Editorial Note: This addendum updates the article “The Arctic is the next frontier of the new cold war,” published in Geopolitical Economy Report on February 28, 2023, in the context of President Donald Trump’s recent efforts to annex Greenland, the expansion of NATO, and China’s continued commercial interests in the area. The original article examines how, though once a zone of cooperative international scientific research, the Arctic has rapidly transformed into a militarized theater of great power competition.
This article was first published by the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective.
The Arctic has increasingly dominated headlines. Most dramatically, President Trump announced his intention to annex Greenland to the United States. By imagining the Western Hemisphere to extend northward, Trump renders Greenland subject to his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the latest expression of U.S. imperial ambition in the region, with its claims on resources and regional domination.
This imperial logic, which has historically treated the Western Hemisphere as a U.S. sphere of influence, now reaches into the Arctic. As Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, this move violates NATO’s commitment to its allies’ territorial integrity. Two factors drive this aggressive posture: Greenland’s mineral wealth and its strategic position as a chokepoint for maritime commercial activity, particularly that of China.
This brings us to the current state of the Cold War in the Arctic and another significant development: the recent entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO. Their accession completes the northern encirclement of Russia, joining Norway, Denmark, Iceland, the United States, and Canada.
Together with NATO’s presence on Russia’s western flank—except for Ukraine, which NATO fights to include—Russia is now nearly completely encircled. With Russia’s current alignment with China, the fronts are solidifying. And other countries are rushing northward to take sides.
Until fairly recently, foreign presence in the Arctic focused primarily on research—studies of climate change, local species, and even indigenous peoples. The unique Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920 made such work possible on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Following contested ownership claims with Denmark and Russia, the treaty made special provision for international activity on the islands. Commerce was permitted, but “warlike purposes” were explicitly excluded.
Originally there were 14 signatories, including the Soviet Union, Germany, and China. Today there are forty-five, including Japan and South Korea, who—like China—define themselves as “near-Arctic states,” a term contested only when China deploys it. The argument for near-Arctic status holds that climate change at the North Pole affects global climate, especially for maritime powers subject to shifting ocean currents, justifying their claim to a policy voice in the region.
Inevitably, this has produced contesting alignments in Arctic politics between Norway as sovereign over Svalbard and the treaty’s allowance of foreign presence, notably that of neighboring Russia. Legal interpretations of the treaty are intensely debated. Of the forty-five signatories, the following maintain permanent research centers: China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Poland and Russia also conduct significant long-term research.
Japan developed an Arctic Policy in 2015 to explore commercial use of the Northern Sea Route, build networks with local businesses, develop oil resources, and establish itself as a diplomatic player in the region—positioning itself in alignment with Norway.
India established a research station on Svalbard in 2008 and formalized an Arctic Policy in 2022. In cooperation with Russia, India supports infrastructure development along the Northern Sea Route to facilitate imports of gas and critical minerals. It maintains a foothold in Svalbard and retains strategic ambiguity between Russia and Norway, while keeping a wary eye on its competitor, China.
A US-led international military exercise, Ice Exercise (ICEX), at Camp Sargo in the Arctic Circle, in 2016 (Photo credit: US Navy)
South Korea signed the treaty in 2012 and published a new Arctic policy in 2023. Its research includes medical resources, but its primary role is as a major shipbuilder of icebreakers, challenging China in this sector. The South Korean city of Busan serves as the hub for production of fifteen icebreakers commissioned by the United States. Like Japan, South Korea positions itself politically with Norway.
But the critically important players are the great powers: Russia, China, and the United States. U.S. imperialism, having long asserted dominance over the Western Hemisphere, now extends its reach into the Arctic, viewing the region through the same lens of strategic control. Russia’s northern border is the longest Arctic littoral of any nation. Along it runs the Northern Sea Route, seasonally navigable to commercial traffic during ice-free months. It offers an alternative to traditional routes that might be blockaded. Russia is expanding its icebreaker fleet independently and through a joint venture with China—a development that has unnerved the West.
It is on Svalbard that contestation has intensified. Russia maintains an historic claim to presence there, notably through an old mining center in Barentsburg, now largely abandoned. In its place, Russia has built a research center separate from the one in Ny-Ålesund used by most international researchers. There it collaborates with BRICS countries and Turkey on meteorology, climate change, geophysics, and oceanography. Of course, any research can be suspected of dual use—serving military as well as civilian purposes. Given Russia’s physical proximity to Arctic NATO nations, such research becomes a fraught issue, especially in light of the Russia-China convergence. Tension regularly erupts in legal disputes over Norway’s sovereignty versus the treaty’s allowance of foreign presence on Svalbard. Norway operates its own Polar Institute, a satellite station (SvalSat), and a University Centre offering Arctic sciences. Politically, however, it has become the node of pro-NATO research confronting that of Russia and China.
China’s interest in the Arctic is primarily commercial, all the more so as continually receding ice will make the Arctic Ocean itself increasingly navigable, offering the shortest route to Europe: a Polar Silk Road. China also maintains the Yellow River research station on Svalbard, as well as a satellite ground station that collects data. Together these contribute to a Digital Silk Road based on China’s own BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, which competes with the American GPS. Digitalization requires seabed cables, and these are being laid by China and Russia in collaboration.
China’s research station connects with Norway’s SvalSat ground station—the world’s largest. The station serves NASA as well as European agencies. SvalSat’s unique value lies in its latitude, high enough to capture information from polar-orbiting satellites. These satellites revolve between the north and south polar regions and so capture data from satellites moving around the earth’s belt beneath them. China’s equal access has raised concern in some circles about dual use. However, many countries with access to SvalSat have used it for military intelligence. The United States utilized it during the Afghanistan war and to obtain images of North Korean installations.
All this international activity in the Arctic, especially the collaboration between China and Russia, forms the backdrop to President Trump’s aggressive move on Greenland as a valuable addition to Alaska in the region. This move extends the logic of the Monroe Doctrine into a new theater. The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) no longer contains a separate section on the Arctic; instead, it refers to a hemispheric framework that includes Canada, which Trump has offered—or threatened—to make the fifty-first state. However, not all of the Arctic falls within the Western Hemisphere; the Nordic states and Russia lie outside it. Thus a new political division has emerged, upending the current governance of the largely consensus-driven Arctic Council, in which all Arctic states are equally represented and non-voting observer status is permitted to outside states.
The United States’ revision of power relations is predictably military:
Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. . . The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity.
While this rhetoric aims primarily at Latin America, it also points to the Arctic, where one form of U.S. preeminence is the newly formed Arctic Sentry, launched in February 2026 to coordinate the military forces of the seven Arctic NATO countries against Russia—the remaining non-NATO Arctic country—and against the “foreign” entity of China. Led by the Joint Force Command Norfolk in Virginia, head of NATO’s North American operations, Arctic Sentry will coordinate maritime patrols, naval deployments, policing and reconnaissance missions, military exercises, and shared intelligence. Arctic Sentry will grant the United States unrestricted military access to bases in these countries and permission to station military personnel, vehicles, and armaments on their territory.
In preparation for possible future war, Green Berets have trained in the Arctic, although the barely tolerable climate makes infantry combat unlikely. More potential is seen in new military technology developed by Ukraine in the current war, notably the use of remotely activated drones. Launched covertly from civilian vessels or shipping containers, they could strike Russian icebreaker ships.
It is to be expected that militarization will increase and deepen on all sides, transforming the Arctic from a once largely peaceful “exceptional” region into an additional front in Cold War 2.0 and a new arena for U.S. imperial ambition.
