This new shipping route might change everything

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE EVERYBODY… a container ship just reached its destination!!

Okay, um, that actually doesn’t sound so exciting in retrospect, unless you’re talking about the China-operated and Liberia-flagged Istanbul Bridge, which just became the first container ship to travel from China to Europe via Earth’s new Arctic Express route.

Here are three reasons you should care about this Arctic route: 

1. It’s faster 

This ship only left China’s eastern Zhejiang province on 23 September, reaching its first European port (the UK’s Felixstowe) barely 20 days later. So we’re talking half the time the Suez Canal takes, and a fraction of the Cape of Good Hope’s 50-day slog.

That means this new Arctic route is now comparable to the ~25 days a China-Europe rail link takes, but those speedy rail options cost twice as much as on-water shipping.

And speaking of costs, slashing these shipping times of course means lower costs via savings around fuel, labour, maintenance, insurance, and security (no Arctic pirates yet).

Speaking of pirates…

2. It’s cooler

Okay not in the 😎 sense, but in the sense it’s easier to keep your cargo temperatures low via the Arctic, particularly during the summer. That makes it ideal not just for time-critical goods like those fresh Ningxia goji berries you smugly tossed in your morning smoothie after a mid run, but also temperature-sensitive cargo like certain semiconductors. 

And speaking of semiconductors…

3. It’s strategic

China has long tried to develop what it calls the ‘Polar Silk Road’, despite not having any Arctic turf. In fact, China is 1,500km / 900mi away from the Arctic (like Mexico City to Houston), but describes itself as a ‘near-Arctic state’, which we can confirm is not a thing.

So why such a big Arctic focus?

Sure, it’s partly the above trade angle: China is by far the world’s top exporter. It’s also about resources: the Arctic has maybe 25% of the world’s oil and gas.

But it’s also really about strategy, in two ways: first, it’s about establishing a presence in a region that is itself strategically sensitive in the way it lets you encircle rivals from above.

But second, it’s also about allaying China’s own fears of encirclement. For example, China gets 70% of its energy imports via the narrow Malacca Straits between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, which is why the US navy will blockade those waters in any war.

Meanwhile, the Arctic route means passing through the waters of Putin’s Russia, which is not only Beijing-friendly right now, but Beijing-dependent. And lest there be any doubt, the two neighbours recently finalised a deal to jointly develop Arctic commercial routes.

So is this the advent of Arctic shipping? Well, yes and no.

You’ll note we casually described this Arctic route as ‘new’, which implies shiny and exciting, but it’s obviously just ‘new’ because the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet. So it’s a bit like announcing a ‘new’ rash. But that’s our reality, and China’s Sea Legend Line is already pledging regular service from next summer.

And that brings us to the iceberg-sized ‘but’: China’s state media conveniently left out that most ships will still need an icebreaker escort, even in September when sea ice is at its lowest! The routes will be fully closed during winter, and freight rates will be high at first, so the Arctic still doesn’t look large-scale viable right now.

So maybe don’t go doubling down on your goji berry smoothies just yet.

Intrigue’s Take

Intriguers will already know we’re hurtling into a low-trust, high-tension era that’ll make the last three decades seem like an episode of Ted Lasso (or for any 1990s kids out there, maybe an episode of 7th Heaven or Full House).

So we naturally spend a lot of time exploring how our new age of competition is already playing out across every dimension, from tech and resources to space and cyberspace.

But the unusual thing about this Arctic route story is the way it stems from fundamental changes in our geography. There are historians like Stanford’s Ian Morris who’ve built entire careers arguing that geography is destiny. That’s even the name of his latest book, exploring how the rising waters that separated the British Isles from continental Europe 10,000 years ago might’ve put the UK on its eventual path to global domination.

There are of course loads of other drivers here, way too nuanced to cavalierly cram into a single parenthetical (culture, institutions, theology, philosophy, sorry), but geography matters. So to have a major geographic shift like the one playing out in the Arctic? It’s big.

Recent history even offers examples of just how big, whether Ethiopia’s new dam on the Nile (triggering a spat with Egypt), Russia’s near-draining of the Aral Sea (triggering Uzbek-Kazakh spats), the massive shrinking of Lake Chad (triggering wars among Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon), or mankind’s own Panama and Suez Canals, which helped accelerate not only globalisation, but also US naval dominance.

So this new Arctic route could end up forcing us to navigate more than just new waters.

Sound even smarter:

• Arctic shipping has already more than doubled (in terms of distance travelled) over the past decade.
• An August study found there’s been a dramatic slowdown in Arctic ice melting over the past 20 years. The researchers argue it’s likely a temporary reprieve caused by natural oceanic variations, rather than any kind of longer-term reversal.