The race for the Arctic

The 1951 defence agreement between Denmark and the US is likely to be the first casualty of any hostile American takeover, since article 2 of that agreement recognises explicit Danish sovereignty over Greenland.

Framing this dispute as an issue of security ignores the fact that for the past 70 years, the US military has largely had a free hand in how it uses its military facilities in the northwest of Greenland to conduct strategic space and hemispheric defence, without interference from Copenhagen.

But America’s 2025 national security strategy, released last November, speaks of establishing US dominance in the western hemisphere, including Greenland. It shifts attention away from great power competition to a world shaped decisively by the interests and wishes of “larger, richer and stronger nations”.

If spheres of influence and domination are back in vogue, then smaller economies including Denmark and even Canada come under direct threat. Whether faced with dismemberment or incorporation into the US, the prospects are deeply concerning.

But the current dramas affecting the Arctic region cannot be blamed entirely on Trump. Vladimir Putin has played his part too. Approaching the fourth anniversary of his country’s invasion of Ukraine, it is not hard to discern how a costly conflict in one part of Europe has had direct implications for other northern European territories.

Soon after Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the intergovernmental Arctic Council was suspended as seven of the eight Arctic states (Canada, Denmark-Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the US) decided they could no longer work with the largest Arctic state, Russia.

The Arctic Council was widely regarded as the centrepiece of what a circumpolar Arctic could achieve, working hard to construct key issues such as environmental protection, sustainable development and scientific collaboration. While the Arctic states could freely diverge from one another on non-Arctic matters, there was a superstructure of working groups and taskforces that generated notable scientific and technical reports, alongside the Arctic Economic Council.

Ukraine shattered all of that. Finland joined Nato in 2023 followed by Sweden in 2024. Russia pivoted towards China and India, a shift that started after the first round of sanctions following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The Arctic has fragmented into Russo-Asian and Euro-American segments. Western scientists are no longer able to access and work with Russian scientists, and circumpolar collaboration has been suspended. Though some bilateral cooperation remains between countries such as Norway and Russia over areas of mutual interest, including managed fisheries in the Barents Sea and search and rescue, high-level political engagement is now impossible.

Russia is instead likely to keep exploring ways of engaging with its BRICS plus group of partners including China, India, the UAE and Saudi Arabia — both through direct economic trade, and in scientific projects in Svalbard and the vast Russian north.

Even if there is a peace settlement involving Ukraine, a return to normality seems impossible given the gravity of Russian operations in areas such as critical infrastructure sabotage, shadow fleet operations, and disinformation. Russia is engaged in risky and provocative behaviour, designed to be both disorientating and costly to its recipients.

It is no exaggeration to say that Europe’s Arctic states — and their close allies including the UK, Estonia and Poland — are now part of an arc of crisis that stretches from Svalbard and the High North of Europe to the Baltic Sea region and Ukraine. The long-held idea of the Arctic being a zone of peace and cooperation is an illusion.

The US president wants Greenland and expects to get it. There might be a strong element of ego-politics rather than geopolitics to this quest. Making America great again appears (in Trump’s eyes) to involve making it larger, and grabbing resources is part and parcel of that ambition.

Greenland’s resource potential has been repeatedly cited, as has the enhanced shipping activity of China and Russia, which has elevated concerns that US national security might be jeopardised. This year could see a slew of annexation and territorial swaps. For example, Trump takes Greenland while Putin takes the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. After all, neither leader is terribly invested in international treaties and organisations.

A cynical deal could also be done to allow Putin to have his way with Ukraine. The ground would thus be prepared for a new world order in which Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Trump all have their spheres of domination, not just influence.

A smaller group of regional superpowers might also be granted their own spheres, with Middle East-based countries looming large in that accommodation alongside the other global superpower, India. The idea might be that a new group of ten-or-so countries would create their new standard operating procedures. Venezuela was just the start, in other words.

What all of this would mean for the Arctic region, if it came to pass, is multifaceted. But above all, European Arctic states would no longer have any security guarantees from the US.

Whatever happens, the 1951 defence agreement is a cold war relic that did not protect Denmark from great power overreach, illustrated by the fact that the US stationed nuclear-armed bombers in Greenland in the late 1950s without bothering to consult Copenhagen.

NATO unity has now been jeopardised, and Norway and the UK face some difficult choices. Norway needs the US (and Russia) to respect its sovereignty over Svalbard, and it needs the US not to abandon NATO’s article 5 commitment to collective defence. Meanwhile, as the UK and Norway work closely on North Atlantic anti-submarine defence, they need to focus on deterring Russia, rather than having to deter a hostile US as well.

American dominance and Russian belligerence are clearly taking their toll at a time when the warming of the Arctic is having increasingly adverse effects on local and regional ecologies, and Indigenous and other communities in the far north. The Arctic is melting, thawing and becoming more flammable — and geopolitical fuel is now being added to the fire.