Confronted with the changing geopolitical environment, NATO acquired two major Arctic players with the addition of Finland and Sweden to the previous 30 nations that formed the Alliance, as well as with the consequences of the climatic changing, how much the Arctic sea-lanes will still be problematic due to ice, the northernmost area of planet Earth is more and more under scrutiny by political and military decision makers
In early December 2024 the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) published a report titled “Up North: confronting Arctic insecurity implications for the United States and NATO.” The 46 pages study has been written by Mathieu Boulègue. a Non-resident Senior Fellow with the CEPA Transatlantic Defense and Security Programme, together with some of his colleagues, Minna Ålander, Charlotta Collén, Edward Lucas, Catherine Sendak, the Director of the Transatlantic Defense and Security programme, and Krista Viksnins.
One of the question marks in that study was the attitude of the Trump administration towards Arctic issues. In early January 2025 the then President-elect made a clear statement on that topic, declaring that he would use only economic force to annex Canada as the 51st State, while he might even use military force to make Greenland a US territory.
“We need Greenland for national security purposes,” he stated. In 1814 Greenland came under the Danish crown, following the split between Norway and Denmark, and was fully integrated in the Danish state in 1953, becoming an autonomous territory of Denmark. Greenland is the world’s largest island and is strategically located in the Arctic Ocean, which led to an increasing interest from Russia and China in recent years, something that worries the new US Administration considering the potential evolution of the Arctic zone. On January 8th, 2025, the New York Post published an article headlined “The Donroe Doctrine”, putting together Donald Trump and James Monroe, the fifth US President, who outlined the US interests in the Western hemisphere in its 1823 State of the Union address.
What will the new US Administration do remains to be seen, even after the declarations by the elected-President. Hereafter a summary of the CEPA document, which was of course drawn up before the Trump statement on Canada and Greenland and his phone call to Mrs. Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark, the latter fully disagreeing with the ideas of the 47th President of the United States of America, stating that Greenland is “not for sale” while opening to an increase of the US military footprint on the Arctic Island.
The CEPA document underlines that the exceptionalism of the Arctic, which in the past has always been an area of low tension [1], may have passed, even though it remains relatively stable. The region has become more accessible due to climate change, which also means a greater human presence that inherently means a potential increase of tension and accidents that might lead to miscalculations and escalation, the latter due to Russian aggressiveness and increased Chinese presence.
In the past, the circumpolar area saw three main actors, NATO, with US, Canada and Norway, Russia, and two neutral states, Sweden, and Finland. Following the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the two neutral states joined NATO, thus now only two players have direct access to the polar circle, NATO, and Russia.
Russia has shown its interest towards the Arctic for some time; at the “Army 2018” exhibition in Moscow a part of the static display was dedicated to Russian Army equipment earmarked for the far north, duly painted in white camouflage. A clear indication of the importance of that region for the Moscow regime.
In the Cold War era NATO had a rapid reaction force earmarked for reinforcing the sides of the Alliance, north-Norway and Turkey, the ACE Mobile Force, which Brigade-size land component was made of nearly all the then 16 member states, showing their flags alongside that of the Alliance as a deterrence towards a possible aggression. Following the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact and the ease of tension between the West and the East, in 2002 the AMF was disbanded. Later on, with the tension rising again, new reaction forces were formed within the Alliance, although none specifically earmarked to that region.
The US, as well as NATO, started refocusing their strategy on the region. In June 2021, on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, the US Department of Defense created the “Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies”; in June 2024 the US DoD published its “2024 Arctic Strategy”; and on September 24, 2024, Dr. Mike Sfraga was confirmed by the US Senate as the first ever U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Arctic Affairs. What will happen after January 20th, 2025, remains to be seen.
One of the key issues is the transit through the Arctic Ocean. Two main routes are currently used, the Northwest Passage, which runs mostly along the Canadian coast, and the Northern Sea Route, which runs along the Russian territory, both linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic Ocean.
While in the past the Arctic pack prevented navigation for most of the year, the climate change rendered those sea lanes more navigable along the year. That said, ice breakers are still needed to ensure freedom of movement, the CEPA document underlining how Russia and China have a greater number of such ships compared to the United States and its NATO allies. This led to the US decision to build new ice breakers that will be operated by the Coast Guard. In July 2024 the United States, Canada and Finland formed the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, also known as ICE Pact, a partnership effort to bolster shipbuilding capabilities in all three nations, and mostly in Canada and Finland, to reduce the gap with the two major competitors.
