The Arctic Great Game Won't Be Won in U.S. Shipyards

Thanks to global warming, there is less ice at the top of the world. And less ice, paradoxically, means a surge in demand for icebreakers, the specialty ships that are seen as the must-have currency to be a player in a melting world.

It’s that time again, when the very real warming in the Arctic—four times greater than the rest of the world—is exceeded only by superheated predictions of a coming great-power clash in the High North. Russia’s been rattling Arctic sabers for years and is now being joined by China. There are renewed worries about a resource scramble, new shipping lanes where ice floes used to be, greater military competition, and as always, the icebreaker gap that periodically frazzles U.S. policymakers.

Russia has scores of icebreakers, specially designed ships that crush ice with their hulls or shear through it to clear lanes of open water, including numerous nuclear-powered ones and one (soon two) armed with deck guns. China has four, as well as a super-advanced one on the way. The United States has just one heavy icebreaker—the half-century-old Polar Star, which is out of its annual dry dock after its Antarctic run—and one medium icebreaker, which is out of action for now after catching fire last month. This summer, there are no U.S. missions in the Arctic; China has three.

The United States and a pair of Arctic NATO allies, Canada and Finland, have announced an ambitious plan to team up and build scores of icebreakers. U.S. officials have touted the so-called ICE Pact, announced on the sidelines of July’s NATO summit, as a mix of friendshoring and industrial policy, leavened with a dose of great-power competition fought with rivets and ratchets, not rockets. 

But the looming competition in the Arctic is not like that facing the United States in other oceans or battlefields. The United States has immense strategic interests and challenges in the warmer waters of the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the rest. If the still-chilly waters of the High North get short shrift in Washington, it’s because whatever may come to pass there takes a back seat to things that are happening in the wider world. The U.S. Defense Department’s new Arctic Strategy essentially boils down to a watch-and-monitor approach to an arena that for two decades has been the perennial next great-power flash point.

“Why do we have trouble seeing ourselves as an Arctic nation in anything like the same way as Russia does? One of the reasons is that Russia gets a significant and growing share of its GDP from the Arctic; we do not,” said Rebecca Pincus, director of the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center. 

“The United States is clearly focused on the Indo-Pacific and Europe, so the Arctic is not top of mind—so why the obsession with icebreakers?” said Pincus, who previously worked on Arctic issues at the Pentagon.

The short answer is that all the Arctic nations—there are eight, and seven of them are in NATO—have the icebreakers they need, except for the United States. The long answer is that there seems to be a looming great-power competition up north, and the only way to play is to have the chips, or ships. But the even longer answer is that there is only one gambler at the table—Russia—and it has a very definite tell that can be exploited.

If the competition in the Arctic boils down to another front in the rivalry with Russia (and China is at best a self-proclaimed “near-Arctic state,” despite its frequent polar forays), then the fight should be in Russian shipyards and vulnerable Arctic facilities, not in American ones. The better strategy to combat Russia in the Arctic, Pincus suggested, happens to be the one that the United States and Europe are already employing: making it harder for Moscow to profitably ply the icy waters, not just easier for Washington to do so.

More icebreakers for the United States would not be a bad thing. For years, the United States Coast Guard has said that it requires a minimum of six icebreakers to adequately handle multiple missions a year to both poles, and only a generous accounting of ships on hand can tally even one-third of that minimum; now the service wants eight or nine. 

Icebreakers are used up north to support several research missions every summer, as well as for practicing oil-spill response and environmental monitoring. On the far side of the world, the United States has to break in once a year to resupply its Antarctic research station at McMurdo, for which really heavy icebreakers are needed. 

The problem is that, while the United States can build some very complex ships such as nuclear aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, it cannot quite manage to build icebreakers despite years of trying. The Polar Star was built in the 1970s; the Healy, the U.S. medium icebreaker, was built in the 1990s. Since then it’s been dry ice.

In that sense, the new Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or ICE Pact, makes some sense. Finland and Canada are best in class at building that very particular kind of ship; Finland alone has built more than half of all the icebreakers afloat. For a country like the United States that is now hoping that its much-delayed Polar Security Cutter, the new generation of icebreakers, will arrive only about five years late and over budget, getting some professional help is smart. 

“Icebreakers have been a key Finnish know-how for a long time. Now that we are part of NATO, this is one thing that Finland can provide—we are tops in the world in designing and building icebreakers,” said Mika Hovilainen, the CEO of Aker Arctic, the world’s leading designer of icebreakers.

What’s not clear about the ICE Pact, though, is what it will actually deliver or how it will work; the outlines of the collaboration pact as announced so far do not tackle the fundamental challenges that have bedeviled decades of U.S. efforts to build the kind of ship that China turns out inside of two years. 

Foreign shipyards, for starters, are off-limits for U.S. Coast Guard and naval vessels, yet they are the ones with the specialized workforces. U.S. shipyards, bereft of investment, workers, work orders, and even dry docks, have enough trouble even building the congressionally mandated number of nuclear submarines, let alone a new class of vessel. Misguided adventures, such as choosing an unproven German design for the new polar cutter rather than a tested blueprint, only add to the woes. 

The ICE Pact, Pincus said, is a little bit like AUKUS, the three-way deal among Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom to bring nuclear submarine technology down under. “Except this time, we’re the Australians,” she said of the United States. “What price are we going to have to pay for their expertise?”

