presence, as the Heritage Foundation’s Luke Coffey put it.
“China is not as involved in the region yet as it is in South Asia or in Africa, so I feel like this is a good example of the administration trying to get ahead of the problem before we go too far down the road,” said Coffey, a former senior special adviser at the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence.
Pompeo has been the face of U.S. efforts to counter Chinese President Xi Jinping’s play for international influence, warning that the regime is using economic power rather than military might to build an empire.
Chinese officials maintain their American counterparts are needlessly reverting to Cold War thinking. “Our development represents growth in the force for peace,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Monday.
