ANALYSIS: The Arctic: The New Battleground for the 21st-Century Cold War

Washington Slept While the Arctic Warmed

The United States has exactly one operational heavy icebreaker. Just one. Russia has more than forty, including seven nuclear-powered ones. This disparity speaks volumes about the gap between U.S. rhetoric on the strategic importance of the Arctic and the actual investments made to maintain a credible presence there. For decades, Washington has treated the Arctic as a secondary theater—far from the priorities of the Pacific, far from the urgency of the Middle East, and far from the grand narratives of U.S. foreign policy. This lack of interest has come at a high cost: Russia has built an unparalleled Arctic infrastructure while America looked the other way.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Arctic Strategy, published in 2024, marks an attempt to catch up. It explicitly acknowledges that the Arctic has become an “arena of strategic competition,” that Russia’s military modernization poses a direct challenge, and that China’s growing influence in the region—including its expanding scientific presence and attempts to exert influence in Greenland—constitutes a long-term threat. But a strategy on paper does not make up for a lack of an icebreaker fleet. The U.S. Congress has approved funding to build new polar ships. The first ones will not be operational for several years.

There is something almost pathetic about the U.S. position in the Arctic. The world’s leading military power, with the most powerful economy in history, cannot navigate freely in its own Arctic waters due to a lack of icebreakers. It must lease or borrow foreign capabilities for its own scientific and military operations. This is not just a failure of investment—it is an admission of misaligned priorities over the past thirty years. And now that the Arctic is becoming what it should always have been considered—a priority strategic theater—America finds itself scrambling to catch up with infrastructure that Russia has had time to build patiently.

Trump, Greenland, and the Obsession with Territory

Donald Trump has turned the issue of Greenland into a barometer of something deeper than his usual unpredictability. When he stated in 2025 that the United States might consider “military” or “economic” means to acquire Greenland, he was expressing—clumsily but not entirely incorrectly—what American strategists have believed for decades: Greenland, an island covering 2.1 million square kilometers whose geographic position controls the passage between the Atlantic and the Arctic, is the most valuable geostrategic location in the Northern Hemisphere. Thule Air Base—now Pituffik—has been under U.S. control since the 1950s. But Washington wants more. Much more.

The Greenlandic government has responded with a clarity that should have put an end to the debate. Its 2024–2033 foreign policy strategy, published under the title “Nothing About Us Without Us,” affirms Nuuk’s autonomy in decision-making vis-à-vis both Copenhagen and Washington. Greenland wants independence—but it wants to decide that for itself, on its own terms, without being used as a bargaining chip in a deal between major powers. Fifty-six thousand residents are watching the superpowers fight over their territory. The humiliation is well documented. Yet it is not documented enough.

Ottawa: Between Sovereign Ambitions and Insufficient Capabilities

Canada has the world’s second-longest Arctic coastline after Russia. It claims the Northwest Passage—that maritime corridor between its Arctic islands—as internal waters subject to its full sovereignty. Washington, on the other hand, considers it an international strait open to free navigation. This quiet dispute between allies, never formally resolved, reveals a structural tension: Canada has the Arctic ambitions of a great power but the capabilities of a middle power. Its Arctic fleet is inadequate. Its investments in northern infrastructure have been chronically underfunded for decades.

Canada’s foreign policy for the Arctic, reaffirmed in 2024, seeks to bridge this gap between ambition and reality. Ottawa has announced significant investments in northern defense infrastructure, Arctic surveillance systems, and the training of the Canadian Rangers—the Indigenous paramilitary forces that ensure a sovereign presence in regions where no other force can operate. And yet, Canada faces an existential dilemma: it depends on its alliance with the United States for its fundamental defense, but that very alliance sometimes threatens its Arctic sovereignty. When Trump talks about Greenland, Ottawa trembles—not because Canada is directly threatened, but because an ally that lays claim to allied territories ceases to be a predictable ally.

What Canada is experiencing in the Arctic is the permanent reality of any middle power in a world where great powers impose their rules. Ottawa has legal rights. It has legal arguments. It even has, to a certain extent, the historical legitimacy and Indigenous presence that make a territorial claim more than just a posturing. But it doesn’t have aircraft carriers. It doesn’t have icebreakers. And in real geopolitics—the kind played out at -40 degrees on the pack ice, not in UN conference rooms—what ultimately matters is the force one can project.

