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Ice Pact: US, Canada and Finland sign polar icebreaker deal in challenge to China
- A trilateral agreement announced at the Nato summit will see collaboration on building of polar icebreakers, in a bid to boost shipbuilding
The trilateral “Ice Pact” will include information sharing on icebreakers – the workhorses of polar coastguard fleets – to create an interoperable product class across three countries, as well as joint efforts to attract buyers from among “allies and partners”, a senior official in US President Joe Biden’s administration told reporters.
“The Ice Pact will reinforce the message to Russia and China that the United States and its allies intend to … doggedly pursue collaboration on industrial policy to increase our competitive edge in strategic industries like shipbuilding, to build a world-class polar icebreaking fleet at scale.”
The pact is also meant “to project power into the polar regions to enforce international norms and treaties”, according to the official.
“Without this arrangement, we’d risk our adversaries developing an advantage in a specialised technology with vast geostrategic importance, which could also allow them to become the preferred supplier,” he said.
Although China has no direct access to the Arctic Ocean, Beijing has declared the country to be a “near-Arctic state”, a designation that it uses to push for a greater role in stewardship of the region.
Chinese President Xi Jinping first raised the idea of the “Polar Silk Road” in Moscow in 2017, when he unveiled a series of plans with Russia in the Arctic to be incorporated into China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a trade and infrastructure strategy spanning Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America.
The paper suggested more scientific exploration, the opening of a shipping route across the Arctic, as well as the development of oil, gas, mineral resources and other non-renewable energy sources, fishing and tourism in the region.
Declining shipbuilding capacity has emerged as one of the biggest concerns for US policymakers looking at national security vulnerabilities with respect to China.
The administration official briefing reporters on the Ice Pact initiative said the US Coast Guard has only two polar icebreakers, both “reaching the end of their usable lives”.
“We intend to scale up by multiples of the current amount as soon as we can,” he added, but he declined to give a specific time frame.
The US government is substantially behind on its Polar Security Cutter programme – a plan to acquire as many as five polar icebreakers, also known as PSCs – which has been plagued by delays and cost overruns.
The estimated US$3.2 billion needed was calculated in 2021, before inflation began picking up in the US, and only about US$2 billion has been appropriated, according to a Congressional Research Service report. The Coast Guard originally intended to have the first PSC in 2024, but the delivery date may now be pushed back as far as 2029 or later, it said.
The Biden administration official said the PSC programme could cost as much as US$10 billion “to fully deploy the fleet that we want”.
The Ice Pact “could involve operational interoperability”, which would “increase the incentive for Finnish and Canadian companies to invest in American shipyards but also to train American workers,” he said.
“We have tentative agreements with [Finland and Canada] to fund a workforce development exchange,” the official added.
“We’ve also made tentative suggestions from our Coast Guard and Navy to sponsor personnel exchanges of the officers who lead shipbuilding for the US.”
It was designed and built by CSSC Offshore & Marine Engineering Company in Nansha, which is owned by China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation.
The acoustic information collected by the network could be used in a wide range of applications, including “subglacial communication, navigation and positioning, target detection and the reconstruction of marine environmental parameters”, according to the study.
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