Moscow has announced that the Arctic will become its “main resource base” by 2020, and plans for troops “capable of ensuring … security in region"

During a week when big ideas have their shot at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, it’s clear the Arctic isn’t getting its share

writes John Vinocur concerning "the worst-case Great Game perspective of guns, gas leaks and oil spills, tanker collisions and nationalist jostling". As John Vinocur explains, the (ignored) problem is that

the Russians … seem more in a rush than the Atlantic Alliance players to create their own kind of Arctic facts.

They have experience in the region, but hardly a resounding record as great stewards of the environment. Their claim to half of the Arctic as their own was described in Halifax as “extravagant” by a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker.

In 2007, they planted a Russian flag under the North Pole. This year, Moscow’s National Security Council announced that the Arctic would become its “main resource base” by 2020, and plans for troops “capable of ensuring military security in the region.” In October, a Russian admiral said that helicopter carriers the Russian Navy hopes to buy from France were earmarked, in part, for its Arctic fleet.

But this could be just woofin’. … All the same, said Mr. Volker, who is managing director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations, “The Russians know what they want. They’ve got an Arctic fleet, and incentives to bring people to settle in the region. They want to develop gas fields. It’s not military aggression, but an attempt to build a comprehensive presence.” Washington, he said, “has been a little slow to put the pieces together. And we’re the only country to have the resources and political weight that can get a handle on the development of the region.”