Norway: The NATO Flank That Looks Russia in the Eye

Norway shares a 198-kilometer land border with Russia. Tromsø, its main city in the Far North, is less than 400 kilometers from the Kola Peninsula—that hub of Russian nuclear power. No other NATO member lives so close to the military heart of Russia’s Arctic. For decades, Oslo has pursued a strategy that balances deterrence and dialogue—what the Norwegians themselves call the “carrot-and-stick” policy. As a founding member of NATO, Norway has nevertheless always maintained channels of communication with Moscow, refused the permanent deployment of foreign troops on its soil in peacetime, and sought to maintain a functional relationship with its Russian neighbor even at the height of the Cold War.

Since 2022, this policy of balance has taken a sharp turn toward a harder line. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has convinced Oslo that a neighbor that violates the fundamental rules of international law in Europe can no longer be treated as a trusted partner in the Arctic. Norway has stepped up its military exercises, authorized increased U.S. deployments on its soil, and bolstered its naval capabilities in the Far North. The Svalbard archipelago—a Norwegian territory with limited sovereignty where Russia legally maintains a civilian presence—has become a latent source of friction. The Russians maintain the town of Barentsburg there. They observe. They gather intelligence. And Oslo watches, gritting its teeth, aware that Svalbard is both a Norwegian sovereign right and a source of constant vulnerability.

Beijing is not a coastal state. Beijing doesn’t care.

China has no Arctic coastline. It has no territorial claims in the region. It is an observer to the Arctic Council—a status that gives it access to information but no voting rights. And yet, since 2018, Beijing has officially defined itself as a “quasi-Arctic nation” and has published its first Arctic policy, which claims an active role in the region’s governance and development. The wording is remarkably bold from a geographical standpoint. China is separated from the Arctic Circle by thousands of kilometers of Russian, American, and Canadian territory. But in Beijing’s view, geographical distance is not a limitation—it is an obstacle to be circumvented.

China’s interests in the Arctic are numerous and intertwined. First, shipping routes: the Northern Sea Route, if it became navigable year-round, would significantly reduce the distances between Chinese ports and European markets—and, above all, it would diversify China’s trade routes beyond the Strait of Malacca, that maritime chokepoint which the U.S. Navy could theoretically close in the event of a conflict. Next, resources: liquefied natural gas from the Russian Arctic—of which China has become a major buyer through the Yamal LNG project—represents a strategic diversification of energy sources. Finally, science: China has increased its polar expeditions, built research stations in Svalbard, and invested in clean icebreaker capabilities. Under the guise of science, it is establishing a presence.

What worries me about China’s Arctic strategy is not what it is doing, but what it is preparing for. China’s recent setbacks—mining projects that have fallen through, postponed airport ambitions—give the impression of a player that the Arctic states are keeping at arm’s length. But China is playing the long game—spanning decades, not election cycles. It is investing, gathering data, and building networks. And in twenty years, when Arctic routes are navigable nearly year-round, when seabed resources are technically accessible, China will want to be at the table—not as an observer, but as a key stakeholder. The question is not whether the Arctic states can prevent this. It is whether they will have the cohesion necessary to do so.

The Russian Paradox: A Forced Partnership, Structural Mistrust

The Russian-Chinese relationship in the Arctic perfectly illustrates what analysts call an alliance of convenience: two powers with converging interests on some issues and deeply divergent ones on others, forced to cooperate by their shared isolation from the West. China needs Russian Arctic gas. Russia needs Chinese capital and the technology that Western sanctions deny it. The Arctic LNG 2 project—the successor to Yamal—has been severely disrupted by U.S. sanctions, which have deterred some of the Chinese partners. The tensions are real.

And Russia does not want too strong a Chinese presence in what it considers its exclusive sphere of influence. Moscow allows Chinese investment in gas but resists any Chinese involvement in strategic decisions regarding the region. Vladimir Putin needs Xi Jinping. He does not trust him. This fragile balance—this alliance without affection—defines much of contemporary Arctic geopolitics and represents both an opportunity and a challenge for the West: to exploit the rifts between Russia and China without precipitating a consolidation that excessive pressure could provoke.

