Arctic & Antarctic

An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on climate change.

Thanks to global warming, the Arctic icecap is rapidly melting, opening up access to massive natural resources and creating shipping shortcuts that could save billions of dollars a year. But there are currently no clear rules governing this economically and strategically vital region. Unless Washington leads the way toward a multilateral diplomatic solution, the Arctic could descend into armed conflict.

On October 4, 1957 the Soviets dazzled the world by launching the first earth-orbiting space vehicle--Sputnik. In response, the United States organized the manned moon landing, made its children learn the new math, and presented the United Nations with a draft treaty of rules to keep earthly rivalries--and nuclear warfare--from outer space. The space age brought forth intensive new competition between the superpowers. But paradoxically it was also an extraordinarily creative period of international rule-making, covering not only outer space but also other environments no one country had yet grabbed--Antarctica, the high seas, the seabed, the continental shelf and slope.