Sammendrag
The Arctic attracts increasingly more political and commercial attention from all over the world. Main focuses are climate change and a vulnerable Arctic environment. There are also commercial and strategic positions. Thawing of the ice open for year-round shipping through the North East Passage, expanded economic activities, and more trade between Asia and Europe, putting Russia in a core position. With the return of geopolitics at the heart of international affairs, the Arctic may also become a scene for superpower rivalries between the United States, Russia, and China, important to the EU, European nation states, and transatlantic relations. Most important, the region is expected to have large amounts of oil and gas. Although Arctic energy is not anymore expected to become very important.to the Western hemisphere, it remains important to Russia and its domestic market, and potentially to China and other Asian economies. Under the assumption of continued reliance on fossil fuels in Eastern hemispheres, this article discusses how long-term Russian - Chinese petro-industrial bilateral ties may affect and be affected by big players’ geopolitical, geoeconomic and geostrategic competition. How and to what extent may this lead the region to becoming a geopolitical hotspot with energy as an accelerator? What is its potential impact on EU-US and transatlantic relations more generally? The article argues that the mixture of soft regulative and hard security supranational and national powers will form the geopolitical role of the Eurasian Arctic, important to transatlantic relations in their various capacities.
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