Early next week, two German-owned container ships will arrive in Rotterdam from Vladivostok in the Russian Far-East, having taken only one month to make the voyage. That’s much faster than usual — but then, they didn’t take the usual route down through the South China Sea, past Singapore, round the bottom of India, through the Suez Canal, across the Mediterranean and up the west coast of Europe. They just went around the top of Russia.

It’s the first-ever commercial transit of the Northeast Passage by non-Russian ships, and it shortens the sea trip between East Asia and Europe by almost a third. It’s the melting of the Arctic sea ice that has made it possible, although for the moment it’s only possible for a couple of months at the end of the summer melt season, when the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover has shrunk dramatically. But it is a sign of things to come.

It’s the Northwest Passage, another potential short-cut between Europe and East Asia going through the Canadian Arctic archipelago, that has got the attention in the past few years. Although ice-breakers have traversed it from time to time, no ordinary commercial ship has ever carried cargo through it. But when the Russians put on their little propaganda show at the North Pole two years ago, the Canadian government had kittens.

In 2007, Artur Chilingarov, a Russian scientist famous for his work in the polar regions and personal Arctic adviser to then-president, Vladimir Putin, took a mini-sub to the North Pole and planted a Russian flag on the seabed. The Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, immediately flew to Iqaluit in the high Arctic and responded with a rabble-rousing speech: “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty in the Arctic,” he said. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake: this government intends to use it.” He then announced a programme to build six to eight armed Arctic patrol vessels to assert Canadian control over the Northwest Passage, and a deep-water naval base on Baffin Island to support them.

Too many odds

Canada’s dispute over sovereignty in the Northwest Passage is actually with the United States of America, not with Russia. The US used to believe that the Northwest Passage could be useful if it were ice-free, so Washington has long maintained that it is an international waterway which Canada has no right to control.

Canada disputes that position, pointing out that all six potential routes for a commercially viable Northwest Passage wind between islands that are close together and indisputably Canadian. But Ottawa has never asserted military control over the Northwest Passage, because to do so would be risking an awkward confrontation with the US. However, if you can pretend that you are building those warships and that naval base to hold the wicked Russians at bay, not to defy the Americans.... That is Harper’s game. He now visits the high north every summer to reassert Canada’s sovereignty claims. But in the end it will make no difference, because the Northwest Passage will never become a major shipping route.

The problem for Canada is that all the routes for the Northwest Passage involve shallow and/or narrow straits between various islands in the country’s Arctic archipelago, and the prevailing winds and currents in the Arctic Ocean tend to push whatever loose sea ice there is into those straits. It is unlikely that cargo ships that are not double-hulled and strengthened against ice will ever get insurance for the passage at an affordable price.

Whereas the Northeast Passage is mostly open water, and there is already a major infrastructure of ports and nuclear-powered ice-breakers in the region. If distances are comparable (as they are), shippers will prefer the Northeast Passage every time. The Northwest Passage will never be commercially viable.