Battleground Arctic: Militarization in the High North
Once a place of peaceful cooperation, Russia and NATO are moving to militarize the Arctic like never before.
Arctic Tough 1st Sgt. Jonathan M. Emmett leads U.S. Army Alaska Aviation Task Force Soldiers assigned to Headquarters Company, 1-52 Aviation Regiment, at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. Image source
Between March 3–14, over 20,000 soldiers from 13 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states took part in the Nordic Response exercise. Held in the frigid northern reaches of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, the exercise included more than 160 fighter aircraft and ships in a simulated response to an assault on NATO troops in the Arctic Circle. Nordic Response was just one portion of NATO’s broader Steadfast Defender exercise, which runs between January and May and is the largest exercise of its kind since the Cold War. Russia’s deputy foreign minister called the exercises “provocative,” saying they are “creating additional risks in northern Europe.”
Over the past decade, NATO members have taken part in an increased number of drills in the Arctic region. Moreover, every country with arctic territories – including seven NATO members and Russia – has systematically upgraded its cold-weather combat capabilities while increasing its military presence in the far north. Although the Arctic was once primarily a place of great power cooperation – even during the Cold War – it is now emerging as a potential theater of conflict. With climate change facilitating vast efforts to tap the region’s largely untapped commercial potential, the threats to global security in this region have never been greater.
NATO troops participating in Nordic Response 2024. Image source
NATO-Russia competition
The Arctic is home to many overlapping territorial claims between the states that comprise it. In 2023, the U.S. claimed one million square kilometers of Arctic seabed in the Beaufort Sea, resulting in a dispute with fellow NATO member Canada. This contested area is part of the Amerasian Basin, which is estimated to contain some 9,723 million barrels of oil and over 56,000 billion cubic feet of natural gas. The Lomonosov Ridge – a 1,700-kilometer-long underwater mountain range – is even more heavily contested as it is claimed by NATO members Canada and Denmark as well as Russia. Estimates claim that as much as 30 percent of unexplored global natural gas reserves and 15 percent of unexplored oil reserves lay beneath arctic waters, including those of the largely unexplored Lomonosov Ridge.
For decades, the Arctic remained conflict-free and was largely an area of cooperation between the West and Moscow despite being home to numerous contested territorial claims. However, this status quo has been upended by growing competition between Russia and NATO, which recently expanded to include the two remaining arctic states of Finland and Sweden in 2023 and 2024, respectively. With the entirety of the Arctic now comprised of these competing powers, the regional stage is set for an increasingly adversarial environment.
In 2013, Russia designated the Arctic a strategic priority and later adopted the Arctic Strategy 2020, which seeks to enhance the region’s military and economic development between 2020 and 2035. This strategy comes in response to an increasingly ice-free Arctic, which Moscow sees as an opportunity in terms of natural resources and potential trade routes, as well as a possible vulnerability to its territorial claims there. Over the past decade, Russia has reactivated and expanded many of its arctic military bases while deploying new missile systems there, enlarging its nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet, and forming military brigades specifically devoted to the region. Russia’s Northern Fleet, which oversees the Arctic, currently hosts a large portion of its retaliatory nuclear strike capability. Norwegian intelligence reports warn that Russia may be carrying nuclear weapons aboard some of its Northern Fleet vessels for the first time since the 1990s.
NATO members are also taking steps to militarize the Arctic. In 2022, Washington released its 10-year Arctic Strategy, which calls for enhanced military capabilities to “deter aggression in the Arctic, especially from Russia.” Prior to this, the U.S. Navy recommissioned its second fleet to cover the Arctic and the North Atlantic and reinstated its military presence in Iceland for the first time since 2006. On March 8, the United Kingdom – which has no arctic territorial claims but is a NATO member – announced it would establish Camp Viking in Northern Norway: the base will house members of the U.K.’s Littoral Response Group, a special unit designed to respond to emerging crises in the European Theater. Other NATO member states, including Canada, Finland, and Sweden, have all announced plans to increase their military presence in their arctic territories, using troops from their own militaries or those of other alliance members.
