Iceland Shills for Chinese Voice in Arctic Affairs

The timing must be entirely coincidental.   Iceland just became the first European country to conclude a free trade agreement with China.

The China-Iceland FTA covers trade in goods and services, investments, and various other areas. Specific provisions on investment, movability of citizens, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical trade barriers, rules of origin, customs procedures, competition policies and intellectual property are also included in the FTA. The parties also made commitments in service trade that are stricter than the WTO commitments.

And, in a remarkable fluke, Iceland's president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, has also come out proposing that China should have a say in developing the far north.

"It is a wrong scenario to think that this will only be of concern to those people living in the Arctic. It will be a concern to every nation," Grimsson said in an interview. "There is no country that will escape the consequences, either through rising sea levels or extreme weather patterns."

With that in mind, Grimsson argued that oil companies and countries as far away as China, India, Singapore and South Korea should have a voice in the future of the region. At present, only the eight countries of the Arctic Council have a say in setting policy in the region. "We realise that there are other nations in Asia and Europe that have legitimate concerns and enterprises in the Arctic and it's important to involve them in a co-operative effort," Grimsson said.

China already has stated some pretty aggressive views on its roles,  civilian and military, in the Arctic region.

Chinese researchers are publicly encouraging the government to actively prepare for the commercial and strategic oppor-tunities that a melting Arctic presents. Li Zhenfu of Dalian Maritime Uni-versity has, together with a team of specialists, assessed China’s advantages and disadvantages when the Arctic sea routes open up.  ‘Whoever has control over the Arctic route will control the new passage of world economics and international strategies’, writes Li, referring both to the shortened shipping routes between East Asia and Europe or North America and to the abundant oil, gas, mineral and fishery resources presumed to be in the Arctic.

...Li points out that the Arctic also ‘has significant military value, a fact recognized by other countries’. In a rare open-source article about the Arctic by an officer of the People’s Liberation Army, Senior Colonel Han Xudong warns that the possibility of use of force cannot be ruled out in the Arctic due to complex sovereignty disputes.