By calling Canada’s claim over the Northwest Passage “illegitimate,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday did that traditional Trump administration standup act, offending everyone while offering no comedy whatsoever.

The main offence lay in giving a crude blustering speech in Finland to the peaceable Arctic Council, where eight countries — Canada, the U.S., Russia and other Nordic nations — discuss co-operation and environmental protection. Even though China is given observer status, it’s not the place for threats about security and economic matters.

The speech went down badly with all diplomats, the U.S. played rogue, so no change there then.

The Northwest Passage, in all its forms, runs between 19,000 of Canada’s northernmost islands. That is a fact. That the U.S. disagrees with this fact is not new. Canada and the U.S. formally agreed to disagree in a 1998 Arctic Co-operation agreement. Pompeo even called it a “feud.” It is not.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland crisply dismissed Pompeo. Michael Byers, UBC professor and Canada’s foremost Arctic expert, responded briskly. “Pompeo’s description of Canada’s claim is consistent with 50 years of U.S. policy and therefore no cause for concern. What do you do when the U.S. Secretary of State gives a speech full of factual mistakes, logical inconsistencies, and gratuitous insults? Laugh? Cry? My suggestion: Ignore him. These guys don't last.”

Byers has a point. And he has always had a point about the Arctic: it is changing ferociously fast. Climate change is melting great expanses of ice, making it pathetically vulnerable to industrial exploitation that will make global warming even worse. In Byers’ 2009 book Who Owns the Arctic? he was horrified by the damage already done.

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Arctic riches are easier to find now. Pompeo mentioned oil, natural gas, uranium, gold, fish, and rare earth minerals, but most of all, shipping lanes. He even referred to Arctic “real estate” rather than land, sea and ice.

And then Pompeo translated “co-operation” between relevant nations as “bitter competition” between the U.S. and seven upstarts. He insulted Canada, Russia and even China, making enemies on three fronts, when the standard American trickery is to choose one enemy and then call for bullying.

According to New York Times reports, Pompeo is suggesting “Beijing’s efforts to build infrastructure in the region and partner with Russia on new sea routes could risk turning the Arctic into another area of competing territorial claims, like the South China Sea.”

But Byers says there is no Chinese infrastructure in the area. Pompeo “paints a negative picture of Russian and Chinese efforts. In fact, they have been constructive. Russia and China are following the rules.”

He ridiculed Pompeo for getting the date of the 1867 Alaska Purchase wrong by 10 years, for basing gas and oil stats on 11-year-old information about “undiscovered” reserves, which by definition do not exist, and going over the top by referring to a “feud.”

The speech “read as if it were written by a Republican intern who wrote it three or four days ago using Fox News as a research source.” Then he said the most damning thing of all.

“It was the equivalent of a Trump tweet.”

That’s the problem with Trump hires, les incompétents. They have no expertise. Pompeo was an obscure Kansas congressman elected in the Tea Party wave. Suddenly, he was CIA chief, for 13 months. Now he’s Secretary of State, although he believes in the Rapture, which means the end of the world will be no bad thing in his eyes. Believers like himself will enter heaven, bodily.

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In other words, he doesn’t have skin in the game when it comes to protecting way station Earth and its billions of unbelievers. “It is a never-ending struggle until that moment, folks,” Pompeo has said. “Until the Rapture.”

There is no future for the Arctic without unlikely partners like Russia, Canada, and other northerners working together on what climate change leaves behind. There will be many and much more profitable places on the planet for the most heavily armed nations to battle over.

About the Arctic, can we not continue to agree to disagree, at least until Trumpism departs American rule?

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