Resilience and the capacity to regenerate forces is one of the lessons coming from Ukraine, and this does not apply only to the Arctic issue but to the overall scenario. Scandinavian countries have relatively small forces and following the end of the Cold War some of them abandoned conscription and eased on civil defence issues. “Sweden divested on those elements in the past, but is now reinvesting, the same being done by Finland,” Lt.Gen. Lance Landrum (USAF ret.), a Non-resident Senior Fellow at CEPA, highlighted. An expert in NATO matters, he also underlined that, “as far as NATO planning goes, this took into account the accession of Sweden and Finland and came out recently with the approved new family of plans. It is a whole new set of coherent operational plans that spans from peace time to crisis and conflict in a regional sense and a domain sense across the entire Euro-Atlantic area,” obviously including the Arctic region. It is a five-step process, he explained, and after five years step three has been reached, having defined the political guidance, the minimum capability requirements, and in 2024 having levied the capability targets onto the nations. Capability road maps and then, finally, an assessment of the NATO defence planning process, will conclude this work.
According to the author of the CEPA report, the Arctic is a weak spot for what concerns infrastructures. “In Alaska, for instance, we know that Russia has both the capabilities and the military structures in place to disrupt critical underwater infrastructure and, more specifically, data cables. The Arctic is vulnerable because of the lack of redundancy in terms of number of cables available,” he said. The lack of spatial diversity in the cables at the bottom of the ocean, these being generally closer to each other because of structural reasons on the seabed, makes the Arctic a choke point.
Canada and the USA are looking at improving their infrastructures, civil and military, in the north and in Alaska, modernising North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) capacity. A similar path should be solved by the three Scandinavian countries, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, now reunited under the NATO umbrella, as they share the North Cape area, Norway and Finland sharing the border with Russia. The latter having some key assets in that area; “the presence of Russia’s main second-strike nuclear assets on the Kola Peninsula, only a few 100 miles away from the Finnish border, is a significant factor here,” Minna Ålander underlined, adding that, “this makes it an important base for Russia’s global power projection.” And this increases the risk of potential conflict in the region because it is so important for Russia, as Moscow is likely in the future to emphasize nuclear deterrence and nuclear assets.
The Arctic can be considered a grey zone for continued hybrid pressure from Russia. “We have already seen it with some of the manoeuvring on the seabed and contesting of borders and land areas, therefore I think the adversary looks for opportunities to test the willingness of nations, to test the coherence and solidarity of the Alliance, to see how the Alliance will react,” Lance Landrum stated.
“From a military security perspective, there is no intention whatsoever from Russia nor the Alliance, to start a conflict in the Arctic, or about the Arctic; what may happen is potential insecurity through the Arctic, the threats passing through the region, whether it is low intensity warfare operations conducted by Russia, whether it is governance enrolled by China with a willingness to change and alter the governance dynamics,” Mathieu Boulègue said. Therefore, there is not going to be a World War Three about the Arctic.
“A broader western political strategy could include a drum beat of regular presence, a demonstration of capability, exercising and training to show that the nations and the Alliance are together, ready to be aware of what is going on and ready to respond, in order to quickly move forces and then the logistics and sustainment,” Lt.Gen. Landrum underlined.
A Finnish national, Minna Ålander warned about the skills and training needed to allow soldiers to be capable to survive and fight in the Arctic. Not all NATO allies have the capabilities that are needed and that work in the arctic environment and climate. This has very specific requirements on simple things, such as battery life when it is very cold,” she said. Sustainment and basing are incredibly important, as it is impossible to do expeditionary operations with lights troops without the appropriate basing in the in the region.
In the past, when the AMF[L] was there, a number of nations, among which Germany, Italy and the UK, beside Norway, the US and Canada, were providing contingents on the northern flank. This has been lost during the “Dividend of Peace” era, but in recent times training in cold weather has been reestablished. From January to May last year NATO carried out “Steadfast Defender 2024” that was the largest military exercise since the Cold War and which first part focused on securing the Atlantic up to the Arctic. Part of the wider exercise, the arctic event was “Nordic Response 2024” which saw in March over 20,000 soldiers from 13 nations operating in north-Norway. These included Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Some of them are clearly already focused on cold weather training, some other are less used to this type of scenario.
We hope this article will be a good lead-in story to some other that will follow soon on winter warfare, as both France and Italy are about to stage each one a conference on that subject, EDR On-Line looking forward to report on those topics in the coming weeks.
Photos courtesy US NavSpecWarfare, SWmaps-com, CEPA, P. Valpolini, US DoD, P.H. Furian, US Coast Guard, US Navy, Canadian DoD, NATO
[1] On September 19, 1996, in Ottawa, the Arctic Council was established as a high-level intergovernmental forum to enhance cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic States with the active involvement of Arctic Indigenous Peoples and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues. It included Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden, and the United States.