China’s arctic Silk Road is now reality — and US cannot do much about it

EuroAsia and the World: China did not gain the Arctic because the ice melted, nor because it belongs there. It gained access because it made Russia dependent on it, and it can use that access because it can build. Both advantages are the product of deliberate strategy rather than circumstance, and neither is easily reversed. For the United States, and still more for Europe, the lesson is not really about the Arctic: it is that industrial capacity has become the central currency of this competition, and that it cannot be regained quickly once it has been lost…