Abstract: With the melting of Arctic sea ice, the considerable strategic value of the Arctic route has attracted the attention of many countries, and the geopolitical issue of the Arctic route will become an important part of international geopolitics in the future. This paper quantitatively evaluates the evolution of the structural characteristics of the national relationship network under the influence of the Arctic routes from 2007 to 2019 by constructing a national relationship network of the Arctic route system, and estimates the geopolitical power characteristics of each country. The results show that the scale of national relations networks continues to expand, and the network density shows a trend of first rising and then decreasing. Based on analysis of each sub-network, the network densities of the scientific research cooperation network and the environmental protection cooperation network are the largest, the network densities of the energy cooperation network and the shipping cooperation network are on the rise, and the security cooperation network density has been low. In addition, the network has a small cosmopolitan nature, and the scale-free feature becomes more obvious during the evolution process. Analysis of the characteristics of specific nodes indicates that the eight Arctic countries are important nodes in the network. During the evolution process, the importance of countries outside the Arctic has increased. Moreover, the communities are divided. In the evolution process, the eight Arctic countries have evolved from convergence to differentiation, and the national relations in the network have become more complex.

Key words: Arctic route, geopolitical problem, complex network, national relations