Will Nuclear Free Thinking Spread to the Arctic?

President Obama announcement today that he has reached agreement with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to further reduce the two countries' nuclear weapons stockpiles. Weapons of mass destruction have no place in a world that calls itself 'civilized' and we are seeing again in this announcement the sea-change in political life that now allows us all to think such rational thoughts.

Disarmament campaigners have for years made the case that until the 'official' nuclear weapons states (Russia, the US, UK, France and China) control their addiction to nukes, no one else who covets them (Iran, Iraq, Isreal, India, Pakistan, etc) will be the slightest bit interested in even talking about, let alone actually, getting rid of theirs. You say we can't have nuclear weapons? how come they formt a central pillar of your foreign policy? (Beyond this rationale, the 'official' weapons states are also bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty to move toward total nuclear disarmament, and unless they do there are concerns that this treaty will simply collapse for lack of legitimacy in the global South.)

Now Obama and Medvedev are applying that logic, and explicitly hoping to influence discussions in the Middle East, where constant flareups of violence look ever more ominous as the 'unofficial' nuclear arsenals of the beliigerents (including Isreal) grow.

Let's take this another step though, and not just put pressure on Mideast nations, but actually model steps to total nuclear disarmament. Russia and the US can take the lead on a treaty to impose a permanent ban on nuclear weapons (and nuclear-powered vessels) in the Arctic region. This area is turning into a geopolitical hotspot in its own right, what with all that oil under the ice and that ice disappearing faster than you can say 'catastophic climate change'.

Our own Canadian hawk, PM Stephen Harper, has repeatedly rattled his little sabre about Canadian sovereignty in the North, and a major public debate about the future of this region is long overdue.

Michael Ignatieff, are you listening?

Here's a major foreign policy angle for you to outflank Mr Harper (as you've failed to do on the Arctic since you won the Liberal leadership earlier this year) - Canada pressing for a nuclear free Arctic would be credible internationally, it would strengthen, not weaken, our claims to the North, and it would prove difficult for Mr Harper to follow suit since his own base finds that kind of policy shift both unappealing and untenable (they still think that Harper's Arctic rhetoric is based in military thinking).

It would also give Mr Ignatieff the chance to speak truth to Mr Obama while at the same time directly engaging the other Arctic nations (in addition to Russia and the US - Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland), and making a practical proposal that would echo very powerfully in the Middle East. Obama would then have another international plank to build the scaffold around Isreal and Iran, pressuing THEM to consider a nuclear-free Middle East.

This would be a big improvement on Mr Ignatieff's ridiculous preening about Arctic issus so far, which have been a laughable imitation of Harper's hawkishness (see the 23.1.09 Arctic post here on NC). As such, such a move by Ignatieff would raise all the right sentiments about the Liberal Party among centrist Canadian voters - nuclear disarmament is not a leftwing issue, after all.

As we've all been saying, that Obama sure does open up possibilities, doesn't he? If only the rest of the geopolitical class was as bold.