Why does the country that invented the nuclear aircraft carrier find it so difficult to build a ship that can drive straight into a six-foot chunk of ice and keep going? It turns out that icebreakers, like nuclear carriers and subs, are very complicated to design and build, and practice does indeed make perfect. Icebreakers need not only specially strengthened hulls, with different attributes depending on whether they will crush the ice or shear it, but also massive engines and absolute all-weather systems. 

Aker Arctic, for instance, spent a decade working on hull-strength analysis to figure out just where an icebreaker needs to be strong and where designers can save steel. That matters enormously when building a ship that is explicitly designed to steer straight for what everything else afloat avoids.

“We are gaining that kind of experience with icebreakers, because we design icebreakers all the time,” Hovilainen said. “We have a lot of standard solutions, we know what works, and we can apply that to new projects. If you have to reinvent the wheel in all areas of the ship, it is going to be super complex.”

Perhaps the new ICE Pact will indeed deliver a collaborative arrangement that helps build the estimated 70 to 90 icebreakers that U.S. officials say Western allies need in the years ahead. But the point about the looming Arctic challenge isn’t to build more Western icebreakers—which mostly carry scientists and science projects—but to make sure that the main Arctic rival of the United States and its NATO allies can’t really take advantage of any ice that it breaks. The United States aspires to be an Arctic nation, or at least Alaska lawmakers do; Russia genuinely is. And that presents not so much a threat as an opportunity.

In 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin updated his already ambitious plans for the Russian Arctic by 2035. He added some new hits such as “protecting sovereignty and territorial integrity,” but he kept the old favorites, including the two most important: tapping Arctic resources to drive Russian economic growth and turning the northern coast of Siberia into a shipping lane worthy of the name.

The Russian Arctic does have mind-boggling amounts of oil and natural gas. (The U.S. and Canadian Arctic has lots, too, but it’s easier and cheaper to frack in North Dakota than to drill in the Chukchi Sea.) Tapping those oil and gas reserves is challenging enough, but Russia has been able to do it, to an extent, despite a decade of Western sanctions that have handicapped some of its frontier energy projects. The tricky part is to move that gas from the frozen north to thirsty markets in Asia: Arctic ice may be melting, but that doesn’t mean those are warm-water ports or easy to navigate.

Especially after the onset of the war in Ukraine, which largely foreclosed European energy export markets to Russia, Arctic energy and its shipping routes to the east have become a key strategic priority for Putin. The Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia is the epicenter of Russia’s newfound trade in liquefied natural gas, or LNG; since piping it to Europe is no longer an option, and China is proving a hard bargainer on piped gas headed east, freezing it and shipping it out is the future for Russian energy.

For Putin, the so-called Northern Sea Route (NSR)—the would-be shipping lane across the top of Russia—is the embodiment of his end-run around Europe and toward a full embrace with China. Moscow has visions of the route becoming a genuine global sea lane to rival such routes as the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal, no matter the fact that container ships cannot and will not save a few days’ journey by venturing into shallow, ice-filled, foggy waters that Russia calls its own and taxes as such. In 2023, the NSR had its best year yet, shipping a whopping 36 million metric tons. The Suez Canal, when not disrupted by Houthis, transits that much cargo in a week.

There is one vulnerability, though. About half the traffic on the NSR is LNG exports. Shipping gas through ice floes requires icebreaking LNG tankers. Those were previously being built for Russia in South Korea, but the Ukraine war put paid to that, with Seoul canceling the pending delivery of new ice-class tankers. (Western dry docks are still servicing the existing fleet, though.) Russia is trying to build some of its own, and probably can, but it may struggle to master some of the advanced cargo containment technology that was a Western monopoly, Hovilainen said.

That is part of an evolving Western strategy to strike at the Russian weakness in the Arctic. Just after the invasion of Ukraine, Western sanctions poleaxed the big LNG liquefaction facility in the Yamal Peninsula, which was reliant on Western technology. Novatek, the private Russian company plowing ahead, now hopes to jury-rig a solution to get its gas super-chilled and super-moving by 2026, but it is employing unproven workarounds. The facility upped production and even started exports this summer but is still running below capacity.

The West has found other chinks in the armor. This summer, the European Union, in its 14th sanctions package on Russia, specifically targeted Russian transshipment of LNG in European ports—Moscow would use precious ice tankers to ship gas south, then move the gas to a regular tanker for export overseas. With that trade foreclosed, Russia’s hard-worked LNG tanker fleet will have to make the full run from Siberia to the final destination and back again, essentially cutting its energy-export capacity.

Or take the latest Western step to hit Russia. In late August, the United States went after Russia’s LNG shadow fleet with new sanctions. The latest sanctions not only intensify the pressure on Russian gas production and liquefaction in the Arctic, but they also take aim at the fleet of specialized tankers that Moscow needs to build up in order to get its product to its last remaining big market. The goal, the U.S. State Department said, is to “further disrupt” both production and export of Arctic LNG, especially relevant now that the big plant in Yamal is up and running again.

If there is a great-power competition in the Arctic, it is only existential for one of the players. And the recipe for success is not building more icebreakers, welcome as they may be, but making sure that those in Russian hands are opening leads to nowhere.

“We are pressuring Russia with economic tools in the Arctic, which is a cost-effective means of pursuing our goals. Russia’s icebreaker fleet is all about energy exports to Asia,” Pincus said. “That’s why the sanctions are smart. If we can sustain them, and the Russian Arctic oil and gas reserves and facilities become stranded assets, then what is the Arctic to Russia? That could end up starving the NSR.”