Polar power play: Who will prevail at the rooftop of the world?

Rune Rafaelsen is a man with a very ambitious plan.

Mr. Rafaelsen is the mayor of Kirkenes, a small port at the northern tip of Norway, 250 miles inside the Arctic Circle. Kirkenes is the end of the line for a passenger ship that trundles daily up the coast through scenic coastal fjords. Its 3,000 inhabitants live in the shadow of an iron-ore works that went bankrupt in 2015. The town is best known for its dramatic northern lights and king crabs, the massive crustaceans with legs the size of sculling oars.

And yet snowy Kirkenes is the place that Rafaelsen envisions as a “new Singapore,” the crucial pivot of a revolutionary global trade route across the rooftop of the world linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

It seems an unlikely prospect. But as melting sea ice opens up the Arctic for the first time in tens of thousands of years, the remote and inhospitable region is emerging as one of the last frontiers of a great geopolitical clash. The world’s big powers – including Russia, China, and to a lesser extent the United States, as well as several other countries – are competing fiercely to exploit the Arctic’s shipping lanes, tap its vast booty of minerals and energy, and otherwise gain an economic and military toehold in this strategically important region.

All this may turn out to make Rafaelsen’s dreams for Kirkenes less quirky than they sound. Indeed, it could put the remote town, where whale steak enlivens local restaurant menus and tourists can stay in one of the world’s few ice hotels, at the eye of a gathering storm of interest, investment, innovation, and tussles for influence in the Arctic.

“The Arctic has turned into an incredibly interesting place where climate change and geopolitics are becoming intertwined,” says Mark Serreze, director of the