The Montego Bay Convention Faces Ambitions That Outgrow It

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), signed in Montego Bay in 1982, is the central legal framework for Arctic governance. It defines exclusive economic zones extending 200 nautical miles, rights to exploit the continental shelf, and rules for innocent passage through territorial waters. In a world where states respect international law, this framework would be sufficient. We do not live in such a world. Russia has submitted claims to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf covering a vast Arctic area—the Lomonosov Ridge, the underwater mountain range that runs across the Arctic Ocean—asserting that it is the natural extension of its continental shelf. If these claims were accepted, Russia would control a massive additional area comprising a substantial portion of the Arctic Ocean’s estimated hydrocarbon reserves.

Canada and Denmark have submitted competing claims over the same ridge. The Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf has been working on these cases for years. It has not yet reached a decision. In the meantime, Russia is acting as if its claims were already recognized. It is deploying military capabilities, installing surveillance buoys, and exercising de facto control over areas whose legal status is disputed. The tactic is well-honed: create enough significant facts on the ground to make any subsequent challenge seem unrealistic. We’ve already seen this method in the South China Sea. We’re seeing it now in the Arctic.

The fundamental problem with Arctic governance is that international law is a construct based on the consent of states to abide by it—and that consent is eroding. When Russia bypasses the Arctic Council, when the United States refuses to ratify UNCLOS, when China invents the concept of a “quasi-Arctic nation,” these are not merely a series of diplomatic incidents. They represent the gradual dismantling of the rules of the game. And when the rules disappear, brute force takes their place. In the Arctic, brute force means the ability to navigate in ice-covered waters—and today, that capability belongs overwhelmingly to Russia.

The Arctic Council: A Stalled Framework for Dialogue

The Arctic Council, founded in 1996, was one of the few multilateral forums where Russia sat, participated, and negotiated with Western democracies. Not on military issues—the Council was explicitly limited to environmental and sustainable development topics—but the very existence of this dialogue had a value that diplomats called an “architecture of trust.” In March 2022, the seven other members suspended their participation in Council meetings in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia, which held the rotating chairmanship, found itself presiding over a body that was boycotting it. Norway assumed the chairmanship in 2023. Dialogue on environmental issues has partially resumed, but trust—that fragile thing, slow to build, quick to destroy—is no longer there.

The question of Russia’s return to the Arctic Council is one of the most delicate issues in contemporary Nordic diplomacy. On the one hand, permanently excluding Russia from a forum that addresses Arctic environmental issues—climate change, pollution, and ecosystem conservation—means depriving the Council of a key player whose cooperation is essential to protecting the region. On the other hand, allowing Russia to resume its seat as if nothing had happened sends the signal that aggression against a sovereign state has no lasting consequences for the aggressor’s diplomatic status. There is no right answer. There are only wrong answers, distributed differently.

56,000 residents at the crossroads of all desires

Sigrid Davidsen, 34, an administrator in Nuuk, watches the international news with a mixture of pride and exhaustion. Ever since Donald Trump revived his talk in 2025 about the possible acquisition of Greenland, her island has become a symbol of everything the world is doing wrong in the Arctic. It is spoken of as a territory to be acquired, a strategic position to be secured, a resource to be exploited. Rarely is mention made of the 56,000 people who live there, the majority of whom are Inuit whose ancestors have inhabited this land for 4,500 years.

Greenland has been self-governing since 2009—it manages its own internal affairs but delegates defense and foreign policy to Denmark. The Pituffik base (formerly Thule), in the northwestern part of the island, has been under U.S. control since 1951. It is the northernmost point of U.S. military installations and an irreplaceable strategic surveillance hub for detecting any ballistic missile strikes coming from the north. This is what Trump really wants when he talks about Greenland: he wants to secure an existing strategic asset, and perhaps prevent a more independent Iceland, a Denmark under budgetary pressure, or worse, a China with deep pockets, from one day challenging U.S. access to this unique position.

