The Wonkette Geopoliticker: Let's Cold War With The Soviets Over The Arctic Circle!

It's getting warm again, which means it's time for for the polar ice caps to start melting, and for glorious Northwest Passages to open up everywhere, and for shipping and extraction and all things industrial to bloom. 

The boat ride from Shanghai to Hamburg is a lot quicker this way, but I don't know, shit feels weird. Ironically, we would save millions of tonnes of fuel by using these routes. Maybe even enough tonnes of fuel for the ice to freeze back over! Also and in addition, better hope there's not a spill up there while they drill baby drill. (Shit would get real .)

Yeah, there's oil up there, waiting to be extracted. Probably 15% or so of the world's undiscovered reserves. Also gold, diamonds, everything really. And as the ice melts and giant ribbons of this stuff become exposed for the first time ever, expect a new gold rush up there in the coming years, and like every gold rush, people will be trying to murder each other to get the gold, so we will have a fun new cold wardriven by insatiable CEOs of oil companies and the like. No wonder Mitt Romney considers "the Soviets" to be Enemy Number One.

Also and lastly, if a Swedish plane hadn't crashed last month, we'd have never found out about these awesome NATO war games, which included a scenario in which "a 'strange group of people' have settled in northern Sweden and established a state called 'Gardaland' from which they have invaded an area in Norway, after which NATO intervenes under a United Nations mandate." Which sounds about right.