Consider the following scenario. Due to the premature melting of the ice in the Arctic Ocean, Russia now exports a significant part of its natural gas via the so-called North-East route, the one which allows, from northern Siberia, to supply the LNG tankers with major customers including Japan, China and India, without having to bypass Europe, Gibraltar and the Arabian Peninsula to the North-West. The saving in time (and therefore money) is considerable, and, in the midst of tension with the West, Moscow claims more “security”. However, too many observers neglect a consequence which seems a priori very distant, even hypothetical at first glance, of this new maritime route, but which nevertheless very concretely embodies a formidable medium-term threat to… Egypt, a key state in the Mediterranean/Middle East basin.
Climatic butterfly effect
Because if a considerable part (for the moment, only 5%) of the supertankers and LNG carriers transporting Russian hydrocarbons no longer use the Suez Canal, this will be the first national income for an Egyptian economy already supported at arm’s length by its Gulf allies who will suffer from it. Arctic ice melts, Egypt suffers; “levels of analysis” over very large spaces – to use Yves Lacoste’s concept -, “butterfly” climatic effect, economic and therefore social endangerment of an already unstable and fragile State with burning borders (Libya, Sudan , Gaza, Israel), determining importance of the seas…
Let us also mention, in bulk, these thousands of submarine cables transmitting more than 97% of digital data but which can be quite easily cut; these coastal megacities, such as Jakarta, victims of rising waters and whose buildings and infrastructures will have to be evacuated and reconstructed (at the cost of tens of billions of dollars to borrow) and millions of residents rehoused; these tensions between landlocked and coastal Sahelian or sub-Saharan states for the export of the resources of the former, via the soil of the latter; this Mediterranean that lazy people call a “gateway” but which above all and increasingly represents a dangerous border for millions of migrants; a so-called South China Sea (but called by the Vietnamese Sea of Vietnam…) which Beijing bristles with military bases on islets of archipelagic sectors yet claimed by other States under their exclusive economic zone (EEZ); the Algerian quest for “bi-oceanity” towards the Atlantic through the Moroccan Western Sahara which Algiers would like to see administered by the Polisario Front supported for this purpose; the Russian occupation of the eastern Ukrainian coast for purposes less “cultural” or “historical” than very prosaically economic and strategic; these areas of piracy and trafficking (including human) which are developing in the Gulf of Guinea and under the Horn of Africa; or this second maritime domain in the world that France possesses, established on almost all the oceans and in particular the immense and super-strategic Indo-Pacific zone, an exceptional asset for the decades to come provided sine qua non to be able to protect and enhance it…
We will discuss all this and many other themes during the 8th Geopolitical meetings in Trouville-sur-Mer, which took place at the Casino Barrière, from Thursday September 21 to Sunday September 24, dedicated in 2023 to “Seas and oceans”, and of which L’Express is a partner alongside the Presses universitaire de France, Ouest-France and other valuable academic and media actors. Jacques Attali will provide the Inaugural Lesson, Admiral Loïc Finaz will close the conference as Great Witness, Corinne Lepage will be the Guest of Honor of this prestigious edition, the Ambassador of the Poles Olivier Poivre d’Arvor and the former Prime Minister Manuel Valls testifying for their part to the fundamental importance of the theme. Around them, a number of university colleagues, senior officers, journalists, economists, elected officials, artists and diplomats will follow one another for eight plenaries open to debate and to all audiences, including several hundred of first and final high school students having chosen the option geopolitics at the baccalaureate and coming from all over the country.
The 8th geopolitical meetings of Trouville-sur-Mer, from September 21 to 24, 2023
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Free citizen entry, and therefore welcome to all for this great fraternal celebration of geopolitics, the authentic one!
Read the excellent work by Maxence Brischoux, Geopolitics of the seas, PUF (collection “Géopolitiques”), 2023.