Despite NATO’s latest efforts, Russia maintains a much greater military presence in the Arctic, with its total number of military bases in the region outnumbering those of NATO by a third. In a recent article in Foreign Policy titled “NATO is Unprepared for Russia’s Arctic Threats,” Liselotte Odgaard notes Russia’s military capabilities in the Arctic currently outweigh those of NATO. She specifically points to NATO’s total lack of ice-strengthened ships with anti-aircraft and anti-submarine capabilities and that many arctic member states, including the U.S., tend to prioritize other potential theaters of conflict, such as the Baltic Sea and the Indo-Pacific. Odgaard also notes that Russian nuclear submarines – which can strike North American targets – are capable of traversing much of the Arctic undetected. In 2021, three Russian nuclear submarines carrying 48 ballistic missiles surfaced near the North Pole. That year, a pair of Russian MiG-31 fighter jets flew over the North Pole and refueled in-air, demonstrating some of the Russian military’s far-north capabilities.
NATO’s latest expansion puts the Arctic at the center of great power competition between NATO and Russia. Image source
Chinese interests in the High North
Despite having no legitimate claim to Arctic territories, China is cooperating with Russia on Arctic matters. In 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed the deepening of their Arctic partnership, including the development of a northern sea route. Last August, a large number of Chinese and Russian vessels conducted a joint naval patrol near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, with the U.S. dispatching four destroyers to monitor the situation in response. On August 25, Russia’s Coast Guard agreed to give China greater access to the Arctic, including more joint coastal operations. “We have thought that Russia is generally skeptical about letting China get too close in the Arctic, but the Ukraine war might have changed those calculations,” said Arctic security expert Andreas Østhagen in response to the agreement.
In 2018, China launched its official Arctic policy with the announcement of its Polar Silk Road, which encourages Chinese companies to invest in infrastructure projects in the region. The move is widely believed to be an effort by Beijing to tap into the Arctic’s vast resource, geo-strategic, and commercial benefits. However, China and Russia have yet to ink an Arctic treaty, indicating a lack of official consensus on regional military cooperation. Moreover, the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline – which would carry natural gas from the Russian Arctic to China – was recently delayed, and the two sides have yet to agree on key details of the project. In this way, a lack of consensus on multiple dimensions will likely limit Sino-Russian cooperation on Arctic security moving forward.
Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR) cuts the travel distance between Europe and East Asia by more than half. Image source
Strategic value of Arctic waters
Climate change is having an outsized impact on the Arctic region, with regional temperatures rising between two and four times faster than the global average. The resulting ice melt has given way to potential resource extraction in the vast and largely unexplored region. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arctic contains over 412 billion barrels of extractable oil and natural gas within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of many Arctic states or the extended limits of this boundary.
The melting of ice is also making way for new potential shipping routes, including Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR), through which ships carried a record 2.1 million tons of cargo in 2023. The route reduces the travel distance between Northern Europe and East Asia by 60% and is 40% shorter than current routes through the Suez Canal. However, ships transiting the NSR require Russian permission to do so. Furthermore, although Russia is running a pilot program to test year-round transiting, the route remains closed for much of the year due to heavy ice. Regardless, with ice levels shrinking by the year, the NSR will likely become an increasingly valuable route for Russian energy exports to the import-reliant East Asian markets.
Many are now looking to the Arctic as a possible source of sea routes to circumvent the increasingly problematic Suez and Panama Canals. Studies show that additional sea routes outside Russian territory could emerge in the coming years. Such routes include Canada’s Northwest Passage, which briefly became ice-free for the first time in the summer of 2007.
Explorers have tried to navigate Canada’s Northwest Passage for over 500 years. Melting ice caused it to open to ships for the first time in the summer of 2007. Image source
Conclusion
Competition between NATO and Russia in the Arctic, including over the vast commercial potential of its increasingly ice-free waters, will likely continue to intensify in the coming years. Although Russia currently holds several strategic advantages, an increasingly focused and expansive NATO combined with Moscow’s ongoing preoccupation with Ukraine could level the playing field in the coming years. As militarization continues to ramp up, so too does the chance of miscalculation and misunderstanding from both sides. The resulting risk of conflict poses a long-term threat to regional and global security.
The cold war is heating up….
I hope that you know that you can count on Canada, naw I was just pulling your leg, joking with you