What the major powers are doing in Greenland, they have done to every strategic territory throughout history—the Azores, Cyprus, Diego Garcia, the Faroe Islands. They treat them like squares on a chessboard, like geopolitical levers, like assets to be secured. And the people who live there—the Inuit of Greenland, the Chagossians expelled from Diego Garcia, the Cypriots divided by their geography—bear on their shoulders the weight of decisions made for them, about them, without them. “Nothing about us without us”: that is what the Greenlandic government states in its foreign policy strategy. It is a simple phrase. It should be carved in stone in every foreign ministry that pores over Arctic maps while forgetting that those maps have inhabitants.

Greenlandic independence: a matter of time and oil

Greenland will become independent. This is not a prediction—it is the island’s political trajectory over the past two decades, enshrined in its laws, its institutions, and its growing national pride. The question is not whether, but when—and under what economic conditions. Full autonomy from Denmark requires its own economic capacity. Greenland currently receives an annual subsidy from Copenhagen of more than 500 million euros—about one-third of its budget. Replacing this subsidy would require either the large-scale exploitation of the island’s natural resources (oil, rare earth elements, fisheries) or accepting economic dependence on another actor. And the only actor close enough, interested enough, and wealthy enough to replace Denmark in this role… is precisely what makes the situation so uncomfortable.

Greenland’s resources are considerable. The island is home to some of the world’s largest deposits of rare earth elements—minerals essential for green technologies and military equipment. It possesses oil reserves whose extraction was previously hampered by ice and made uncertain by global market prices, but which global warming is gradually making more accessible. Who will extract these resources? With what guarantees of sovereignty for the Greenlanders? At what environmental cost to an already fragile Arctic ecosystem? These are the real questions. They’re harder to tweet about than Trump’s territorial ambitions—and infinitely more important.

The Northeast Passage and the End of the Suez Monopoly

In 2023, approximately 36 million metric tons of cargo traveled along the Northern Sea Route, the corridor that runs along the Russian coast between Europe and Asia. This is a significant figure compared to virtually nothing twenty years ago. Yet it remains negligible compared to the 1.2 billion metric tons that pass through the Suez Canal each year. But the trajectory is clear, and it points to a future in which the Arctic will be a major trade route—with all that this implies in terms of power for those who control it.

Russia understood before anyone else that the Northern Sea Route is a key geostrategic asset. It has invested in port infrastructure, icebreakers, and maritime traffic guidance and control systems. It requires foreign ships using this route to employ Russian pilots and pay transit fees. The United States challenges this right, asserting that the Northern Sea Route is an international strait open to free navigation. The dispute is a legal one. It is also, at its core, a dispute over who controls the future of global trade in a region that will continue to open up as the ice retreats.

The Northern Sea Route is not yet a route—it is an Arctic promise that the ice still partially holds in check. Ships traveling it today do so with icebreaker escorts, during limited time windows, and with marine insurance policies that reflect the real risk of navigating waters that no one fully controls. But in ten years? In twenty years? When the summer sea ice has almost disappeared? The route will be there. The Russian infrastructure will be there. And the West will find itself either dependent on a maritime corridor controlled by Russia—or having built, at colossal cost, the alternative infrastructure that will allow it to avoid that dependence. The choice must be made now. Because in twenty years, it will be too late.

Infrastructure as a Weapon: Whoever Builds Wins

There is a simple rule in the geopolitics of hard-to-reach areas: whoever builds the infrastructure sets the rules. This is true for the undersea cables that carry the bulk of global internet traffic. It is true for the deep-water ports that China is financing through its “Belt and Road” initiative. It’s true for military bases that give their owners a permanent presence in strategic regions. And it’s true, above all, for Arctic shipping routes—those navigation corridors that exist only because someone built the icebreakers, the beacons, the weather systems, and the port infrastructure that make them navigable.

Russia has devoted decades and tens of billions of dollars to building this infrastructure. It didn’t do this out of a love for navigation—it did so because it understood, before anyone else, that the Arctic would be the next major geostrategic challenge. The West, caught up in its immediate crises, its election cycles, and its budget debates, looked the other way. The result is an infrastructure gap measured in decades of delay and billions of dollars in missed investments. Closing this gap is possible. It will take time. And in the meantime, Russia continues to build—even under sanctions, even with a weakened economy, even at the cost of sacrifices that its people are bearing firsthand.

