Arctic Meltdown: Die Neuvermessung der Welt

written on October 20, 2026, read October 2026

The newest book of Robert Habeck. Former Vice Chancellor of Germany. Member of the Green Party. Well, for a long time I was an SPD voter. Although I certainly had a certain affinity for green issues, I still didn’t vote for the Greens. That changed, however, with the 2021 federal election. As a voter, I had increasingly felt that I had lost my political home in the SPD.

Since 2021 I have voted Green. Perhaps that is due to something some people call a betrayal of the green idea, but which for me is an expression of realism. While you try to make the world a little better with heat pumps and can deposits¹, you simply also have to take care of security matters. To me, that is not a contradiction. I use the term wehrhafter Pazifismus for it – a pacifism that is able to defend itself. I have written about this at greater length before. In my view, Joschka Fischer embodied this early on, but for a long time I saw him as someone who had run ahead of his party, which had not yet taken this path.

When Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck were then confirmed as the Greens’ lead candidates in 2021, the party got my vote – but from many others, as far as I could observe, mostly manure. How often I was annoyed that in political discussions in forums, in comment sections and in private conversations, people condescendingly refused to call Ms. Baerbock by her surname, as if she were a little girl who had ended up in this position by accident. Does anyone still remember how people tried to go after Robert Habeck at the ferry and discredited him as a children’s book author? And some people ought to be deeply ashamed for a very long time of what was done to Ricarda Lang. But I can’t shake the feeling that these were exactly the people who are incapable of shame. And this manure-slinging continued after what is, from my perspective, the least optimism-inducing federal government – so far² – moved into its offices.

The really bad part, though, is this: the Greens were right about a lot of things. I have noticed in my circles that this is now admitted even by people who criticized these politicians heavily and in some cases even ridiculed them. Much has come to pass as predicted. And Mr. Habeck has turned out to be quite clear-sighted in many respects when it comes to his view of the state of things.

For that reason I thought to myself recently: it might be worth reading a book by Robert Habeck. In the end it became “Arctic Meltdown – Die Neuvermessung der Welt” (“Arctic Meltdown – The Remeasuring of the World”).

People tend to forget that, unlike at the South Pole, there is nothing beneath the Arctic sea ice but water. While climate change will leave behind land at the South Pole, at the North Pole it leaves more and more open sea. And open sea awakens desires and fears.

Where we see a drowning polar bear, others see an opportunity. Where we see a melting polar ice cap, others see threats to their borders. And finally: where we see glaciers in Greenland growing ever smaller, others see room for their imperial or commercial fantasies.

This is exactly what Habeck shows very well in his book. You would think a book by a Green politician would be mainly about environmental issues. Here, however, they play only a marginal role.³ He does draw an arc from Arctic amplification – the fact that the Arctic is warming several times faster than the rest of the world – to the question of how far the end of fossil-fuel societies is also connected to the problems of our democracies. In between, however, he talks a lot about the interests of other states: he explains how Russia justifies its claims and how China sees its interests in the Arctic, tries to understand why Trump wants Greenland, and asks what role Europe plays. It is about raw materials, shipping routes and security interests – and about the ways in which strategic interests are developing anew or differently here.

Because the interest in this region is not new. For a long time there was the US base at Keflavík and the acoustic underwater surveillance systems between Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom; the American base at Pituffik in Greenland still exists today. Such considerations have even found their way into fiction. Back in the 1980s, in Tom Clancy’s⁴ Red Storm Rising, the Soviet seizure of Iceland and its subsequent recapture by the Americans are an essential part of a plot centered on a Third World War.⁵

Iceland, admittedly, lies only on the edge of the Arctic. But mentally replace Iceland with Svalbard: the so-called Bear Gap (which Habeck calls the “Bärenlücke” in the book), the strait between the North Cape and Bear Island south of Svalbard, has similar characteristics and a similar significance. That is something that only became clear to me through reading this book. Nor had I previously understood the many implications arising from the special status of this archipelago (Svalbard Treaty).

What we are basically witnessing is the revival of an old conflict with old interests. In the past, the Arctic Ocean was a body of water largely blocked by ice, which could at most serve as a hiding place. Today, because of climate change, it offers military, economic and political room to maneuver, the consequences of which we are probably not yet fully aware of.

The dissolving of the ice plug at the northern end of the world puts us in a changed situation. Ultimately, we have brought it about ourselves through man-made climate change. And this illustrates very well what Habeck says at the beginning of his book: that environmental protection is never just environmental protection.

Long regarded as a periphery, the Arctic now has the potential to become a major geopolitical flashpoint. Possibly not even because of its raw materials: Habeck points out that they are difficult to extract and that the shipping routes cannot yet be used profitably. So perhaps conflicts will not ignite over them at all. His diagnosis: “But national delusion is hard to counter. And it is, not for the first time in history, the driving force behind the conflicts” (p. 325, my translation).

I would like to close this text with a sentence I liked very much. At one point Habeck writes: “Yet if the world were a desirable one, it would be a different one.” (my translation). After reading this book, but also when looking at the world right now, one may well agree with that.