Even while being hammered by rapid climate change, the Arctic has long managed to keep its balance.
“For decades the Arctic was a rare, low-tension region where international cooperation prevailed,” Canada’s Governor General, Mary Simon, said at the Arctic Frontiers conference held at the start of February in Tromsø, Norway.
This “Arctic exceptionalism,” as it came to be known, manifested in cooperation over resources and borders, and in smaller ways too. In the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, for example, just 15 minutes by car from Russia, street signs are still written in both the native language and Russian. But as recent threats by President Donald Trump against Greenland suggest, Arctic exceptionalism is eroding.
“We are at a decisive moment in history,” Simon warned high-ranking government officials, policy and military analysts, and scientists gathered at the conference on Feb. 3. Just two weeks later, those words were to receive an exclamation point in the form of a live-fire naval artillery exercise announced by the Russians and scheduled to occur as close as about 30 miles from Kirkenes.
Unsettling events like these are taking place in the context of climate warming that’s occurring at nearly four times the rate of the global average, and resulting long-term shriveling of the Arctic’s floating lid of sea ice. These shifts have, in turn, set off a scramble to exploit the region’s increasingly accessible resources. Now, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing Ukraine aggression, and more recently with Trump’s seeming willingness to abandon allies, cooperation has turned to tension—and the risks of outright Arctic military conflict are rising.
“The Arctic is hot,” Espen Barth Eide, the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, told a packed ballroom at the Arctic Frontiers conference. It’s literally hot because of rapid warming, he said, and it’s figuratively “very hot in the international security landscape.”
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, agreed. “It is a period of high stress for the High North,” she said, noting that even as Russia has been fighting in Ukraine, it has reopened and modernized Soviet-era military bases in the Arctic region.
On Feb. 5, the final day of the conference, this sober reality snapped even more clearly into focus with the expiration of the last remaining nuclear arms agreement between Russia and the United States. No longer restrained by the New START treaty, they could now choose to resume the nuclear arms race. Already, the U.S. Navy is considering adding hundreds of nuclear warheads to its Ohio-class submarines. Moscow is unlikely to stand pat.
The Arctic is implicated in nuclear peril because Russia houses one of the world’s greatest concentrations of nuclear weapons there, on the Kola Peninsula bordering Norway. Also based there are submarines in Russia’s Northern Fleet that can carry dozens of nuclear warheads each while hiding beneath sea ice.
Arctic waters are also where Russia has been testing “mad scientist weapons you only used to read about in comics,” said Thomas Nilsen, an Arctic security expert and editor of the Barents Observer newspaper. Speaking at the Arctic Frontiers conference, he noted that these include weapons like the nuclear-powered, nuclear-tipped Poseidon: a speedy, deep-running, long-range torpedo that could theoretically decimate a coastal city.
“The Arctic is the most dangerous place on Earth,” warns Lars Saunes, former chief of the Royal Norwegian Navy, and now at the U.S. Naval War College.
While Trump did back down on using force in Greenland, U.S. allies remain fearful. At the same time, the United States continues to participate with those allies in an Arctic military buildup, aimed at maintaining the peace through deterrence.
On Feb. 11, NATO launched “Arctic Sentry,” combining the alliance’s Arctic activities under one military command based at U.S. NATO headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. A day prior, Britain announced it would double its number of troops training in Norway to 2,000. Then came news that Britain would send an aircraft carrier strike group to the North Atlantic and High North, to operate alongside U.S. and other NATO allies.
On March 9, troops from 14 NATO nations are scheduled to begin a massive military training exercise called “Cold Response 2026,” involving 25,000 soldiers operating on land and at sea in northern Norway. It will be led by a joint Norwegian-U.S. command.
While intended to maintain the peace, these activities nonetheless highlight that risks of confrontation are rising as many nations eye the region’s oil, natural gas, rare earth and strategic elements, as well as its geostrategic advantages. Evidence of this interest is seen in the membership of 13 non-Arctic nations, including the city-state of Singapore, as observers in the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum. None are focused more on the region than China, which has conducted joint military operations with the Russian navy.
Of the eight countries with Arctic territory, Russia dominates, with a coastline accounting for 53% of Arctic Ocean shores. Of the Arctic’s nearly 4 million residents, 2.5 million live in Russia. And the nation’s economy depends on resources extracted there, especially oil and gas. Further fossil fuel development is high on Moscow’s strategic agenda.
Neighboring Norway markets itself as a secure supplier of petroleum and natural gas to European nations previously dependent on Russia. And it has been aggressively exploiting its Arctic reserves. Last March, for example, the Norwegian state-owned petroleum company began pumping at a new site in the Barents Sea more than 125 miles from the nation’s northernmost mainland point. These and similar activities have prompted protest over climate and social impacts. But they also promise to further swell Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, currently valued at more than $2 trillion, the world’s richest.
The expansion of oil drilling has been made possible by the shrinking of sea ice, which is occurring fastest in the Barents Sea. Productive fishing grounds are located there too, and boats have been pursuing stocks farther and farther north. All of this is making Arctic waters busier.
While there are no active conflicts in the region right now—and Russia’s damaged military remains tied down in Ukraine—some experts fear the growing activity is raising risks for a minor incident escalating into armed conflict. At the Arctic Frontiers conference, Robert Habeck, Germany’s former Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate, proposed this hypothetical scenario:
“Maybe there’s a Russian fishing trawler boarded by the Norwegian coast guard, and maybe the Russian captain is drunk and pushes one of the Norwegians overboard,” posits Habeck, now a senior analyst at the Danish Institute for International Studies. After the Norwegians arrest the Russian crew and impound the vessel, Habeck continues, it’s possible Putin could be very tempted to escalate, thinking this could reinvigorate flagging patriotic support among Russians.
Saunes sees things differently: “The risk for unintended escalation in the Arctic is possible,” he says, “but very low.” That’s because Putin is focused on Ukraine, and Norway is skilled in de-escalating tense standoffs.
Even so, “climate change and increased access to the Arctic Ocean will create a strategic security dilemma between NATO and Russia, as well as the United States and China,” Saunes says. He also notes that Russia’s great power status is secured only by its nuclear weapons. Thus, should Moscow ever perceive an imminent threat to its strategic forces on the Kola Peninsula, it may well use conventional weapons to take out NATO systems.
While Trump’s Greenland threat seemed to come out of the blue, it actually emerged from this worrying geostrategic context—as well as the background reality of continuing climate changes he has derided as a hoax.
Of course, they are anything but, as the warmest January on record in Greenland just showed. At the same time, valuable resources there, and elsewhere in the Arctic, are beckoning ever more seductively.
With all that, Saunes warns, “the faultline between Russia and NATO will become more and more visible.”
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