What happens at the pole doesn’t stay at the pole

The Arctic is the planet’s thermometer. The speed at which it is warming—four times faster than the global average—is not just a local crisis. It is a wake-up call for the entire Earth’s climate system. The melting of permafrost—the permanently frozen soil that covers vast swaths of Siberia, Canada, and Alaska—releases methane, a greenhouse gas whose warming potential is dozens of times greater than that of CO2 in the short term. If permafrost thaw accelerates uncontrollably, it could trigger a climate feedback loop that even the most ambitious emissions reduction policies could not offset.

And yet—and this is the dizzying paradox of the Arctic—the warming that threatens the planet is also what opens up shipping routes, makes resources accessible, and transforms this region into a major geostrategic issue. The powers that covet the Arctic are coveting the very product of the climate catastrophe they are helping to create. Arctic oil, if extracted, will exacerbate the warming that made its extraction possible. Commercial Arctic shipping will emit carbon that will accelerate the melting that will open up even more shipping routes. There is no clean way out of this dilemma. There are interests at stake—and interests that rarely align with the planet’s long-term interests.

The Arctic issue always brings me back to the same fundamental thought: we are facing a crisis driven by the destruction of an ecosystem, and the dominant response is to fight over the ruins. While scientists document the collapse of the sea ice, while polar bears search for ice that no longer exists, while Inuit communities watch their millennia-old way of life erode beneath their feet—the major powers are positioning themselves to exploit what remains. This is not Realpolitik. It is organized predation. And we are all complicit, in one way or another, in this predation—because we continue to live in societies whose economic metabolism demands precisely the resources that the Arctic promises to deliver.

Indigenous Peoples: The First Victims, the Last to Be Consulted

The Inuit have lived in the Arctic for millennia. They have weathered ice ages, periods of warming, colonial invasions, forced religious conversions, and brutal relocations—displacements organized by Canadian and Danish governments that transported entire families to regions they did not know, under the pretext of development or national sovereignty. Aklaq Aqiaruq, a 47-year-old hunter from the community of Clyde River in Nunavut, Canada, puts it with a soberness that takes your breath away: “The ice is changing. We know it before the scientists do. We know it in our feet, when it no longer holds.” This millennia-old knowledge—Inuit traditional knowledge about ice conditions, safe routes, and the behavior of marine animals—is precisely what Arctic strategists ignore when they map out their trade routes and exclusive economic zones.

Indigenous Arctic peoples have secured increasing rights to their lands and resources in several countries—Nunavut in Canada, co-management rights in Alaska, and co-governance in Greenland. But these formal rights consistently clash with geopolitical reality: when national strategic interests come into play, Indigenous rights tend to become negotiable. Missile corridors, military bases, shipping routes—these decisions are made in capitals thousands of kilometers away from the communities they directly affect. Greenland has declared, “Nothing about us without us.” But in a world where major powers treat the Arctic like a chessboard, this magnificent phrase risks remaining an aspiration rather than a reality.

Finnish and Swedish Membership: The Biggest Strategic Shift Since 1991

Finland joined NATO in April 2023. Sweden joined in March 2024. In less than a year, the length of the land border between NATO and Russia has doubled. Finland brings 1,340 kilometers of shared border with Russia, an army of 280,000 trained reservists, a proven territorial defense doctrine, and experience from the Winter War that no other member of the Alliance possesses. Sweden brings a sophisticated defense industry—Saab, the Gotland-class submarines renowned as among the best in the world—and a geographic position that controls access to the Baltic Sea.

For Russia, this expansion is a strategic nightmare. Vladimir Putin had justified the invasion of Ukraine, in part, by citing fears of NATO expansion to its borders. The result of this invasion is precisely the expansion he wanted to prevent—but in an even more direct form, involving countries that had maintained a cautious neutrality for decades. Finland and Sweden did not join NATO out of ideology. They did so because Ukraine showed them what happens to states that do not benefit from the guarantee of Article 5. This is the most stinging lesson of the war in Ukraine for Arctic geopolitics: it has transformed the Atlantic Alliance into a quasi-circumpolar power.

There is a bitter irony in Putin’s situation in the Arctic. He invaded Ukraine to halt NATO’s expansion. He ended up with the most significant expansion since the end of the Cold War. He sought to reaffirm Russian power. He has instead brought about the most cohesive Western unity in decades. He thought he would capitalize on transatlantic division. Instead, he has achieved—at least temporarily—a reconciliation among Europeans with their own need to defend themselves. Putin’s calculations were wrong on almost every point. But the miscalculations of autocrats never come without a cost—it is the people who pay for them, his own people first and foremost.

NATO Must Learn to Fight in the Cold

The accession of Finland and Sweden has solved one geographical problem for NATO. It has revealed another: most Alliance members do not know how to fight in the Arctic. Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Turkish soldiers—they are trained for Mediterranean or Anatolian environments. The equipment of many allied armies is not suited for extreme temperatures. Vehicles break down. Communication systems malfunction. Lubricants freeze. Soldiers who have never experienced temperatures below -30 degrees make basic survival mistakes.

NATO has recognized this problem and has begun to address it. The “Cold Response” exercises in Norway now bring together thousands of allied soldiers to train in Arctic conditions. Winter combat doctrines are being developed. Investments in appropriate equipment are being made. But training an army to fight in extreme environments takes years. Equipping a 32-member alliance for an Arctic theater takes decades. Russia, on the other hand, has generations of experience with Arctic climates. The gap is not just material—it is cultural and doctrinal, deeply rooted in the way Russian and Nordic soldiers view warfare in extreme cold as a normal part of their environment.

When the Rules of the Game Disappear

Arctic governance is based on a fundamental paradox: the region requires cooperation among powers that are otherwise in intense competition, or even in open conflict. Climate change, pollution, ecosystem protection, and maritime security—these issues know no national borders. An oil spill in Russian waters can contaminate the Norwegian coast. The melting of Russian sea ice affects the wind patterns that determine weather conditions in Europe. The decline of Arctic fish populations impacts Canadian fishermen just as much as Icelandic fishermen.

But how can we cooperate with a Russia that has invaded a neighboring country? How can we maintain a scientific dialogue with a state that is transforming its Arctic research stations into military observation posts? How can we discuss environmental sustainability with governments whose economic strategy relies on the extraction of hydrocarbons that global warming is making accessible in the first place? There are no easy answers to these questions. There are only painful compromises between conflicting imperatives. And in the meantime, the Arctic continues to warm, the major powers continue to stake their claims, and the 4 million inhabitants of the circumpolar region—half of whom are Indigenous peoples—live in what geopolitical analysts call a zone of growing tensions, and what its inhabitants call, quite simply, their home.

Thierry Garcin, in his work on the fragmentation of the world, uses this concept to describe an international system where common rules are crumbling, where actors pursue their interests without regard for the collective framework, and where each region becomes a battleground for powers that no longer share a common language. The Arctic is the perfect illustration of this fragmentation. It was one of the last spaces of genuine multilateral cooperation. The war in Ukraine has shattered this illusion. What remains is raw competition, increasing militarization, and climate change, which continues its course regardless of human decisions. I do not know if we will have the wisdom to rebuild Arctic governance worthy of the name. I do know that without it, the Arctic will become what it has never been in its entire history: a theater of war.

The Closing Window: Perhaps Ten Years Remain

Experts in international law and Arctic diplomacy agree on one point: there remains a window—a narrow one, and one that is shrinking—to establish stable rules of the game before competition reaches a point of no return. This window may be ten years. Perhaps less. In ten years, Arctic shipping routes will be more navigable. In ten years, cold-water extraction technologies will have advanced. In ten years, states will have invested such vast sums in their Arctic infrastructure and capabilities that any agreement involving a retreat from their positions will be politically impossible to sell to their publics.

What needs to be built now—and what no one is really building—is a conflict management framework specifically for the Arctic. Not to replace NATO or to whitewash Russian crimes, but to maintain channels of communication that prevent local incidents—an icebreaker entering disputed waters, a military aircraft violating airspace, a submarine getting too close to undersea energy infrastructure—from escalating into a direct confrontation between nuclear powers. The Arctic is one of the few places in the world where the United States and Russia operate in such close physical and military proximity that an accident could trigger a crisis. And accidents—in extreme environments, under operational pressure, with equipment subjected to conditions found nowhere else—do happen.

The Arctic is warming. Ambitions are hardening. And the world is looking the other way.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist