Arctic Essay | Arctic Practice Cases
Loss of the Northern Sear Route (NSR) undermines Russia geopolitically
Charles Diggs, August 27, 2025, The Moscow Times, Russia Risks Arctic Environmental Disaster in Pursuit of Profit and Power, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/08/26/russia-risks-arctic-environmental-disaster-in-pursuit-of-profit-and-power-a90351
Moscow envisions the NSR not only as an export lifeline but as a geopolitical lever, a tool to project power and reshape global shipping routes. Moscow promotes it as a faster, cheaper alternative to the Suez Canal, with a growing fleet of icebreakers ensuring year-round navigation.
Russia’s NSR activities will destroy the environment, we need enforceable standards
Charles Diggs, August 27, 2025, The Moscow Times, Russia Risks Arctic Environmental Disaster in Pursuit of Profit and Power, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/08/26/russia-risks-arctic-environmental-disaster-in-pursuit-of-profit-and-power-a90351
As climate change accelerates, the once distant and frozen Arctic is transforming into a controversial industrial frontier. Nowhere is this tension clearer than along Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR). This emerging shipping corridor, running along Russia’s 6,000-kilometer Arctic coastline, is being touted by the Kremlin as a lucrative shortcut between Europe and Asia. But as we illustrate in our new report, the rush to exploit this fragile environment threatens to turn the Arctic into another zone of sacrifice — one where delicate ecosystems are collateral damage in the hunt for hydrocarbons and geopolitical influence. The Arctic is in a vicious cycle where the melting sea ice that makes the NSR more accessible jeopardizes the region’s unique biodiversity and climate stability. Russia’s ambitions to transform this route into a major trade artery — and to ramp up oil and gas extraction along its coastline — risk compounding the climate crisis while leaving Arctic ecosystems vulnerable to catastrophic pollution. In 2024 alone, more than 84% of the cargo transported along the NSR was oil and gas. Fossil fuel extraction is the engine driving Russia’s Arctic strategy. The Kremlin shows no sign of slowing down, even amid its ongoing war in Ukraine and mounting international sanctions. Moscow envisions the NSR not only as an export lifeline but as a geopolitical lever, a tool to project power and reshape global shipping routes. Moscow promotes it as a faster, cheaper alternative to the Suez Canal, with a growing fleet of icebreakers ensuring year-round navigation. Pentagon Says Russia Deepening Cooperation With China in Arctic But this industrialized vision collides with a stark reality. The NSR remains a treacherous route subject to rapidly shifting ice conditions, dangerous ice ridges, and narrow, shallow straits. Even in summer, migrating ice floes can choke critical passages, while thick fogs and sudden storms add another layer of risk. In winter, the entire route freezes solid, navigable only with the help of powerful icebreakers. The infrastructure needed to manage emergencies like oil spills and other vessel accidents is practically nonexistent. Ships stuck in ice might wait weeks for assistance, and specialized equipment for cleaning oil spills in Arctic conditions is in critically short supply. Yet Russia’s push to develop the NSR continues, driven by powerful economic incentives. As global demand for oil and gas persists, the Arctic shelf represents a trove of untapped resources. Extracting these resources demands more than just drilling platforms; it requires the construction of coastal infrastructure, ice-class tankers, and an extensive support network — all of which increase the risk of pollution and environmental degradation. Russia’s plans also involve a growing shadow fleet of older, lightly regulated oil tankers that operate outside normal maritime insurance and safety frameworks. In 2024, at least seven such vessels were spotted along the NSR. These ships often sail with their transponders turned off, are poorly maintained, and operate virtually free of any oversight. Were an accident to occur — such as an oil spill — response times could stretch into weeks, if a response comes at all. Even beyond the threat of unmanageable oil spills, intensive shipping threatens the Arctic in subtler but no less damaging ways. Noise pollution from ship engines disrupts the lives of mammals like whales and seals, whose communication and navigation depend on sound. Ballast water discharges can introduce invasive species, undermining the delicate balance of Arctic marine life. And increased traffic means more greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating the very climate change that is already melting the ice and opening these waters. Russia’s regulatory framework offers little reassurance. Despite strategic documents that nod to environmental protection, there are no binding targets for reducing shipping’s negative impacts. The International Maritime Organization has banned the use and carriage of heavy fuel oil (HFO) in the Arctic as of 2024 — a necessary step given HFO’s high risk of spills and its production of black carbon and sulfur oxides that worsen both climate change and local air quality. Yet Russia has refused to join the ban, allowing its ships to continue burning one of the dirtiest fuels available in the world’s most fragile environment. Adding to the threat is the legacy of nuclear contamination along Russia’s Arctic coast. Decades of Soviet-era nuclear vessels, reactors, and sunken nuclear submarines haunt the seabed, while active military nuclear facilities dot the coastline. International cooperation on cleanup projects has stalled since the invasion of Ukraine began, leaving these radioactive risks largely unaddressed. Russia’s Arctic coastline spans half of the entire Arctic Ocean — a vast and fragile habitat for fish, marine mammals, and migratory birds. This region is not just a domestic matter; it is a global concern. Yet Russia’s environmental stewardship has lagged far behind its economic ambitions. To understand how Russia’s Arctic strategy evolved, it helps to look back in time. The idea of using the NSR as a transport link between Europe and Asia was first proposed in 1525 by Russian diplomat Dmitry Gerasimov. But it was not until 1878–79 that the Swedish explorer Baron Nils Nordenskjöld finally navigated the route, emerging through the Bering Strait into the Pacific. In 1932, the Soviet icebreaker Alexander Sibiryakov became the first vessel to complete the entire NSR in a single navigation season, marking the route’s modern birth. The first true transport operation took place two years later, in 1935. But it was only in the 1970s and 1980s — thanks to the creation of the Soviet nuclear icebreaker fleet — that the NSR began to see sustained use. The Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Plant on the far northern Taimyr Peninsula, with its year-round cargo demands, helped drive this industrial expansion. Today, as climate change reshapes the Arctic, Moscow sees a chance to fulfill its centuries-old ambition of making the NSR not just a seasonal route but a permanent fixture of global trade. opinion Russia’s Radioactive Submarines Remain a Toxic Arctic Threat Read more But at what cost? Russia’s 2022 Maritime Doctrine names the Arctic seas, the NSR and the continental shelf as key national priorities that are critical to the nation’s economy and security. Environmental and climate concerns are acknowledged, but are always a secondary consideration. The priority is clear: open the Arctic, extract its resources, and cement Russia’s geopolitical dominance of the entire region. If the international community fails to challenge this approach, the Arctic could become yet another environmental casualty of unchecked industrial ambition. We have already witnessed how fragile ecosystems can collapse under the weight of pollution and climate disruption. The world cannot afford to let the Arctic — one of our last, almost unspoiled frontiers — become a sacrifice zone for fossil fuels and power politics. This means governments must take action. Third-country governments in particular should discourage the use of the NSR by avoiding cooperation with Chinese or other companies seeking to employ it as a transit corridor. Last year, we issued an open letter to Norway’s Prime Minister urging his government to reject such involvement. This year, with reports of a Chinese company planning shipments via the NSR to Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Gdansk, we are preparing open letters to those ports and relevant authorities. At the same time, the international community must closely monitor the shadow fleet carrying Russian oil through the NSR. Sanctions should be imposed not only on these vessels but also on companies that service them or buy their oil, including through secondary sanctions. By treating the NSR as a dangerous and illegitimate trade corridor, and by targeting those who profit from it, we can help ensure that the Arctic is preserved rather than sacrificed to short-term economic and geopolitical gain.
Plan can’t solve – researchers abandoning the US and they can’t publish about climate change. There is no internal link from some finding in the Arctic to *any* continued development or application as long as the US is involved.
Colette Davidson, 8-25, 25, Christian Science Monitor, The US used to be a haven for research. Now, scientists are packing their bags, https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2025/0825/trump-science-brain-drain-europe
This isn’t the first time James Gerber and Lisa Hilbink have packed up their things and left. In the past 23 years, the married pair of academics have rented out their two-story house in Minnesota a handful of times – during sabbatical stints or fellowships. They’ve tucked away in boxes the family photos, handicrafts from trips to Latin America, and leather booties their children wore when they took their first steps. But this time feels different. Why We Wrote This A recent survey of U.S. professors found that 75% were looking for work outside the country. The result is an exodus that has not been seen since European scientists sought refuge on U.S. shores during the World War II era. For the researchers who have chosen to leave, it is bittersweet – and professionally risky. But they say the future of science depends on it. “We’ll do what we’ve always done in the past: Pack things up and leave it,” says Dr. Hilbink, sinking into a leather armchair in their St. Paul home. “But this time, I’ll bring certain special things with me, like my favorite photos.” In a matter of months, the two will move to the south of France, where they’ve been offered spots within Aix-Marseille University’s Safe Place for Science initiative. Dr. Gerber is a climate researcher; Dr. Hilbink is a tenured professor of political democracy. They don’t know whether they’ll be welcome in the United States when they return. “I hope it’s just paranoia,” says Dr. Hilbink, offering a pained glance at Dr. Gerber sitting beside her. “You prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” Recommended Where crime persists in Washington, residents don’t see federal troops as the answer The couple are part of a growing number of academics and researchers leaving the United States. As government funding for scientific research dries up, and as President Donald Trump wages pointed attacks against some of the nation’s top universities, more academics are looking to Europe and Asia as safe havens. A recent survey of U.S. college faculty by the journal Nature found that 75% were looking for work outside the country. Some are doing so to protect their research, while others are trying to safeguard their individual freedoms. The result is a reverse brain drain that has not been seen since European scientists sought refuge on U.S. shores before and during World War II. For the researchers who have chosen to leave, it is bittersweet – and professionally risky. But they say the future of science depends on it. “A lot of us scholars value our independence,” says Isaac Kamola, director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. “We value the ability to research, write and teach what we want, and do what we think is in the best interest of … our disciplines. “So, when somebody comes and tells us, ‘No, you can’t say these words, you can’t teach this book … this class … it’s basically like saying to a doctor, ‘You’ve trained for years to become a doctor, but we’re not going to let you see patients. You’ll have to do office work,” says Dr. Kamola, who is also an assistant professor at Trinity College in Connecticut. “If you use any of these words … you’ll get rejected” Wendy, an anthropology professor in Minnesota who asked not to be named, has worked too long and hard to throw it all away. But when she saw the list of words banned by the Trump administration, she began to wonder whether her academic future was still in the United States. Recommended Let summer linger with the 10 best books of August “Gender, female, inequality … these themes are all part of my research,” she says, sipping a latte in a Twin Cities-area coffee shop. “If you use any of these words in a grant application now, you’ll get rejected.” Wendy studies religion and migration among medieval populations. But she has become increasingly worried about getting funding for her research, which relies heavily on the National Endowment for the Humanities. As part of its 2026 budget proposal, the Trump administration has called for the elimination of the NEH, the largest humanities funder in the United States. It has also dismantled the National Science Foundation, the only federal agency that funds research across all fields of science and engineering. It has already canceled at least 1,653 active research grants. On Aug. 21, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote allowed the White House to proceed with almost $800 million in cuts to research from the National Institutes of Health. The Trump administration’s list of banned words is now at over 350 and growing, with words such as “woman,” “climate,” “race,” and “housing” on the list. It has also taken down from government websites decades-worth of data related to climate change, health, and other scientific research. When Mr. Trump returned to office, he signed an executive order vowing to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, including in higher education. That, and the rollback in funding, are part of what the administration sees as a corrective to what it considers a long leftward shift in higher education. The Education Department also has asked for enrollment data from universities to make sure that race isn’t being considered in admissions and has launched investigations into what it calls rampant antisemitism on campuses such as Harvard and Columbia. Recommended As famine hits Gaza, Jews abroad take a hard look at Israel’s war This past year, Wendy heard from a French colleague that the University of Aix-Marseille had launched the Safe Place for Science program, freeing up 15 million euros ($17.6 million) to offer research grants to top U.S. professors. She, alongside nearly 300 others, applied immediately. Colette Davidson Mayor Benoît Payan of Marseille, France, speaks to candidates of the Safe Place for Science program, in Marseille, June 26, 2025. “Higher education is being silenced, censored,” says Wendy. “My job isn’t at risk yet. But it could be. Ever since Trump was elected, my feeling was, ‘We need to get out of America.’” In June, Wendy – along with Dr. Gerber, Dr. Hilbink, and three dozen other candidates – flew to Marseille for final interviews. The university is in the process of making offers to about 20 candidates, who will have up to a year and a half to start their contract. As part of the initiative, the university is also pushing French officials to create a special immigration status of “scientific refugee,” to recognize the current threat researchers face. “More than 80 years ago, the United States welcomed exiled researchers to allow scientific research to continue, while France hid in the shadows of [Nazi Germany’s] occupation,” says Eric Berton, the president of Aix-Marseille University, in June. “[I hope] we can be a role model for this historic moment.” The U.S. no longer a safe haven? During the 1930s, many Jewish scientists, including Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller, escaped Hitler’s Europe for the safety of the United States. Between 1939 and 1941, scientific exiles helped create the Manhattan Project and later the world’s first atomic bomb. The period marked the beginning of what would become a tradition of collaboration between the U.S. government and scientists, spawning the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Those agencies are largely responsible for everything from the moon landing to the internet. Recommended After war’s destruction, Syrian seamstresses bring ancient craft to life “At the time, the United States was considered a land of freedom – a safe haven for people who were persecuted,” says Annette Wieviorka, a French historian and Holocaust specialist. “Its universities were considered the most open-minded and they welcomed researchers with open arms. “Now, it feels like the United States is closing itself off,” she adds, “that it’s losing its position as a place of security, freedom, and creation.” France’s Aix-Marseille University is one of a growing number of programs aimed specifically at recruiting American researchers. The Netherlands’ education minister announced in March that his country was creating a fund to attract leading international scientists, while The Free University of Brussels in Belgium has unlocked $2.7 million in funding for foreign researchers. In Spain, the Council of Ministers has approved a call for proposals worth up to 45 million euros (about $53 million) aimed specifically at attracting U.S. researchers. Meanwhile, Germany, once the center of Europe’s scientific exodus, has unequivocally found itself on the other side of history. Recommended There’s a famine in Gaza. Who determined that, and how? “Free science and free international exchange are key for social and economic progress,” said leaders in a joint statement published in March by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. “We can and want to offer research scientists who no longer see the opportunity to work freely in their country a perspective, within the scope of our possibilities, in the German research system.” Can Europe afford U.S. researchers? European universities are up against one major challenge in recruiting American researchers: money. Despite Europe’s financial investments, researchers who decide to cross the Atlantic often face hefty cuts to their salaries. An average salary for a full professor in the U.S. is over $155,000; in Europe, it is around 50,000 euros (about $58,000). American universities also offer other perks, such as paid relocation and subsidized housing. Wendy, the Minnesota anthropologist, says her salary in Marseille will be cut by about one-third. The university has promised to help her find housing, set up a bank account, and other necessities of starting over abroad, but she expects to have to make some concessions. Her husband, a high school teacher, will need to find work. The couple will have to find a gymnastics club for one of their twin daughters, while navigating a new city in a new language that none of them speak. “Right now, I can walk to work, the girls’ school is nearby, and we live close enough where the girls can go play on the campus football field on their own,” says Wendy. “Logistically, I’ve been having doubts. But we’ll go regardless. I’m thinking of my career long-term.” Recommended The AI crime against children in Argentina, and how Norway prevents homelessness Other researchers agree. They say they’re willing to give up American comforts in order to feel safe. On a recent trip home from France, Brian Sandberg, a professor of European history, says he was worried about getting questioned at the U.S. border or having his mobile phone searched. Colette Davidson Brian Sandberg, a European history professor from Illinois and a candidate for the University of Aix-Marseille’s Safe Place for Science program, in Marseille, France, June 26, 2025. “I try not to weigh in on politics,” says Dr. Sandberg, from his home in Illinois. For the safety of his colleagues and students, he asked that his university not be named. “But if it affects universities and academics, well, it would only take a Google search to see my views.” Dr. Sandberg says that, as a U.S. citizen, he is less worried about being denied entry and more concerned with insidious threats, such as online trolling. The real targets, he says, are international researchers and students. In March, a French scientist was denied entry into the U.S. after immigration officers found anti-Trump messages on his mobile phone. More than 300 international students have had their visas revoked since Mr. Trump took office in January. In June, the Justice Department issued a directive that aims to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship in certain cases. Still, researchers have bristled at the idea of being labeled “refugees.” Dr. Gerber and Dr. Hilbink say they’re uncomfortable with being put in the same administrative category as Ukrainians and Palestinians, who face persecution and “truly have to leave home.” Observers are equally skeptical about creating a special status for scientific researchers. “I don’t think we’re quite at the same level as during World War II,” says Dr. Wieviorka, the French historian. “At the time, scientists weren’t just at risk of losing their research. They were at risk of losing their lives.” But for some American researchers, President Trump’s policies have hit close to home, and their reasons for leaving go beyond career goals. Matthew, a tenured creative writing professor at a school in Connecticut, started thinking of moving his family to Barcelona, Spain, in the summer of 2024, after realizing that Mr. Trump’s views on transgender people would be “low hanging fruit for the new administration.” Matthew’s 13-year-old daughter is transgender, and he says he and his wife became fearful for their child’s future. “All we want for our kids is for them to have the privilege of not worrying too much about things that 13-year-olds and 11-year-olds shouldn’t have to worry about,” says Matthew, who requested his real name be withheld to protect his family’s safety. “I’m trying to make the best out of the situation.” He was already on a semester sabbatical in Barcelona to write a book and decided to extend it to an official leave of absence for one year. It took some convincing to get their two kids on board, but they’ve found a school and are all learning Spanish. What happens after the year is up, he cannot say. “I love my job,” says Matthew. “[My university] has done a pretty good job of protecting academic freedom. … It would be a heartbreak for me to have to leave my career.” Colette Davidson James Gerber and Lisa Hilbink, shown in their St. Paul, Minnesota, home, are among the U.S. professors accepting offers to teach for a year or more in Europe or Asia. As much as university professors and researchers might be contemplating a move abroad, crossing the Atlantic is not going to become de rigueur, says Dr. Kamola of the AAUP. Established professors might be in a good position to leave, such as Tim Snyder and Jason Stanley, both of whom announced that they are leaving Yale University for Canada. But, Dr. Kamola notes, there aren’t an abundance of positions for professors to move overseas. And some are tethered to the lives they built in the U.S., such as taking care of aging parents or raising children. The unwitting losers may be future scholars. “Potentially, you’re going to have a lot of really young, smart students who are passionate about learning but won’t go to grad school,” says Dr. Kamola. “[And] faculty are going to be in a position where they have to make more and more concessions.” Observers have warned that tenured positions will be increasingly vulnerable to political attacks, and that the Trump administration could use moves from Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ playbook, such as trying to ban materials from being taught. Scholars could find themselves censored or even self-censoring their own research. That could affect science as a whole, which has a “critical role of independently analyzing someone’s data, critiquing methods, and challenging old as well as existing findings,” according to David Schley, deputy director of Sense about Science, a U.K.-based charity that promotes scientific evidence in the name of public interest. “You can go across the world and see that authoritarian societies have a very strict control over what is published, what is disseminated,” says Dr. Schley. If one is looking at a list of countries banning books and freedom of speech, he contends, the U.S. is hardly going to come at the bottom. That said, he adds: “It’s just the huge shift we’ve seen, going from being a leader in science, innovation, and disseminating information to taking this huge step back.” “A defining professional moment” Wendy, along with Dr. Gerber and Dr. Hilbink, have all received offers from the University of Aix-Marseille to teach. With all the administrative hurdles of moving abroad, they’re looking at a January start date next year. They’re also still wrestling with some grumblings among French researchers, who have expressed resentment over university funding going to foreign researchers when local salaries are in dire straits. “I have seen people online complaining about us, but there are only going to be about 20 researchers coming,” says Wendy. “I’m a little worried about how I’ll be perceived.” Get stories that empower and uplift. Your e-mail address By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy. But it will be worth it, they all say, in the spirit of helping save science – one researcher at a time. “I’m not an activist, I’m a scholar. But this is definitely a defining professional moment,” says Dr. Hilbink, straightening her black-rimmed glasses. “There are lots of opportunities closing, but this is also a great opportunity to collaborate. We could make this into something where we build an institutional relationship along the way.”
China-Russia Arctic cooperation increasing now
Carl Zhang, 8-23, 25, South China Morning Post, Why is the US uneasy as China’s 5-strong icebreaker fleet arrives in the Arctic?, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3322730/why-us-uneasy-chinas-5-strong-icebreaker-fleet-arrives-arctic
China’s intensifying interest in the Arctic has aroused concerns in the US, which has been monitoring the progress of five Chinese icebreakers and research vessels since before they passed through the Bering Strait earlier this month. The fleet is led by the domestically built Xue Long 2, one of the world’s newest generation polar research icebreakers and the first to adopt an intelligent hull and engine room design. Over the past five years, the Xue Long 2 has conducted nearly 10 scientific expeditions to both the Arctic and Antarctic. On this expedition, it is accompanied by the Shenhai Yihao, which is equipped with a deep-sea submersible, Jidi – which made its first trip to the Arctic last year. Also sailing along are China’s newest icebreaker, the Tansuo Sanhao, and its oldest – the Zhongshan Daxue Jidi. According to the live tracker Maritime Optima, the Chinese vessels crossed the Bering Strait in quick succession from August 5 to 7 and are currently operating in the Arctic Ocean. The fleet’s actions prompted a quick response from the US coastguard, which claimed the vessels came as close as 290 nautical miles (537km) from the Alaskan coast, right on the edge of the disputed area of the “extended continental shelf” claimed by the United States. The Zhongshan Daxue Jidi as detected by an American C-130 Hercules aircraft. Photo: Handout The Zhongshan Daxue Jidi as detected by an American C-130 Hercules aircraft. Photo: Handout According to its official website, the US coastguard detected the research vessels Jidi and Zhongshan Daxue Jidi in the northeastern Bering Sea on August 5 and sent a C-130J Hercules fixed-wing aircraft in response. The following day, the cutter Waesche was sent on a similar mission when the Zhongshan Daxue Jidi was spotted travelling north in the Chukchi Sea above the Arctic Circle after passing through the Bering Strait. The coastguard said it conducted long-range escort and surveillance, adding that it took no substantive interception measures and was monitoring five Chinese vessels operating in or near the US Arctic. According to the US coastguard, the Xue Long 2 was detected on July 26, around 290 nautical miles north of Utqiagvik, Alaska. A C-130J Hercules fixed-wing aircraft was sent to monitor the research vessel, it said. In recent years, with the Arctic becoming a focal zone of global strategic competition, China and Russia have been deepening their cooperation in the region, prompting growing concern in Washington. In 2019, China and Russia established a joint laboratory on polar technology and equipment at Harbin Engineering University in northeast China. Last year, the two countries’ coastguards conducted their first joint Arctic patrol. SCMP Plus is a new premium news platform that gives you an all-inclusive edge to stay ahead on China news. To access our exclusive content you’ll need to subscribe. TRY FOR FREE Already a subscriber? LOG IN China views itself as a near-Arctic country and an important stakeholder in the region’s affairs. Russia boasts the world’s largest fleet of polar vessels – 55 in all – and is the only country capable of manufacturing nuclear-powered icebreakers. Apart from scientific research, the two countries are also exploring the commercial potential of developing Arctic shipping routes – the shortest links between the Asia-Pacific and Western Eurasia. In July last year, the US Defence Department updated its strategy for the region, saying that China’s collaboration with Russia in the Arctic had “implications for the security of the United States and our allies and partners”. US President Donald Trump regards the Arctic as vital to advancing his country’s commercial and strategic interests. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, allocates nearly US$9 billion for icebreakers. Responding to the US coastguard’s actions, Beijing-based think tank the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) said in an analytical article that the Chinese fleet’s transit through international waters was legitimate. According to the researchers, the Chinese fleet’s route was fully in line with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos). Washington is not a signatory. “[Unclos] stipulates that the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) should not exceed 200 nautical miles from the baseline used to measure the breadth of the territorial sea,” the think tank said. “When the Chinese vessel was spotted, it was approximately 290 nautical miles from Utqiagvik, Alaska, and therefore located in international waters, not within the US EEZ,” it added. Russia’s Vladimir Putin touts ‘Arctic power’ with nuclear-powered icebreakers The SCSPI also pointed out that the US coastguard’s tracking and surveillance might constitute illegal interference with the Xue Long 2’s right to exercise freedom of the seas.
Russia-US Arctic cooperation now
Reuters, 8-22, 25, https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-sees-light-end-tunnel-russia-us-ties-cooperation-arctic-alaska-2025-08-22/, Putin sees ‘light at end of the tunnel’ in Russia-US ties, cooperation in Arctic and Alaska
MOSCOW, Aug 22 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that there was “light at the end of the tunnel” in Russia-U.S. relations and that the two countries were discussing joint projects in the Arctic and Alaska. The Russian president, answering questions during a visit to a nuclear research centre, said he was sure that U.S. President Donald Trump’s leadership qualities would help in restoring relations from recent lows. The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here. Advertisement · Scroll to continue Report This Ad “With the arrival of President Trump, I think that a light at the end of the tunnel has finally loomed. And now we had a very good, meaningful and frank meeting in Alaska,” Putin said, referring to last week’s summit. “The next steps now depend on the leadership of the United States, but I am confident that the leadership qualities of the current president, President Trump, are a good guarantee that relations will be restored.” Item 1 of 3 Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with nuclear industry personnel during a visit to the Russian Federal Nuclear Centre – All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF) in Sarov, Nizhny Novgorod Region, Russia August 22, 2025. Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS [1/3]Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with nuclear industry personnel during a visit to the Russian Federal Nuclear Centre – All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF) in Sarov, Nizhny Novgorod Region, Russia August 22, 2025. Sputnik/Gavriil… Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Read more His comments signalled Russia’s optimism that it can mend relations with the U.S. and strike business deals, despite the lack of clear progress towards ending the Ukraine conflict at his August 15 summit with Trump. Advertisement · Scroll to continue Report This Ad Putin did not give details of possible U.S.-Russia cooperation in the Arctic but said there were “huge, huge” mineral reserves in the region and noted that Russian liquefied natural gas company Novatek was already operating there. “We are discussing, by the way, with American partners the possibility of working together in this area. And not only in our Arctic zone, but also in Alaska. And at the same time, the technologies that we possess, today no one but us possesses. And this is of interest to our partners, including those from the States,” he said. Both Russia and the United States have said they see enormous economic opportunities if they can normalise relations after ties plunged to a post-Cold War low because of the war in Ukraine.
Icebreakers/[logistics] key to deter China-Russia aggression in the Indo-Pacific
Iris Ferguson, 8-21, 25, https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2025/08/21/where-the-arctic-meets-the-pacific-americas-overlooked-frontline/, Defense News, here the Arctic meets the Pacific: America’s overlooked frontline
While the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska underscored the Arctic’s decisive importance, there was another signal coming from just offshore: Russian and Chinese naval forces conducting a joint exercise near the Aleutians. In the north Indo-Pacific, a geostrategic game is unfolding, one in which control over sea lanes, resources and influence will shape the 21st century. And Washington has been slow to catch up. Despite Alaska’s undeniable role in the Indo-Pacific, providing a launch pad for force projection and missile defense, for three decades America has let its Pacific Arctic flank erode. Only sustained attention, disciplined use of new funding and closer work with allies and partners will keep America from losing ground to competitors who already understand its value. The Indo-Pacific Arctic has become one of the most active arenas of great power competition. Russia and China, while not allies, are cooperating here with arguably greater depth than anywhere else in the world. Their joint naval patrols are no longer rare events but recurring, normalized operations, reinforced by last summer’s first combined bomber patrol and growing coast guard coordination. Their economic partnership has deepened as well, with China investing billions in Russia’s Arctic energy and mineral projects. And Beijing is not simply riding Moscow’s coattails; it is operating independently, with five Chinese research vessels currently underway near Alaska. If these operations unfolded along Florida’s shoreline, they would dominate the front pages and trigger emergency hearings. Near Alaska’s waters, they barely register. The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Stratton, right, shadows a Russian submarine about 57 miles northwest of Point Hope, Alaska, Sept. 15, 2024. (U.S Coast Guard) In response to this unprecedented level of cooperation, the Pentagon has taken notice. Over the next several weeks, INDOPACOM and NORTHCOM are combining two of DoD’s most important exercises for the region — Northern Edge and Arctic Edge — for the first time. With thousands of air, maritime and ground forces, the goal is to signal that Alaska and the Arctic are a strategic hinge between the Indo-Pacific and North America and to eradicate the challenging seam that exists between them. While the commanders of INDOPACOM and NORTHCOM deserve great credit for coming together this month, momentum must be sustained. Bridging the lines between the Arctic’s multiple combatant commands is essential to close operational gaps, preserve stability and present a unified front in the face of competing interests that converge in the far north. Against this backdrop, the recent reconciliation bill offers an opening that may not come again soon for the North American Arctic. From $8.6 billion for much needed icebreaker development to $24.4 billion for missile defense and the Golden Dome, developing these capabilities would aid homeland defense and our broader objectives in the Indo-Pacific. The challenge will be executing them on time and within budget. Equally important is $115 million buried within the bill for the Defense Department to explore and develop existing Arctic infrastructure, including in Alaska. These upgrades, from long neglected maintenance on existing bases to the creation of future operating sites, are vital for operations in one of the world’s most unforgiving regions, yet they have repeatedly been pushed to the margins of funding priorities. History underscores the urgency. The Aleutians were the only part of the continental United States invaded and occupied by enemy forces during World War II. Today, those same islands form a natural bridge between the Arctic and Indo-Pacific theaters. Adak provides a perfect example — once a vital Cold War and WWII military hub in the Aleutians, it remains strategically positioned and should be strongly considered for reopening. The U.S. should identify, prioritize and execute projects now, while the legislative window and political will are aligned. The Pentagon in particular must act decisively, not stall in pursuit of the perfect analysis. While this funding may be game changing, it only scratches the surface of what’s required to compete in the North American Arctic. Beyond icebreakers and missile defense, America needs resilient communications networks, reliable energy in the cold, sensors that see farther and unmanned platforms that endure longer in extreme conditions. Just as vital is sustained scientific research, which is not a luxury but a foundation for national security. Without continuous investment in understanding the Arctic’s rapidly changing environment, the U.S. and its allies will be operating blind in one of the world’s harshest theaters. Meeting these requirements is far beyond the capacity of any single nation, which makes allied investment and partnership not optional in the Arctic but indispensable. The U.S. cannot go it alone in the Arctic. Even Russia, with its vast northern coastline, seems to recognize the necessity of relying on others. The colder, more austere Indo-Pacific side of the Arctic is especially demanding and expensive, and success will hinge on shared capabilities, presence and investment. While the European Arctic rightly receives significant attention through NATO allies, far less focus has been given to the equally critical Indo-Pacific front. Beyond NATO and NORAD, the U.S. has an untapped opportunity to deepen cooperation with Japan and South Korea. Both nations bring advanced technology, maritime expertise and shared concerns over Russian and Chinese intentions, making them natural collaborators in securing the high north and linking Arctic security to broader Indo-Pacific stability. Ultimately, these partnerships are not only about deterring threats, but about building the ties of cooperation that keep the Arctic peaceful. But partnership cannot be taken for granted. Allies will only stand shoulder to shoulder in the Arctic if Washington demonstrates sustained trust, credibility and respect. Lastly, Arctic advocacy and action only happens with great intention, and the region needs leadership empowered to demand and coordinate the unique capabilities that the Arctic requires. My former position fulfilled exactly that role for the Department of Defense. Personnel is policy, and if the U.S. is serious about ensuring security in the Arctic, while also advancing stability and opportunity, it will need dedicated leadership. Without it, the Arctic risks falling through the cracks of bureaucratic seams, allowing competitors to set the pace in a region where time is not on our side.
NATO cooperating with Canada now
Mike Blancfield, 8-20, 25, Politico, Canada courts Arctic allies to counter Russia, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/20/canada-courts-arctic-allies-to-counter-russia-00515070
Russia’s saber-rattling in the Arctic is forcing Canada to deepen military cooperation with its Nordic NATO allies — a marked policy shift away from the United States. Prime Minister Mark Carney has dispatched two top Cabinet ministers to Sweden and Finland this week in pursuit of new defense deals — including a look at Sweden’s Saab Gripen fighter jet. Canada had previously decided on the Lockheed Martin F-35, a flagship export under President Donald Trump. But amid a trade war, at a time when other allies are turning away from the U.S. war plane, Canada is reconsidering its C$19-billion plan to buy a new fleet of F-35s. “Clearly, there are trade tensions [with the U.S.], and we want to become closer to our friends,” Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said Monday as Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch formally welcomed her to Stockholm. Canada’s Arctic defense strategy is shifting away from a bilateral relationship with the United States toward a broader NATO framework. With Sweden and Finland joining NATO after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — and in the wake of Trump’s tariff attacks — Ottawa is widening its foreign policy focus to align with NATO as the foundation of its Arctic security. Busch said she welcomed a strategic partnership, “focusing on security and defense, investment and competitiveness, digital innovation and energy raw materials.” Joly name-checked Canadian ties to Saab, as well as to Sweden tech giants Ericsson and ABB (Asea Brown Boveri). “We have the crown jewels of the private sector of Sweden already in our country, but we want to do more,” the minister said. On Tuesday, Canada added one more jewel when Roshel, a Canadian manufacturer of armored vehicles, signed a “strategic partnership agreement” with Swedish steel producer Swebor. Roshel said in a statement that the partnership will “establish Canada’s first facility dedicated to production of ballistic-grade steel” — a key ingredient in military vehicles. Earlier in the trip, Joly visited Saab, the Swedish manufacturer of the Gripen — at one time a runner-up on Canada’s shortlist to replace its aging fleet of CF-18s. Lockheed Martin won that contract, and will deliver 16 of the stealth fighters so far. Joly is joined on this week’s trip by Stephen Fuhr, Canada’s new secretary of state for defense procurement, as Ottawa contemplates whether it will buy 72 more F-35s. Canada’s Minister of Industry Melanie Joly (right) is welcomed by Sweden’s Minister of Energy and Business Ebba Busch in Stockholm. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch (left) welcomes Canadian Industry Minister Mélanie Joly to Stockholm on Monday. | Jonas Akstromer/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images Later in the week, Joly is to cut the ribbon on a joint Finnish-Canadian shipbuilding venture that will begin manufacturing a new fleet of icebreakers for Canada’s Coast Guard. Meanwhile in Europe, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand was scheduled to meet with Finland President Alexander Stubb on Tuesday. The tête-à-tête follows Stubb’s appearance at the White House Monday alongside other European leaders, supporting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Trump-brokered negotiation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to end the war in Eastern Europe. Anand said NATO, which was founded during the Cold War on the premise it was an eastward-facing European bulwark against the Soviet Union, must confront Russia beyond Europe’s borders in the Far North. “NATO’s gaze also has to shift westward and north because of the changing geopolitical landscape, especially following Feb. 24, 2022,” Anand said Monday. “Our priority in terms of Canada’s Arctic foreign policy is to ensure that we leave no stone unturned to protect and defend Canada’s sovereignty,” she added. Anand said that will mean tens of billions of dollars of new spending on Arctic infrastructure. The minister added that it was no longer appropriate for civilian and military infrastructure projects to exist in bureaucratic “silos.” “When we talk about critical minerals in the north, yes, that’s an economic question, but it’s also a defense and security question, and it is embedded in our foreign policy,” Anand said. Anand met with foreign ministers from the Nordic 5 group of countries, including her host, Elina Valtonen, and their counterparts from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. They later issued a joint statement of unwavering solidarity with Ukraine. “The Nordic countries and Canada are ready to play an active role in combining the efforts of the Coalition of the Willing with those of the United States to ensure the strength and credibility of these security guarantees,” Anand and her Nordic counterparts said. They emphasized that Ukraine’s borders must remain intact, and that Russia has no “veto” over Ukraine’s possible pathway to EU or NATO membership. They also called for the return of thousands of Ukrainian children who were taken to Russia after the war started. “For as long as Russia continues its war of aggression against Ukraine, we — together with partners and allies — will continue to maintain and increase pressure on Russia’s war economy,” the Nordic 5 said. “Russia poses a long-term threat to European security.”
Arctic slowdown doesn’t mean climate change isn’t caused by humans, there is just a large natural variation now
Damian Carrington Environment editor, August 20, 2025, The Guardian, Dramatic slowdown in melting of Arctic sea ice surprises scientists, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/20/slowdown-in-melting-of-arctic-sea-ice-surprises-scientists
The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years, scientists have reported, with no statistically significant decline in its extent since 2005. The finding is surprising, the researchers say, given that carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning have continued to rise and trap ever more heat over that time. They said natural variations in ocean currents that limit ice melting had probably balanced out the continuing rise in global temperatures. However, they said this was only a temporary reprieve and melting was highly likely to start again at about double the long-term rate at some point in the next five to 10 years. The findings do not mean Arctic sea ice is rebounding. Sea ice area in September, when it reaches its annual minimum, has halved since 1979, when satellite measurements began. The climate crisis remains “unequivocally real”, the scientists said, and the need for urgent action to avoid the worst impacts remains unchanged. The natural variation causing the slowdown is probably the multi-decadal fluctuations in currents in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which change the amount of warmed water flowing into the Arctic. The Arctic is still expected to see ice-free conditions later in the century, harming people and wildlife in the region and boosting global heating by exposing the dark, heat-absorbing ocean Dr Mark England, who led the study while at the University of Exeter, said: “It is surprising, when there is a current debate about whether global warming is accelerating, that we’re talking about a slowdown. “The good news is that 10 to 15 years ago when sea ice loss was accelerating, some people were talking about an ice-free Arctic before 2020. But now the [natural] variability has switched to largely cancelling out sea ice loss. It has bought us a bit more time but it is a temporary reprieve – when it ends, it isn’t good news.” The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used two different datasets of Arctic sea ice levels from 1979 to the present day. The scientists analysed the sea ice area for every month of the year and the slowdown was seen in all cases. To see if such a slowdown could be a result of natural variation, they examined the results of thousands of climate model runs. “This is not an extremely rare event – over a century, it should happen a couple of times,” said England, now at the University of California, Irvine. Furthermore, all the simulations showed sea ice loss accelerating again after the slowdown. Prof Julienne Stroeve, of University College London, said: “We know climate records, be it in global temperatures or sea ice, can remain the same for several years in a row as a result of internal climate variability.” Stroeve’s analysis of the long-term trend from 1979 to 2024 shows that about 2.5 sq metres of September ice is lost for every tonne of CO2 emitted. skip past newsletter promotion Sign up to Down to Earth Free weekly newsletter The planet’s most important stories. Get all the week’s environment news – the good, the bad and the essential Enter your email address Sign up Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion Prof Andrew Shepherd, of Northumbria University, said: “We know that the Arctic sea ice pack is also thinning, and so even if the area was not reducing, the volume still is. Our data show that since 2010 the average October thickness has fallen by 0.6cm per year.” The rate of the rise in global surface temperature has also slowed down in the past, before resuming a rapid rise. A major El Niño event in 1998 was followed by a decade or so of similar global temperatures, which was nicknamed “the pause”. However, the planet continued to accumulate heat throughout and global temperatures have since risen rapidly. England rejected any suggestion the sea ice slowdown suggested climate change was not real. “Climate change is unequivocally real, human-driven, and continues to pose serious threats. The fundamental science and urgency for climate action remain unchanged,” he said. “It is good to explain to people that [the slowdown] is happening, else they are going to hear it from someone who is trying to use it in bad faith as a way to undermine our very solid understanding of what’s happening with climate change.”
Russia Arctic threat increasing
The Independent,August 15, 2025, https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/putin-russia-us-military-arctic-nato-lammy-b2806754.html, How Russia is preparing for conflict in Nato’s new Arctic battleground, The Independent
t its nearest point, Alaska is just 2.4 miles from Russia. In the remote Bering Sea, Little Diomede Island (belonging to the US) sits next to Big Diomede Island (part of Russia). In between them lies the international date line, which means the American island, also known as Yesterday Island, is 21 hours behind its Russian neighbour, unsurprisingly dubbed Tomorrow. This quirk of geography and history appeals to Vladimir Putin, putting him ahead not only in a chronological sense (literally), but also in a political one – because that’s where he’s winning the race for control of a vast region that is opening up thanks to climate change. For as the Arctic continues to thaw, it is Russia that is taking advantage. “This region is at the centre of Nato’s security. This is Nato’s northern flank… Russia’s military presence, particularly, has been growing now for years,” warned foreign secretary David Lammy on a recent trip to the High North. RECOMMENDED Trump’s hand makeup has returned after questions about president’s swollen ankles Grand Designs ‘saddest ever property’ finally sells after over a decade of turmoil Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and other moguls all use the 5-hour rule. Here’s what I learned from… Blinkist Magazine | Sponsored CVS Hides This $1 Generic Viagra – Here’s the Aisle It’s Really In. Friday Plans | Sponsored Powered by Taboola A Russian nuclear submarine breaks through the Arctic ice during military drills at an unspecified location in 2021 open image in gallery A Russian nuclear submarine breaks through the Arctic ice during military drills at an unspecified location in 2021 (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service) “This area is hugely, strategically important as the ice caps melt. It opens up potentially new gateways. Suddenly you can do shipping in areas where you couldn’t before. “My visit is about deterring the threat from Russia, just as it is about tackling the threat of climate change.” Ice in the Bering Sea in 2020, as seen from a small aircraft near the western coast of Alaska open image in gallery Ice in the Bering Sea in 2020, as seen from a small aircraft near the western coast of Alaska (AP) Russia is working the hardest to dominate the Arctic because it has the most to gain from the opening of these routes. The thawing of the Arctic ice caps is an economic and military opportunity that Moscow has not missed. Recently, it expanded its fleets with its binoculars trained on Arctic dominance. The newly built Arktika-class nuclear icebreakers, such as the Arktika and the Sibir, are among the most powerful in the world. They are capable of ploughing through ice up to 2.8 metres thick, and operating all year round. By the end of this year, Russia plans to operate a fleet of more than 20 nuclear and diesel-electric icebreakers – and will lead the world in carving through the Arctic. In response, the US Coast Guard has three icebreakers and one on order. The UK has none. This Russian fleet enables Moscow to lead the search for the vast mineral resources, including fossil fuels, that are locked beneath the melting ice. Newly built nuclear-powered icebreaker ‘Ural’ begins its passage from Russia’s Baltic shipyard in St Petersburg to the northern city of Murmansk in 2022 open image in gallery Newly built nuclear-powered icebreaker ‘Ural’ begins its passage from Russia’s Baltic shipyard in St Petersburg to the northern city of Murmansk in 2022 (AP) Icebreakers also allow it to control shipping routes and assert military dominance over the emerging region. According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, the level of Arctic sea ice has declined by around 40 per cent since satellite observations began in 1979, reaching record lows in recent years. That means new shipping routes can be opened – and probably kept open – by Russia. The northern sea route (NSR), which runs along Russia’s Siberian coast from Murmansk to the Bering Strait, is at the heart of the Kremlin’s strategic push into the Arctic. This route used to be impassable for most of the year. Satellite and climate data now reveal that the navigation season along the NSR has stretched from only 60 days a year to double that. Year-round transit is around the corner. The distance between Asian manufacturing hubs like China and Europe is being cut by approximately 40 per cent, saving millions of dollars in fuel and transit time. Trips from Shanghai to Hamburg via the NSR take around 15 days, compared with roughly 30 days via the Suez Canal. That’s an economic bonus that Russia wants to own. It is likely to come into conflict with the rest of the world if Moscow insists on collecting tariffs from other countries using an international shipping route – which it hopes to do. Already Russia uses its ports in the High North for moving sanctioned crude oil in its “shadow fleet”, which helps to fund Putin’s war against Ukraine. Foreign secretary David Lammy has warned of Russia’s growing military presence in the region open image in gallery Foreign secretary David Lammy has warned of Russia’s growing military presence in the region (PA) Norway operates the biggest satellite observation network in the world from the Svalbard archipelago, and can see these illegal oil exports leaving Russia’s northern ports. “It’s this satellite ground station that helps us see the movement of Russia’s shadow fleet and ultimately helps us to thwart Putin’s ability to fund his war,” Lammy said. “The High North has always been important to the security of the whole [Nato] alliance. This is one of the regions where Russia can move out and towards the West.” The UK’s Royal Marines play a key role in Nato’s cold-weather warfare, and Lammy insisted that Britain is crucial in defending Nato’s northern flank with what is called the Littoral Response Group. But the Royal Navy does not have any amphibious ships to move the commandos, and its real contribution is very light compared to that of the Nordic countries and the US. This puts further strain on the whole of Nato’s operational readiness as Ukraine is the focus of so much effort. Russia’s Northern Fleet has deployed advanced nuclear-powered submarines, including the Borei-class and Yasen-class vessels, capable of launching strategic missile strikes from under the ice. They give Moscow a second-strike nuclear capability, which ensures its place among the superpowers. To consolidate its position, Russia has constructed new military bases and upgraded existing ones in Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, two remote archipelagos in the Arctic Ocean. RECOMMENDED Ghislaine Maxwell rejects Prince Andrew claims in newly released interview Newsom-Trump feud fueling ‘rising tide of support’ among voters, says CNN data expert 56-Year-Old Replaced $21,500 Facelift With This $38 Drugstore Item (See Results) The Skincare Magazine | Sponsored Replace Your Entire Roof in as Little as 1 Day! Metal Roofing Innovations | Sponsored Powered by Taboola These are the real inroads into the Arctic – taking advantage of the rapid rate of climate change – and the rest of the world needs to sit up and take notice. By choosing this location for his first face-to-face talks with Putin since he became president for the second time, Donald Trump may inadvertently have drawn the world’s attention to another clear and present danger.
US science being destroyed, nothing to collaborate with
Ashifa Kassam, July 5, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/05/academics-leaving-us-scientific-asylum-france-trump, ‘The American system is being destroyed’: academics on leaving US for ‘scientific asylum’ in France
The American system is being destroyed’: academics on leaving US for ‘scientific asylum’ in France Almost 300 researchers have applied for for positions at Aix-Marseille University after Trump unleashed his attack on academia It was on a US-bound flight in March, as Brian Sandberg stressed about whether he would be stopped at security, that the American historian knew the time had come for him to leave his home country. For months, he had watched Donald Trump’s administration unleash a multipronged attack on academia – slashing funding, targeting international students and deeming certain fields and even keywords off limits. As his plane approached the US, it felt as though the battle had hit home, as Sandberg worried that he would face reprisals over comments he had made during his travels to the French media on the future of research in the US. “It makes you think about what your status is as a researcher and the principle of academic freedom,” he said. “Things have really changed … The entire system of research and higher education in the United States is really under attack.” Soon after, he became one of the nearly 300 researchers to apply for a French university’s groundbreaking offer of “scientific asylum”. Launched by Aix-Marseille University, the programme was among the first in Europe to offer reprieve to researchers reeling from the US crackdown on academia, promising three years of funding for about 20 researchers. Last week, Sandberg was revealed as one of the 39 researchers shortlisted for the programme. “The American system is being destroyed at the moment,” he told the 80 reporters who turned up to meet the candidates. “I think a lot of people in the United States and as well as here in Europe have not understood the level to which all of higher education is being targeted.” Éric Berton View image in fullscreen Éric Berton, the president of Aix-Marseille University, likened the programme to the US welcoming academics from France during the second world war. Photograph: Theo Giacometti/The Guardian As reports began to emerge of funding freezes, cuts and executive orders targeting institutions across the Atlantic, institutions across Europe sprang into action, announcing plans to lure US-based academics. At Aix-Marseille University, hundreds of applications came in from researchers tied to institutions such as Johns Hopkins University, Nasa, Columbia, Yale and Stanford. Three months after they launched their programme – named Safe Place for Science – the university said it had received more than 500 inquiries. It was a glimpse of the “historic” moment the world was facing, said Éric Berton, the university’s president. “More than 80 years ago, as France was under occupation and repression, America welcomed exiled researchers, offering them a helping hand and allowing them to keep science alive,” he said. “And now, in a sad reversal of history, some American scientists have arrived in France in search of a space for freedom, thought and research.” Last week, the university opened its doors, allowing reporters to meet a handful of the Americans who were in the final running to join the programme. As high-profile battles play out between universities such as Harvard and the White House, all of them asked that their institutions not be named, citing concerns that their employers could face reprisals. Some declined to speak to the media, while others asked that their full names not be used, offering a hint of how the Trump administration’s actions are sowing anxiety among academics. “The worry is that we’ve already seen that scientists are being detained at the border. Granted they’re not US citizens, but they’re even saying now that if you speak out against the government, they will deport you,” said a biological anthropologist who asked to be identified only as Lisa. “And so I don’t need anything against me at the moment until I can officially move here with my family.” Together the researchers painted a picture of a profession that had been plunged into uncertainty as the US government slashes spending on research grants and dismantles the federal institutions that manage and hand out funding. Months into Trump’s second presidency, politics is increasingly blurring into academia as the government works to root out anything it deems as “wokeism” from the post-secondary world. “There’s a lot of censorship now, it’s crazy,” said Carol Lee, an evolutionary biologist, pointing to the list of terms now seen as off-limits in research grant applications. “There are a lot of words that we’re not allowed to use. We’re not allowed to use the words diversity, women, LGBTQ.” While the swift pace of change had left many nervous about what may lie ahead, many were not taking any chances. “People are moving, for sure,” said Lee. “A lot of top people have already moved to China. And China is laying out the red carpet. If people are getting an offer from Canada, people are moving to Canada.” For Lisa, the biological anthropologist, the reality of dismantling her life in the US and moving her husband, a schoolteacher, and their two kids across the Atlantic was starting to sink in. “It’s excitement, but it’s nerve-racking,” she said. She knew she had to get out when it became clear that Trump had won a second term. Months later, she has found a potential path to do so, but is still wrapping her head around all that taking part in Aix-Marseille University’s programme would entail. “It is a big pay cut,” she said. “My kids are super gung-ho. My husband is just worried that he won’t find a job. Which is my worry too, because I don’t think I’ll be able to afford four of us on my salary.” But for her, and several others on the shortlist, the view was that there were few other options. “It’s a very discouraging time to be a scientist,” said James, a climate researcher who asked that his full name not be used. “I feel America has always had a sort of anti-intellectual strain – it happens to be very ascendant right now. It’s a relatively small proportion that doesn’t trust scientists, but it’s unfortunately a very powerful segment.” His wife had also been shortlisted for the same programme in southern France, leaving the couple on the brink of uprooting the lives and careers they had spent decades building in the US. “I have very mixed feelings,” he said. “I’m very grateful that we’ll have the opportunity, but really quite sad that I need the opportunity.”
US ceding the Arctic to China and Russia now
Heather Conley, July/August 2025, The Arctic Great Game” And Why America Risks Losing It, HEATHER A. CONLEY is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former President of the German Marshall Fund. From 2001 to 2005, she was U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and European Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print-article/node/1133201
“Fighting it out over the Arctic, with the vast resources of the Arctic, is going to be the new great game of the twenty-first century,” Steve Bannon, who served as chief strategist early in President Donald Trump’s first term, declared in an interview in February. The power struggle unfolding in the far north does indeed have much in common with the original Great Game, the nineteenth-century competition between the era’s two great powers, the British and Russian Empires, over access to strategically and economically valuable territory in Central Asia. In today’s contest, China, Russia, and the United States are similarly pursuing territorial expansion and influence. The modern powers are again eager to access economic riches and build protective buffer zones. And should the competition intensify, the players’ military adventures could even end the same way their predecessors did: thwarted by cold weather. With nineteenth-century power dynamics resurgent, the former U.S. diplomat Mary Thompson-Jones’s recent book, America in the Arctic, offers a timely and informative narrative of how the United States acquired and maintained its status as an Arctic power. After a largely successful history of building a U.S. presence in the Arctic, Thompson-Jones warns, Washington is now paying insufficient attention to a region that has become a focus of the world’s great powers. Even in the short time since America in the Arctic was written, new developments have raised the stakes. After taking office, Trump trained his sights on potential Arctic acquisitions, making frequent, controversial references to Canada as “the 51st state” and vowing that the United States would “get” Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, “one way or another.” Cooperation between Russia and China, meanwhile, has been growing since their 2022 announcement of an “unlimited partnership,” which in the Arctic has translated to joint scientific, space, and military operations, including coast guard and naval patrols. And Washington’s recent outreach to Moscow has introduced a wildcard: should talks yield some kind of grand bargain, the resulting geopolitical realignment could change the game entirely Whatever happens, a contest over critical minerals, maritime routes, fisheries, natural resources, seabed mining, and satellite communications is coming, and the United States is not ready for it. For years, Russia and China have been preparing to take advantage of new Arctic shipping routes, improving their undersea military and scientific capabilities, and honing their hybrid warfare tactics while U.S. attention has been elsewhere. To compete, the United States will need to dramatically increase its military, economic, scientific, and diplomatic presence in the Arctic, in close cooperation with U.S. allies. If Washington does not resolve the deficiencies and contradictions of its Arctic strategy soon, it may find that it has already lost the new great game. MEET THE CONTESTANTS Thompson-Jones provides a rich history of the United States’ experience in the Arctic, including its active role in shaping the Arctic policies of Canada, Denmark (via Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden, incorporating memorable vignettes from each Arctic country. A former U.S. diplomat who served in Canada, Thompson-Jones conveys her deep admiration for the people who live in the Arctic and her appreciation of the unrelenting effects of climate change, the desire for security, and the value of friends and allies “when the ice breaks,” as the Inuit proverb goes. The book closes with a stark—and accurate—lament of Washington’s distinct lack of ambition in its recent Arctic policies. Thompson-Jones, writing before the U.S. presidential election last year, recommends that future leaders increase their focus on climate change and multilateral diplomacy in an expansive Arctic strategy. That advice, unfortunately, quickly became outdated with the return of Trump. More likely to suit the sensibilities of the U.S. president is Thompson-Jones’s suggestion that the United States have what she calls a “Longyear moment”—a reference to a Midwestern industrialist named John Longyear, who in 1901 sailed to the Svalbard archipelago in the sea north of mainland Norway and “saw iron ore and big possibilities.” In 1906, Longyear founded the Arctic Coal Company and sought to build and sustain an industrial presence in the Arctic, with the eventual support of the U.S. government. Thompson-Jones writes that this venture represented a “profound conceptual shift” in U.S. approaches to the Arctic, ushering in an era of heightened ambition. Over a century later, the United States needs to pursue “big possibilities” in the Arctic once again if it is to compete with its rivals, Russia and China. All three players are invested in the region, but in different ways. For Russia, which holds vast swaths of Arctic territory, the region is vital to its military and economic survival. For China, the Arctic represents an opportunity to diversify its global economic interests. And for the United States, which secured its Arctic presence with the 1867 purchase of the territory of Alaska from Russia—a sale that Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s former deputy prime minister, has described as a “betrayal of Russian power status”—the region is a northern frontline of defense. The Arctic animates Russian President Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical strategy. He seeks to develop a maritime passageway, the Northern Sea Route, that traverses Russia’s northern coastal waters and is dotted with new port infrastructure linked by rail to the country’s sub-Arctic regions. A new fleet of Russian icebreakers would escort registered vessels along the route, which would facilitate the export of Russian natural resources and the east-west transit of Chinese goods. In that kind of large-scale project, Thompson-Jones traces echoes of a brutal legacy: the savagery of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s Arctic infrastructure campaign, in which roads, railways, and mines were built by prisoners and forced laborers, many of whom died during the construction. One road was known as “the Bone Road” because so many workers were buried in its foundation that “there is one body for every meter of road.” Putin’s economic and military buildup in the region is less ruthless than Stalin’s but similarly ambitious, driven by Russia’s chronic sense of insecurity and fear of losing control over its territory. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Arctic military bases were closed, damaged infrastructure was left unrepaired, and many Arctic populations, cut off from state subsidies, moved elsewhere. Today, Russian authorities are trying to prevent a further deterioration of the Arctic population by delaying residents’ requests to leave. Polar gulags are also the preferred place to send political prisoners who threaten the government, such as the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died under suspicious circumstances in one such prison in 2024. Russia is constructing and refurbishing Arctic military bases, in part to improve its monitoring capabilities as commercial activity increases along the Northern Sea Route. The sudden appearance of Russian flags, crosses, and Orthodox priests across not just the Russian Arctic but also, worryingly, the Norwegian High North are declarations of Russia’s past, present, and future ownership. China joined the Arctic game more recently. Despite lacking Arctic territory of its own, China has declared itself a “near Arctic” state on the basis of fifteenth-century maps and its interest in Arctic governance. Beginning in 2004, when it established its first research station on Svalbard, it has used scientific cooperation to boost its Arctic presence and knowledge. Later, China pursued business ventures with Canada and the Nordic states, but these countries were wary of its investment terms—and under pressure from Washington—and slowly restricted Beijing’s access. Another opening came with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As Moscow faced the loss of its European markets, the end of its partnerships with Western energy companies, and wartime budgetary limitations, it welcomed Chinese investment as a way to fill the gap. China increased funding for Russia’s liquefied natural gas projects in the Arctic and related infrastructure development along the Northern Sea Route, expanding its commercial presence in the region. For its part, the United States has been an Arctic economic power since it acquired Alaska to secure access to the territory’s natural resources. It first attempted to purchase Greenland in 1868 for the same reason. (Further attempts to acquire the island—in 1910, 1946, and 2019—had a mix of economic and security motives.) After World War II, the United States expanded its Arctic presence through a network of regional alliances and infrastructure projects. In the 1950s, it built the Distant Early Warning Line, a string of radar stations that traversed Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands and remained operational until 1993 to defend against a potential Soviet missile attack. In cooperation with Canada, the United States constructed the Alaska Highway and created an integrated air defense system known as NORAD. Together with NATO allies, U.S. forces patrolled the waters and airspace of the North Atlantic, particularly around Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom, to detect Soviet, and later, Russian nuclear submarines and bombers. The Arctic remains vital to U.S. economic and security interests. Anchorage, Alaska, is home to the fourth-busiest cargo airport in the world. Nearly all of the United States’ radar systems and ground-based missile interceptors are located in the state, whose high latitude enables earlier detection of incoming threats. Recent bilateral defense agreements with all five Nordic countries and the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, in 2023 and 2024, respectively, have strengthened collective defense in the Arctic. THE GAME BOARD The prize that Russia, China, and the United States are all after is control. As the American aviator Billy Mitchell quipped in 1935, “Whoever holds Alaska will hold the world.” Control of Arctic land offers several advantages. Crossing over polar regions shortens the distances that cargo vessels, airplanes, undersea cables, or intercontinental ballistic missiles must travel to reach their destinations. The region hosts satellite ground stations and orbital launch sites that are important to both civilian and military operations. High-latitude communications infrastructure, although limited, is vital for tracking vessels, monitoring weather, and integrating surveillance systems. Arctic lands and seabeds also hold vast quantities of critical minerals and energy resources, and Arctic waters are becoming an increasingly important source of food as warming ocean temperatures compel fish to swim north seeking cooler waters. The main battle lines will thus be drawn along the Arctic seabed, in international waters, and en route to outer space. U.S. and Russian nuclear submarines already patrol zones where undersea cables connect Europe and the United States, and security is likely to get tighter as Russian and Chinese vessels target new cables. Countries will also be looking to lock in access to critical minerals. In 2023, a United Nations commission associated with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) issued recommendations that supported most of Russia’s claims to extend its outer continental shelf deep into the central Arctic. (Russia must eventually negotiate with Canada and Denmark to resolve overlapping claims.) Seabed mining in this area could increase Russia’s commercial and military presence in international waters. Disputes over the status of two Arctic maritime routes, the Russian Northern Sea Route and the Canadian equivalent, the Northwest Passage, are likely to continue. Both Russia and Canada claim these passages as internal waters, but the United States and other countries consider them to be international waters and therefore not subject to national laws or restrictions. As polar ice melts, a third transpolar route that lies almost entirely in undisputed international waters could open up, and the United States will need additional maritime and monitoring infrastructure to prepare for its increased use. China has already begun testing the viability of the route, sending an icebreaker through it in 2012. Finally, the positioning of satellite ground stations and polar orbit launching stations in the Arctic will be a key front of the space race. As Russia has demonstrated in its war in Ukraine, the country that controls global navigation systems and can disarm the satellites of its adversaries will have enormous military advantages. PLAYING TO WIN The United States is woefully unprepared for the emerging competition. Despite efforts from Congress, especially the delegations from Alaska, Maine, and Washington, to push successive administrations to devote the necessary resources to the region, the U.S. defense community has treated it as a low priority. Insufficient funding and insufficient attention create a vicious circle, producing uninspired Arctic strategies that lack adequate budgets and clear command structures. To get back in the game, the United States needs to ramp up its military and economic presence in the Arctic, working closely with its Arctic allies to strengthen its scientific and surveillance networks to better identify and defend against threats. The most visible sign of the United States’ inadequate preparation is its aging icebreaker fleet. The U.S. Navy has no ice-strengthened surface ships, a class of ship that can navigate mostly ice-free waters. The U.S. Coast Guard has only three icebreakers—a stronger ship designed to clear passages through solid ice—but just two are operational today, and they must serve both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Just one, a 50-year-old ship, can break through 20 feet of ice. In 2024, Washington purchased the third, a commercial icebreaker built in 2012, but work must be done on it before it becomes operational, expected next year. This ship, which can break nearly five feet of ice, is meant to serve as a backup to the United States’ older icebreakers until a new, more powerful icebreaker that the first Trump administration commissioned in 2019 is constructed. The target date for that project, currently 2030, has been delayed by repeated design changes and the erosion of expertise at U.S. shipyards, which have not built a heavy icebreaker—one that can cut through ice 21 feet thick—since the 1970s. The problem goes well beyond icebreakers. The United States does not have sufficient military presence or maritime infrastructure, such as deep-sea ports, to defend large swaths of Arctic territory. U.S. forces are able to operate Pituffik Space Base on the north coast of Greenland, for example, but they cannot secure the entire island. The Trump administration has also been jeopardizing critical Arctic alliances. Its aggression toward Canada and Denmark has pushed both countries to enhance their capabilities—Canada announced plans to construct two new icebreakers and three new Arctic military bases earlier this year, and Denmark announced a $2 billion security upgrade in January and another $600 million for surveillance vessels in April—but threaten to damage their relationships with the United States in the long term. If Washington is to compete with China and Russia, it needs its Arctic friends fully on its side. Washington must also start putting real money behind the development of U.S. Arctic capabilities. Trump has spoken repeatedly about U.S. interests in the Arctic, and since 2021 Congress has pushed for multiyear funding for an Arctic security initiative to be included in the Pentagon’s budget. It is time to make that plan a reality. The U.S. Navy needs ice-strengthened ships. Trump has repeatedly called for the construction of 40 icebreakers, but this quantity is unnecessary and unrealistic. The Coast Guard has said it needs eight or nine, and even reaching this number within a reasonable time frame would require most of the building to be done by foreign shipyards. Runways, radar systems, and other military installations damaged by thawing permafrost must be repaired and stabilized. Increased deployments of personnel and long-range bombers, more and better port facilities and sensors along the coasts of Greenland, and upgraded satellite communications, underwater drones, and sea-floor mapping are necessary to monitor the vast expanse of the Arctic and particularly to detect Russian or Chinese military activity. As U.S. General Gregory Guillot, the head of the U.S. Northern Command, put it in his congressional testimony in February, “You cannot defeat what you cannot see.” The U.S. military must also streamline responsibility for operations in the Arctic under a single regional command. In the existing structure, developed in 2011, operational responsibilities are divided between the U.S. European Command, which covers the European Arctic, and the U.S. Northern Command and the U.S.-Canadian organization NORAD, which together cover North America. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, meanwhile, manages the bulk of the U.S. Army’s cold-weather and airborne capabilities based in Alaska. With each command focused on its own area, no single entity has eyes on the Arctic as a whole. Even the east and west coasts of Greenland fall under separate military jurisdictions. A unified subregional U.S. Arctic Command would be able to detect and respond to adversaries’ activities across the Arctic and support regional commands. There are clear steps the United States can take to access the Arctic’s critical minerals, too. One is for the Energy and State Departments to create a dedicated Arctic initiative, building on the Minerals Security Partnership (a grouping of 14 countries, plus the European Union, formed in 2022), to boost public-private investment in sustainable mining and related infrastructure in Alaska, Greenland, and other Arctic locations. Another step is to enlarge U.S. Arctic territory—not by trying to buy Greenland or incorporate Canada, but by extending the U.S. outer continental shelf in the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean. The Biden administration began this process in 2023 by mapping 151,700 square nautical miles as an extension of the land mass of Alaska, as defined under UNCLOS. Although not a signatory to the treaty, Washington can still submit a claim to these waters to the associated UN commission. The United States, moreover, ought to ratify this treaty, which both China and Russia have signed, in order to shape future governance of seabed mining and to use its provisions to hold Beijing and Moscow accountable for violations of maritime law. For the past two decades, Washington has written dozens of Arctic strategies while letting its Arctic capabilities atrophy and, more recently, alienating its Arctic allies. But this is the time for concerted action. Russia and China have already made their opening moves. The United States, following a line from Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 book, Kim, set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Central Asia, must now “go far and far into the North, playing the Great Game.”
US needs nuclear-powered ice breakers
Seth Grae, 6-25-25, The United States must build a fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers to counter Russia and China’s advantage in the Arctic, Why American Arctic Dominance Depends on the Deployment of Nuclear-Powered Icebreakers, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/energy-world/why-american-arctic-dominance-depends-on-the-deployment-of-nuclear-powered-icebreakers, Seth Grae is CEO of Lightbridge Corporation, a developer of advanced nuclear fuels, and chairman of the International Council of the American Nuclear Society.
The United States faces a developing crisis in the Arctic, where our adversaries have the advantage because, unlike the United States, they have existing and planned nuclear-powered icebreakers, allowing them easy access to shipping routes and areas for critical mineral extraction that the United States cannot as easily access without nuclear-powered icebreakers. American dominance in the Arctic regions will continue to be of vital importance to our nation and our allies, and the United States should take the lead in deploying nuclear-powered icebreaker ships. The Strategic Gap between the United States and Our Adversaries It will also offer unprecedented access to vast untapped natural resources, including oil, gas, and rare earth minerals, where such mining is legal and can be done in an environmentally responsible manner. Currently, Russia holds a commanding lead with seven nuclear-powered icebreakers in operation and several more under construction, including the massive Project 22220 and Lider-class vessels, which are designed to keep Arctic shipping lanes open year-round. China also has a major program to deploy nuclear-powered icebreaker ships, even though China does not border the Arctic. In stark contrast, the United States has zero nuclear-powered icebreakers, with only two conventionally powered heavy icebreakers in service, one of which, the aging Polar Star, was commissioned in the 1970s. By investing in its own nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet, the United States can begin to close this strategic gap, assert its sovereign interests, and prevent potential adversaries from monopolizing critical passages and Arctic resources. While the United States is working to add new conventionally powered icebreaker ships, including contemplating the purchase of such ships from Finland, these ships will be inferior to Russia’s nuclear-powered ships. The strategic advantages of nuclear propulsion are well established by the US Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers and their ability to project ever-present American dominance across the globe. These strategic advantages should also be extended to our nation’s icebreaker fleet in the Arctic. The Role of the US Government We believe that a US government program backed by congressional authorizations and appropriations could develop a US nuclear-powered icebreaker in perhaps as little as three years’ time. Since the United States is already working with Finland to develop conventional icebreaker ships, this relationship could be leveraged to allow the United States and Finland to develop a nuclear-powered icebreaker ship platform in a timely manner, into which the nuclear propulsion system could be inserted. Icebreaker Fleet Propulsion As CEO of Lightbridge Corporation, a leading developer of advanced nuclear fuels, and also serving as chair of the International Council of the American Nuclear Society, we know that naval nuclear propulsion offers unparalleled endurance and power, allowing icebreakers to operate year-round without the need for constant refueling—an essential capability in the remote and severe Arctic environment. freestar Since reactors designed for submarines and aircraft carriers would not work, due to weight and other restrictions, for an icebreaker ship, the propulsion system could be based on a compact reactor with innovative fuel that can power the ship without needing to refuel for long durations. Contractors that produce nuclear propulsion systems for the US Navy could produce a compact pressurized water reactor within an acceptable timeframe. It’s Time to Close the Arctic Gap Russia and China are leading the United States with regard to nuclear icebreakers in the Arctic. This puts the United States at a disadvantage in securing access to Arctic shipping routes and to the region’s critical mineral resources. To secure our nation’s strategic advantages in the Arctic, the United States should embark on an expedited nuclear-powered icebreaker deployment initiative. Our nation should deploy a nuclear icebreaker fleet, the most powerful icebreaker ships in the world.
Melting ice means Russia has an Arctic advantage
Domic Waghorn, 5-30, 25, The fight for the Arctic – where climate change is giving Russia room to manoeuvre, Sky News, https://news.sky.com/story/the-fight-for-the-arctic-where-climate-change-is-giving-russia-room-to-manoeuvre-13376706
The twin threats of climate change and Russian malign activity in the Arctic must be taken “deadly seriously,” David Lammy has warned. We travelled to Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago that is the most northern settled land on Earth, 400 miles from the North Pole. It is at the heart of an Arctic region facing growing geopolitical tension and feeling the brunt of climate change. be viewed from your current country or location Why the Arctic is being fought over Mr Lammy told us the geopolitics of the region must be taken “deadly seriously” due to climate change and “the threats we’re seeing from Russia”. We witnessed the direct impact of climate change along Svalbard’s coastline and inland waterways. There is less ice, we were told, compared to the past. Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Norway’s Foreign Minister Barth Eide view the melting Blomstrandbreen glacier during a boat trip on Kongsfjorden, an inlet on the west coast of Spitsbergen, during his visit to Svalbard, Norway. Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire Rescue team members work as smoke rises at the site where an Air India plane crashed in Ahmedabad, India, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Amit Dave What we know so far after Air India flight to London Gatwick crashes Air India screen grabs of the crash Moments before Air India plane crash “We do see Russia’s shadow fleet using these waters,” Mr Lammy said. “We do see increased activity from submarines with nuclear capability under our waters and we do see hybrid sabotage of undersea cables at this time.” In Tromso, further south, the foreign secretary was briefed by Norwegian military commanders. Vice Admiral Rune Andersen, the Chief of Norwegian Joint Headquarters, told Sky News the Russian threat was explicit. “Russia has stated that they are in confrontation with the West and are utilising a lot of hybrid methods to undermine Western security,” he said. But it’s not just Vladimir Putin they’re worried about. Norwegian observers are concerned by US president Donald Trump’s strange relationship with the Russian leader too. Vladimir Putin chairs a security council meeting at the Kremlin. Pic: AP Image: Norwegian observers are concerned about the Russian leader – and Trump being ‘too soft’ on him. Pic: AP Karsten Friis, a Norwegian defence and security analyst, told Sky News: “If he’s too soft on Putin, if he is kind of normalising relations with Russia, I wouldn’t be surprised. “I would expect Russia to push us, to test us, to push borders, to see what we can do as Europeans.” Changes in the Arctic mean new challenges for the NATO military alliance – including stepping up activity to deter threats, most of all from Russia.
No Arctic icebreaker advantage beyond what Russia has now
Malte Humpert, June 14, 2025, Russia to Spend $6bn To Jumpstart Domestic Shipbuilding, Includes 130 Vessels for Arctic, https://gcaptain.com/russia-to-spend-6bn-to-jumpstart-domestic-shipbuilding-includes-130-vessels-for-arctic/
The country’s ability to execute on such an ambitious Arctic shipbuilding plan remains questionable. While Russia has extensive experience constructing conventional and nuclear-powered icebreakers, its yards have thus far struggled to construct ice-class LNG carriers and oil tankers. The Far East Zvezda yard has been unable to commission a number of Arc7 gas carriers partially constructed by South Korean Samsung Heavy Industries. Not a single Arc6 crude oil tanker for the massive Arctic Vostok Oil project, the largest oil development in Russia since the 1980s, has been delivered. The project requires thirty such vessels by the 2030s. Expansion of the country’s icebreaker fleet is also expected to continue. The strategy foresees fleet strength reaching 60 vessels by 2030 and 69 by 2036 in the baseline scenario. As of 2023 the country’s icebreaker fleet consisted of 45 icebreakers, including 37 diesel-electric and 8 nuclear. However, similar to the U.S.’ aging Arctic capacity, many of Russia’s icebreakers will need to be replaced in the coming two decades. Nearly half of its icebreakers are older than 40 years, with just 10 vessels younger than 10 years.
Arctic exploration & development a critical part of US masculine & imperial desire to expand Westward
Christopher Hooks, May 15, 2025, Real Men Steal Countries: Inside Trump’s Absurd Greenland Obsession, https://newrepublic.com/article/194716/trump-greenland-nineteenth-century-steal-country
Go West, young man, and grow up with the country. There is nothing for you in the East. The irascible New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley said that around 1833, of course, except that he probably didn’t. It is appropriate that this famous epigraph of America’s romantic nineteenth century seems to have been stitched together after the fact, an imagined quote about the future from an imagined past. Who cares. It’s a good line, and it was a romantic time. Hegemony is boring. America was growing then, fighting to be born. Back before antidepressants and collateralized debt obligations, the malaise of modern life, a man could get all he needed with just his wit and hands: a paraffin lamp—made in the United States, no less—a hardy wife capable of surviving at least a few childbirths, and hopefully no more than one or two run-ins with rickets or the Russian grippe. It all went to plan, for good and ill. But then we ran out of West. We ran out of Guano Islands. We ran out of overseas markets to open. We even ran out of history, in time. We put Mikhail Gorbachev in a Pizza Hut ad. For a while we had some hope for what we called the “New Frontier”—go up, young man—but what’s out there is mostly rocks. America seemed fated for a dark future: tedium, stasis, and email jobs. But today, we have discovered a new cardinal direction. Go north, says Charlie Kirk, founder and chief brain-thinker of Turning Point USA, the institution that translates Donald Trump’s Republican Party to the youth of America. In January, two weeks before the inauguration, Kirk joined Donald Trump Jr. on “Trump Force One,” the famous campaign 757, as the two took a half-day trip to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, where they met with a small group who want independence from Denmark and closer ties with the United States. Trump Sr. is the source of the push to annex Greenland, of course. He keeps talking about the island like a Dick Tracy villain—we’ll “get it,” he says, “one way or the other,” always hinting that while peaceful acquisition is preferable, force is a possibility. But because he’s not very good at articulating why, or what exactly he means and wants, it falls to folks like Kirk to translate. So he says: “There are three options of who will control Greenland. America, Russia, or China.” That’s the strategic rationale. Next, there’s the economic rationale: The island has “incomprehensible amounts of wealth. We’re talking that Greenland could be the new Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Permian Basin, Marcellus Shale, and the Balkan all mixed into one.” (He means the Bakken formation.) The spiritual bounty offered by Greenland is the real thing; what we might call the Weltanschauung rationale: It’s a portal to the 19th century.What Kirk saw sometime between when his plane landed in the late morning and the moment it took off later that day was a place that offers “the resurrection of masculine American energy.” There are some signs Kirk may not entirely know what he’s talking about. In his nine-minute dispatch, he does not pronounce the name of the city he visited correctly once. (It’s more like “nuke” than the room you might eat breakfast in.) But details are for pedants. The spiritual bounty offered by Greenland is the real thing—what we might call the Weltanschauung rationale: It’s a portal to the nineteenth century. What he saw sometime between when his plane landed in the late morning and the moment it took off later in the day was a place that offers “the resurrection of masculine American energy. It is the return of Manifest Destiny,” said Kirk. American men would find a blank canvas on which they could paint the visions that reality-based liberals have spent decades suffocating with their feminine rules and admonitions. The Arctic frontier will make us “dream again,” he said; will give us the space to reject modernity, liberate ourselves from the sight of Uncle Sam as a “low-testosterone, beta male slouching in our chair, allowing the world to run over us.” I am by any fair evaluation a low-testosterone male with bad posture. But there is something in Kirk’s call I cannot deny. Besides, as a freelance magazine journalist, I am a blue-collar manufacturing worker in a collapsing industry that no amount of tariffs can fix. My day-to-day has become a Rust Belt of the mind, and there is nothing left for me in the West. Off I go. In late March, a mostly empty charter flight takes me to Kangerlussuaq, a settlement of around 400 people about 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, about one-third of the way up the western coast of Greenland at the end of a 120-mile long fjord. Kangerlussuaq is a base station and logistics hub with two notable assets. There is an airport, built by the Americans in 1941 and maintained as an air base until 1992. For a while it was, improbably, a chic jet-age stopover—a midway point on the Copenhagen-to-Los Angeles route. Before last year’s opening of a new four-gate airport terminal in Nuuk, it was Greenland’s primary landing strip for international flights. There is a hotel in the old barracks, one restaurant, and one bar. The other asset is the road out of town, built by the Swedish firm Skanska to test German cars. At 19 miles, it is the longest in Greenland, and the only place where the island’s massive ice sheet is accessible by car, providing a thin reason for Kangerlussuaq to keep existing. A world map showing Greenland and its proximity to Russian and the U.S. Map by Haisam Hussein Kirk’s entreaty to American youth to find a future in Greenland provides one key insight: Trump’s push to annex the island is best understood in terms of American psychology and pathology, habits of thought and action. It doesn’t take long to realize that the rest of it is nonsense. Greenland is a beautiful and unique place, but it has nothing—Arctic ports, mineral resources, room to develop—that the United States is not already blessed to have in great abundance. What Greenland does have in great abundance is nothing, a biblical amount of nothingness. The ice sheet covers almost 80 percent of the island and is about a mile thick on average. It weighs, perhaps, 2.35 quintillion tons, flows and shifts like a very slow-moving river, and is profoundly hostile to most forms of life. On a Friday morning, a day when the morning temperature at the airport is about five degrees Fahrenheit—spring is in full swing—I meet a guide named Søren, who has agreed to take me to the ice sheet. Søren is a friendly, scoffing, caustic Dane in an immaculate cable-knit sweater who keeps roasting me, correctly, for bringing the wrong gear. “You’re going to be extremely unhappy,” he says. He drives a giant army-green Mercedes diesel truck with tires that are substantially as tall as I am. Søren comes from the Werner Herzog school of tour-guiding. The theme on the drive to the ice sheet is human futility. The road out of town is a kind of living museum of the waves of short-timers who have come here for some reason that no longer applies. There’s the golf course, now partially washed away, built by two pilots. There’s the “forest” just out of town, where an optimistic scientist came to see if he could make pine trees grow. The survivors are about a half-century old and as stubby as Charlie Brown’s Christmas shrub. Otherwise, the land is totally barren. We drive for about two hours, and the sights are few. We stop at a plane crash—a Lockheed T-33A—whose mangled turbojet engine breaks up the visual monotony. There is a field where the Americans left unexploded ordnance, which schoolchildren used to find. Søren points out a radio station where an American was once mangled by a polar bear. There is occasionally a reindeer, a ptarmigan, a gyrfalcon. But the life that prospers here is weird and ancient. One currently frozen lake is said to contain Arctic tadpole shrimp. Another is called plum lake, because the prehistoric algae that grows there clumps into balls. We pass two Inuit graves. The ground being totally frozen, the bodies are not buried but covered with rocks. This still seems like it must have been hard to do, because there aren’t many rocks around. The end of the road and civilization—a place called Point 660—is marked incongruously by a very small yellow Caterpillar tractor, partially snowed under, facing east across about 440 miles of ice as if ready to do battle. It seems outmatched. It takes roughly five hours to hike about six miles on the sheet. The expensive hiking boots I was happy to have procured for the trip are the wrong kind to take crampons. My right foot keeps sliding out of the frame, and I roll my ankle a little scrambling up a 10-foot ledge of fresh powder, with a good deal of help from Søren, feeling a little bit like the boat in Fitzcarraldo. The pants I brought aren’t long enough to keep snow from piling around my ankles, and in a few hours they’re uncomfortably wet. My gloves aren’t tight enough. The sun is out, thank God, but the wind is bitter. Having established myself as a stupid American from the jump, I resolve to be as cheerful as possible. The ice is incredibly beautiful. Battered by wind, the great slabs of ice that form the terrain are smoothed like river rocks, but also shaped in a way that catches the sunlight in strange patterns. It is a river, Søren reminds me. The snow that covers the ice in parts is pure, fresh white powder, and when the wind slips it over the mounds of ice, catching the sunlight, too, it looks—and I’m sorry to reach for this—like the spice in Dune. It’s the most hostile environment I’ve ever experienced. Søren keeps pointing out new ways to die. Everywhere we walk, he points out moulins, the holes that lead to deep channels into the interior of the ice sheet. Last season, he says, pointing to the bottom of a house-size funnel, a hiker fell and began to slide down to the hole here, and the guide caught him by the straps of his crampons. In the summer, the moulins are easy to identify because they are fed by fast-moving rivers—fall in, and you’re gone—but in the winter, the crevices and holes may be hidden by snow bridges. These dangers are replicated mile by mile across the ice sheet, which is a tad larger than Iran. The sheet is melting at the fastest rate in 12,000 years. In some of the more hype-driven corners of the Annex Greenland movement, you see excitement about this—“Make Greenland Green Again / Emit CO2,” Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee tweeted. It may take one to 10 more millennia to fully melt, but if it does it will raise the global sea level by about 24 feet, and by that time the earth we knew will have been destroyed. There may be wonderful things under here, but we are not meant to know them. At the start of his second term, President Trump has stressed his affection for two nineteenth-century expansionist presidents: William McKinley, who, among other acquisitions, annexed Hawaii, and James Polk, whose most audacious addition to the Union was California. He’s looking for a legacy, and he wants to acquire something. But the ice sheet is not California. I mean, not even Bakersfield is this bleak. Unlike other presidents, who used rhetoric and performance to playact, Trump operates within a comedic register. His world is irony. This offers two pitfalls for the observer, who can err in taking him too seriously or not seriously enough. He maintains plausible deniability until the point when he acts—see the aftermath of “Liberation Day.” Trump’s desire to annex Greenland, when it surfaced in his first term, seemed too bizarre to take seriously. It is still hard for Americans to take seriously—as it is when he vows to annex Canada or reoccupy the Panama Canal Zone. But we are not taking it seriously enough. His desire to enlarge the United States, to acquire new territory, and his appreciation for the legacy of Polk and McKinley is a through line that connects his campaign, his pre-presidency, his inaugural speech, his recent address to Congress, and both the official and unofficial actions of his administration and wider circle. While the American public is absorbed with more pressing Trump-related problems, there is a looming possibility that he sets off a real international crisis by using force or the threat of force against a longtime ally. No, Marines are not likely to be storming the beaches of Nuuk anytime soon, or of Kingston, Ontario, for that matter. But there is much damage that Trump could inflict short of a war. He could, for example, greatly expand the deployed forces at America’s base in Greenland’s north and dare Denmark, and the island’s government, to respond. Trump’s Greenland fixation—and his love of the glories of the nineteenth century—has something important to tell us about Trump’s brain, and possibly about the direction of the United States. But to get there, we need to do a little housecleaning, because it’s important to say that essentially every part of the case Trump makes is wrong. In the first place, they don’t make sense because formal control of Greenland is not necessary to achieve the administration’s stated objectives. In the second place, Trump’s approach is hurting America’s reputation in Greenland, a place where it could easily develop much closer ties through diplomacy and investment. In the third, the details of the practical case they make for the necessity of U.S. involvement in Greenland are simply wrong. Redundance, incompetence, dishonesty. These three things collided in the last week of March, when an extraordinary diplomatic crisis hit Nuuk. The capital is home to around a third of the island’s population and has many of the signs of a modern, wealthy city—a shopping mall, mass transit in the form of the Nuup Bussii, and sleek modern apartment buildings. There are also continual reminders that it is not. Sewage flows into the pristine fjord at a building the locals call the “chocolate factory,” whose vicinity seems to host most of the birds in town, perhaps because the water is warmer. The older housing blocks look Soviet. There are a handful of restaurants in the “downtown” area and seemingly one proper bar, Daddy’s, kitted out like a 1990s T.G.I. Friday’s and open till 4 a.m. on Fredag and Lørdag. An illustration of Trump, Don Jr., and Vance planting an American flag in a Greenland glacier Illustration by Cold War Steve You can feel every ripple, in other words, and the Americans caused a big one when the administration announced a visit by Usha Vance, along with national security adviser Michael Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Later, JD Vance joined, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to visit the island. The alarm this caused was hard to overstate, because of something any capable diplomat could have pointed out to them. On March 11, Greenland held elections. The five parties that won seats in the 31-member Inatsisartut expressed unanimity on one issue—a lack of desire to become an American colony—and near-unanimity on another—fully 29 seats went to parties that favored independence from Denmark. (Though they differed on a timetable.) The parties had 45 days to form a government, until which time there was no one who could speak for the island in an official capacity. The scribes at the mighty little newspaper Sermitsiaq faithfully reported the two possible responses to this pressure campaign. “It is important that we do not panic,” the soon-to-be prime minister of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, told the paper. Nielsen has been in high-pressure international situations before: He won a gold medal in badminton for his home in the 2023 Island Games, where he defeated a player from the British crown dependency of Guernsey. On the other hand, perhaps a little panic was just the thing. Outgoing prime minister Múte Bourup Egede took to Sermitsiaq to declare—perhaps correctly—that the whole postwar international order was dead: “Until recently, we could safely trust the Americans, who were our allies and friends.” Greenland had played an active role in the history of the “Western allies who helped each other through thick and thin,” he said. “That time is over.” The paper drew an uncomfortable parallel between the American push for the island and the Russian push, a decade before, for Crimea, the asymmetric drive to destabilize the region and precede the final push made by the “little green men.” If this seems hyperbolic to you, consider what a nation of around 340 million looks like to a country of five digits. The island has much that others covet, no military forces besides the Danish Arktisk Kommando, and a population smaller than Missoula, Montana’s. And consider what the following days looked like. The administration presented Vance’s trip as a “private tour,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense to begin with but is peculiarly unreflective of the vast expense and machinery that kicks into place when a high American official visits a foreign country. An advance team set up in the Hans Egede Hotel, Nuuk’s swankiest. They had to find poor Usha something to do on her private visit to Nuuk, and to their embarrassment no one seemed to want to host her. Tupilak Travel, a tour agency near the center of town, initially agreed but then pulled the invitation upon realizing that they had signed on to a circus. There would be significant protests, because there had been large anti-Trump protests recently. To keep things cool and dignified, the Danes were flying in police officers, who immediately made themselves felt on the streets of the capital. One Danish member of Parliament grumbled that the expense should be borne by the United States, which was flying its own forces in. The “U.S. vanguard,” as Sermitsiaq put it as the crisis intensified, arrived in Nuuk via two Hercules C-130 transport planes, the workhorse of the empire, which brought four bulletproof cars and passengers, who dispersed throughout the country. The two planes reappeared in Kangerlussuaq. “The aircraft’s pilots and crew,” the paper reported, citing an anonymous source, “keep a low profile in Kangerlussuaq, where they move around the settlement in civilian clothes.” As they did so, Trump spoke ominously from the Oval Office about fifth columnists in Greenland, with whom he was working, and who shared his vision of the Stars and Stripes hanging above the Greenland legislature. Then, suddenly, the Americans gave up. They would visit their base instead of Nuuk, a much less provocative port of call. On a Wednesday morning, I stood outside the airport and watched the Hercules depart, reflecting on the strange feeling of reporting from a country that my own had threatened to invade. Would it be the last? That Friday, hours before JD Vance arrived, Egede and Nielsen announced a unity government, of the kind that parliamentary democracies sometimes form in wartime—one capable of warding off the Americans if they tried to come again. Only one of the five parties in the Parliament, Naleraq, didn’t join. Nominally the America-friendly party, it was reduced to calling the other parties hysterical and trying to make excuses for the Americans that they did not bother to make themselves. “Trump is only going to be president for four years,” said one Naleraq parliamentarian, at which point the island would still need American friendship. Greenland’s desire to declare independence, and its need for external investment and subsidy, is fertile ground for a stronger relationship with the United States, and an adept and subtle U.S. administration could forge that closer relationship without sacrificing its relationship with Denmark. Much is made of the need to replace Denmark’s subsidy of $511 million a year, but that’s chump change. That’s about how much the Texas Legislature is likely appropriating in film production incentives this session. Greenlanders want a partner. But they will never opt to become another colonial subject. Greenlanders might be the least receptive people in the world to Trump’s high-pressure, bullying approach, said Dwayne Menezes, the founder of the Polar Research and Policy Initiative, a north-facing think tank in London. “These are people with great pride,” he said. The American attitude is that “surely there’s a price they’re going to be willing to accept before selling their birthright.” There is no price. In 2024, the government of Greenland produced a foreign policy and defense plan for the next decade. Presenting the report at a symposium in Anchorage, Alaska, Aaja Chemnitz Arnatsiaq Larsen, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, tried to draw attention to part of the report’s title: “Nothing about us without us.” The world should understand, “When we say that, we really mean it.” The first step to approaching the island is to treat it with respect. Instead, American leaders have talked about the island as an object, not a subject. Donald Trump is right, in a very broad sense, about one thing: Greenland is on the edge of the map but in the middle of everything. The European colonization of North America, the biggest story in all of history, began in Greenland in 986, with the Norsemen soon continuing on to Canada. You can see the remnants of their settlements still today in the fjords around Qaqortoq and Narsarsuaq. That the first place in the Americas to be colonized is now set to become—if it separates from Denmark in the next decade, as seems likely—an independent, modern, and potentially prosperous nation, is a miracle of history. The Greenlandic Inuit survived the thousand-year gauntlet and have the chance to occupy the only place in North America in which the original inhabitants—some 90 percent of Greenland’s 60,000 people count themselves as native—have survived long enough to claim sovereignty. One of the many small tragedies of this affair is that Donald Trump has made this remarkable story a story about him. From 1774, the kingdom of Denmark managed Greenland through Den Kongelige Grønlandske Handel, a company that had a trading monopoly on the island and set up a racial caste system. The United States repeatedly expressed interest in Greenland in the nineteenth century, most prominently in the administration of Andrew Johnson. Secretary of State William Seward attempted to make an offer to Denmark at roughly the same time he was negotiating the purchase of Alaska. Securing both would advance the great American cause of the nineteenth century: annexing Canada. But it wasn’t to be. In 1917, the United States bought the Danish Virgin Islands instead. In that treaty, the United States agreed to shed any claim to Greenland and recognize the Danish claim. After Denmark fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, Greenland became a protectorate of the United States. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but in practical effect it has been a loose appendage of the United States ever since.We have shared, with Denmark, a kind of informal, loose condominium over Greenland that is still in effect today. But just a few decades later, after Denmark fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, Greenland became a protectorate of the United States. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but in practical effect it has been a loose appendage of the United States ever since. We have shared, with Denmark, a kind of informal condominium over Greenland that is still in effect today. This is what is so strange about Trump’s push to annex the island. He wants to take direct control—expensive, tiresome—over a place where he already exercises a high degree of indirect influence. World War II became an inflection point in how empires work. Before, empires dominated large stretches of territory to control rare mineral resources and strategic choke points. As Daniel Immerwahr, a history professor at Northwestern University, wrote in How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, the widespread adoption of synthetic materials—plastic, artificial rubber—negated much of the need for physical control of resource extraction around the world. Air power ran on an entirely different logic than sea power, which necessitated worldwide coal and oiling stations. And soft power—the radio and movies and blue jeans—was much more powerful than gunboat diplomacy had ever been. This played out in a very concentrated way in Nuuk, then called Godthaab, in 1941, when the Americans arrived. Into the formerly closed colony walked a bunch of corn-fed boys who seemed much more powerful than the Danes. Instead of company stores, residents began buying consumer goods from the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog. A newspaper and a radio station started up, and American movies started playing. The Americans built 15 bases up and down the east and west coasts of Greenland, lacing it up like you would a shoe. Kangerlussuaq was Bluie West 8; the last remaining American base in Greenland, formerly Thule Air Base, was Bluie West 6. Greenland saw real combat in the war—the Germans kept trying to set up secret weather stations—but the most important events were cultural and economic. The old colonial model was dead and dusted. After the war, the Americans offered to buy Greenland again. Denmark declined. But awkward conversations ensued. Would the United States even vacate Greenland if Denmark asked? The island gained a new prominence in American strategic thinking as a stopover to bomb Moscow. (Some of the footage of B-52s in Dr. Strangelove was filmed over Greenland.) The Soviets in turn made clear that if Denmark allowed the Americans to roost in Greenland, Denmark would be fair game in a wider war. So the Danes, traditionally proud of neutrality, joined NATO. From then on, the United States, Denmark, and Greenland, as it began to assert autonomy over the years, existed in a complex web of multilateral relations in which the United States got basically everything it wanted for very little, and with the consent—sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes grudging—of its partners. It got the bases, it got market access, and it got two faithful allies in the bargain. This is the genius of American power in the postwar period. “A lot of the mainstays of U.S. power are subtle,” said Immerwahr. “A lot of iterated negotiation with foreigners, carrots and sticks, etc. And I think Trump is uncomfortable with nearly all that.” Immerwahr isn’t sure how serious Trump is about Greenland, but he shares my fear. Trump, he said, “has a good gut feel for formerly outrageous things that are now politically possible.” Squint around at the world now, and “you can develop the argument that the taboo against colonization, roughly held since World War II, with exceptions, is breaking down.” Land acquisition is on the table again. Russia’s partial annexation of Ukraine, the brewing Chinese attempt on Taiwan, the open question of what is to happen to an ethnically cleansed Gaza Strip.… In all three places, land claims are justified with antique logic, and they’re not the only ones. Even small countries are questioning long-closed points of the international order: Politicians in Hungary moan endlessly about the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. The postwar international system, its trade agreements and multilateral institutions and proxy wars, were not all wine and roses. American power could be extremely brutal and immoral, particularly in what was called the Third World. But it “just seemed to sort of knit the world together,” said Immerwahr, at least for a time. If it starts to buckle under, you could see a “game of musical chairs,” he said, in which the great powers scramble for spheres of influence and direct, old-school control, in a similar way that they did at the end of the nineteenth century. “The worst fear is that we do that again,” he told me, “this time with nuclear weapons.” There appears to be a good deal of disagreement on the desirability of this point. Trump and fellow travelers keep pointing to the nineteenth century as a model, something to emulate. This goes back to his first term, when he made a self-conscious effort to identify with the political legacy of President Andrew Jackson. McKinley and Polk came more recently. Portraits of Jackson and Polk hang in Trump’s Oval Office with other notables of the era, where he can stare at them while he presses the hidden Diet Coke button. McKinley received a higher honor—the re-renaming of the mountain that Alaskans have long preferred to call “Denali.” From these men, he draws on three matters of importance. Jackson, and to a lesser extent Jackson’s mentee Polk, were populists, friends of the little guy and enemies of The Elite. (McKinley was not even remotely a populist.) All three men passed tariff bills. (They sought to lower tariffs, but still.) And all three, of course, were expansionists. Jackson accelerated seizures of Native American land in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court, Polk waged an aggressive war to seize almost half of Mexico, and McKinley brought manifest destiny to the Pacific and Caribbean. It says something important that Trump and the team around him have picked these three men for his White House vision board—and it says something more important that he prefers not to stress continuity with leaders from the twentieth century or the postwar period. These parallels seem very significant to the right-wing intellectuals who form the thinky section of Trump’s movement, at places like the Claremont Review of Books: “For Jacksonians like Trump, America’s spiritual renewal—its republican virtue—depends upon the ‘sober pursuits of honesty industry.’” (If you can square that with Trump’s “Strategic Crypto Reserve,” you have a nimbler mind than I.) But Trump gives no indication of having thought very deeply about them. In March 2017, Trump traveled to the Hermitage, Jackson’s estate, to celebrate his 250th birthday. Right-wingers would hail this speech for years afterward, but it was one of those Trump speeches where he did not even try to convince the audience he had read it beforehand. When he read a line he liked, he looked around and smiled, like ain’t that something? Jackson opposed the elites, Trump said. So did he! “I’m a fan, I’m a big fan,” he said. Jackson’s great enemy Henry Clay called Jackson’s victory “mortifying and sickening,” Trump said. “Oh boy, does this sound familiar?” But Jackson persevered, and “imposed tariffs on foreign countries to protect American workers.” In fact, it was Clay who was the great protectionist. It was his signature issue. All presidents of the nineteenth century oversaw tariff regimes, because that’s how the premodern state raised revenue. But Jackson (and Polk) saw protectionist tariffs as a tax on the poor to support elites—Northern industrial capital. Trump’s understanding of McKinley on this point is not much better. “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” he said in January. “That’s when we were a tariff country.” The first point is flatly wrong, of course, but McKinley was a protectionist in Congress who had a dramatic about-face as president, declaring to the world his intention to pursue global free trade—immediately before he got shot. An illustration of Trump with the Northern Lights in the background Illustration by Cold War Steve Trump’s pick-and-choose focus on the nineteenth century is a positive version of a negation—the wholesale rejection of the postwar, post–New Deal American experience. Gutting America’s state capacity and its international profile are parts of the same project. Refugee resettlement, the Voice of America, USAID, the 1965 Immigration Act, and Social Security—you have to kill them all to fully and properly wind back the clock. Robert Merry is a conservative author and historian who served as the editor of the paleoconservative publication The American Conservative and is a longtime critic of neoconservatives. He happens to have written the two most prominent recent biographies of McKinley and Polk. Both books, which I read in Nuuk, are dutiful accountings of the presidencies of both men, using official records, but they shy from ruminating on the wider political and moral universe the two men inhabited—a particularly strange omission in the case of Polk, a slaveholder who set the countdown clock to the Civil War. But in two recent pieces more or less directly addressed to Donald Trump, Merry fills in the gaps, telling Trump the lessons he should take. The century between Napoleon’s defeat and the start of World War I, he says, was an era of “robust nationalism, European imperial expansionism, and an Enlightenment faith in human improvement and progress.” If we model this, perhaps we can return to the “widespread civic satisfaction and tranquility” of the McKinley era and its “peace, prosperity, national pride, and the American ascendancy.” This is, to put it gently, a weird way to describe the nineteenth century, a vast bloody arena that was no less complicated than the present—and that led, inexorably, to the crises of the early twentieth century, in Sarajevo, St. Petersburg, and at home. But it appeals to Merry because of what came after: “the postwar Franklin Delano Roosevelt era,” in which we’re still stuck. Nationalism gave way to an “increasingly powerful globalist ethos,” he writes, and “a new meritocratic elite gained sway,” while “multicultural sensibilities became widespread and strident.” Egads! Paleoconservatives like Merry have a problem. The America of the post-Roosevelt era—righties used to call him “Rosenfeld”—is by any reasonable metric more successful than the America that came before. The 1960s were traumatic, yes, free love and all that, but only a fool would trade them for the 1860s. They get around this with a bait and switch. The nineteenth century is romanticized; the prosperity of recent decades is decried as, somehow, fake. They then say American power is broken, that the country has no choice but to revert. “Many Americans seem loath to accept or even acknowledge one of the fundamental developments of our time,” writes Merry in his lesson to Trump, referring to “the transformation of America from a unipolar world behemoth to a lesser power in a multipolar environment.” Trump “has absorbed the reality of a multipolar world,” he says. But what, precisely, is the nature of this American decline? America’s nominal GDP makes up about the same portion of the world economy that it did in 1995. China’s, of course, has grown rapidly. But America’s best asset remains the international system it created. The collective wealth and power of our allies—the ones Trump wants to discard—is vast. The American crisis is domestic in nature, a crisis of confidence. The way we provide housing, education, and medicine is broken, while tax cuts have ensured we’re funding meager services through debt. Americans are in a scarcity mindset, and that’s the perfect time to destroy something like USAID, if you’re so inclined. To invert Bill Clinton, what’s wrong with America is eating what’s right with America alive. The Sunday after the Vances leave the country, Nuuk is getting back to normal. The high is 18 degrees, and the low is 14. The HDMS Lauge Koch putters back into the fjord from a deployment, sliding past the happy birds at the chocolate factory and toward the industrial port. No Russians here yet. The sun is setting in the west, casting a pink and orange glow on the mountains. At Daddy’s, a bartender from the Philippines, of all places, is serving Carlsberg to a drunk Inuit who leans on me and says, pointing at the Filipino’s neck tattoo, “You’re a gangster? I’m a gangster, too.” Roy Orbison is playing on the stereo. The National Museum of Greenland, through a presentation about the Danish movie industry, inadvertently diagnoses current American delusions. The Greenlanders above all know that their land is a canvas for the psychological projection of outsiders. Danish “films often stage Greenland as the country where you experience life as meaningful and epoch-making, and where one sees a search for identity in the wild landscape as the solution to the problems that life in the towns and modernity have entailed.” Kevn Cøstner in Dances With Seals. Greenland is, among other things, a useful tool to produce conflict and division between Europe and the United States—to end or overhaul the postwar order. So are the tariffs. Why are the Americans doing this? My worry is that the answer is simple: We’re bored. “Life swings in a constant pendulum between pain and boredom,” said Arthur Schopenhauer, 174 years before Francis Fukuyama warned in The End of History that future generations would “struggle for the sake of struggle.” In the old days, expansion could be done in the name of strategic interest or economic imperative, but it usually served a domestic political purpose, too. The Trump administration may be frying its own state capacity as it lurches from self-created crisis to crisis, but it can offer a foreign policy to provoke, to entertain, to reassure the masculine energies. It can burn the house down. And in the future, when more entertainment will be necessary, this immense, powerful bully of a country may find itself chasing a stronger high. In Køge, southwest of Copenhagen, I meet Søren Knudsen, a retired colonel of the Danish armed forces. Knudsen lives in a converted farmhouse with his American wife, Gina, born in Dallas. They keep me fed and a little drunk: Still, the night feels ever so slightly like a funeral. Knudsen has been living with an idea of America all his life that he now sees may need a rewrite. JD Vance’s repeated statements about the Danes—that they were not a “good ally,” lazy, incompetent—caused him to take his Bronze Star, given by the Americans for his service as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, off his wall. Knudsen’s life sums up the passing era much more than Trump’s. His relationship with the United States begins in 1939. The hero in his childhood hometown was the captain who sailed the HDMS Danmark into New York Harbor for the World’s Fair—the one that promised “The World of Tomorrow”—putting him safely out of reach when the Nazis marched on Denmark in 1940. He gifted the ship to the U.S. Navy and went off to fight. “He was the war hero in town,” Knudsen said, a precious commodity in a nation whose war of resistance famously lasted six hours. As a child, he grew up in a country that had been buttressed by the Marshall Plan: He joined the army in 1979, when it was armed with surplus American equipment and the order of the day was to prepare for Soviet paratroopers and tactical nuclear weapons. In the 1990s, he became a diplomat—here he opens a bottle of vodka, a gift from his diplomatic years. He joined DANIDA, the Danish equivalent of USAID, and became a foot soldier of the new nation-building European mission. He met Gina at a party at the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania, where he was working development aid, and she was a lawyer with the American Bar Association’s overseas aid program. If these were not happy times, exactly, there had been much sadder ones in living memory. Europe, the miserable slaughterhouse of the first half of the twentieth century, was an open garden at the turn of the millennium, and that was largely backstopped by U.S. power. The 9/11 attacks did not initially seem to have changed this. Knudsen watched the towers fall from the Danish Embassy in Tirana. This was not what NATO was for, as an alliance to maintain the peace in Europe. But it was immediately clear the Danes would help, that they would be stepping up because of the “inherited” debt of the transatlantic relationship. “We sent the best young ones we had, and some of them died,” he said, sent them knowing they would come home with “wounds on their souls and on their bodies, because the Americans asked us to do so.” The Danes deployed to Afghanistan. Knudsen won his Bronze Star for his work supporting the Afghan legal system, but the Danes did the dangerous stuff, too: Denmark lost more soldiers there on a per capita basis than any other NATO country. The American mission dragged on, and on, even after it grew to include Iraq, which squandered Europe’s goodwill. A sense of irony and futility crept in. During his first winter in Kandahar, he said, his base was garrisoned by the Hawaiian National Guard, who couldn’t handle the weather. They were replaced by Alaskans in the summer, who fared worse. As the vice president of the Danish veteran’s association, he meets regularly with soldiers who struggle with trauma from the American wars. When Vance called the Danes cowards, he didn’t just insult national pride: “It feels like those guys are stomping on everything we have believed in and worked for for most of our adult lives,” Gina said. America is very lucky to have such friends as Søren Knudsen; and it has them all over the world—people who respect us more than we’ve earned, perhaps. It would be very foolish to throw them away. The vodka and goulash gone, the sun fully set, Knudsen brings out his medals and the U.S. flag that used to hang on his wall and lets slip, in a more optimistic note than he’s voiced so far, that he’ll be able to put them back up someday. This is a common sentiment among the Danes I spoke to. No matter how slighted they feel by Trump and particularly Vance, who seems to have a pathological hatred of Europe, they suspect their old friend America is going through a phase. I am considerably less optimistic, particularly after returning home on “Liberation Day.” It feels as if the United States—the most powerful nation in history—is walking off into the tundra in ill-fitting clothes. The angel of history beckons; the masculine energies are returning. Be careful what you wish for.
Arctic R&D at-risk due to recent Trump administration actions
Birgitte Annie Hansen, 4-16, 25, High North News, Arctic Research Cooperation With the US Continues as Before
Research and education in the United States are under tremendous pressure. How does this affect research collaboration in the Arctic? UiT, the Arctic University of Norway, and Luleå University of Technology say that for the time being, the collaboration will continue as before. From Les på norsk. American knowledge institutions are under great pressure from the Trump administration. Many schools and institutes are robbed of their funding, and limitations on research and education are imposed. For the past few months, the Trump administration has attacked research and education with mass firings, cuts in funding, and limitations to research. Research on climate, diversity, equality, and inclusion has been hit particularly hard. Primary school education may also be subject to restrictions regarding diversity, equality, and inclusion in order to continue to receive government support. In addition, the administration is trying to shut down the US Department of Education. Trump signed an executive order on March 20th, 2025, to do so, but a complete shutdown will be impossible without Congress’s approval. The attack on research and education has far-reaching consequences, including for science diplomacy. ScienceNorwa.no recently reported that an American university has terminated its cooperation with the University of Bergen due to the challenging political climate in the US. Jan-Gunnar Winther, Prorector for Research and Development at UiT the Arctic University of Norway. (Photo: UiT) “Given the central role that American research has had, this is serious for several research fields, including health and climate. Further concern is connected to free research being under pressure,” says Jan-Gunnar Winther, Prorector for Research and Development at UiT the Arctic University of Norway, to High North News. Free and independent research at risk High North News has previously reported on what the American cutbacks could entail for Arctic research. Many researchers believe that the US is creating a vacuum that will be filled by China. Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine and the subsequent loss of all research cooperation with the country, the region could now be about to lose yet another key actor in the North. And even where research remains, some wonder how free and independent it really is. What consequences does this have for Arctic bilateral cooperation agreements? “We are prepared for the possibility of restrictions on projects funded by various federal institutions. Given the central role that American research has played, this is serious for a number of research fields, including health and climate. Further concern is connected to free research being under pressure,” says Winther, and adds: “In the Arctic, we have not had access to data and knowledge from Russia for some years, which accounts for half of the land area in the region. If American research efforts in the Arctic were to decline, it would exacerbate the already demanding situation that applies to Arctic research cooperation.” Anna-Karin Lundin, press contact at Luleå University of Technology, says that this is also being discussed in Luleå, but the consequences of the American strategy are still unclear. Trump and DEI The Trump administration has cracked down on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) – an organizational framework that aims to promote fair treatment and full participation for all people. This particularly applies to groups that have historically been underrepresented or discriminated against based on identity or disability. In a March speech to Congress, Trump said, “We have ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and, indeed, the private sector and our military. And our country will be woke no longer.” Woke is a play on the word ‘awake’ and refers to being alert, aware of, and critical of social injustice. The term has been used to refer to being invested in the fight against injustice in society, and especially against racism and gender discrimination. The term is now used almost exclusively in a negative way, especially among the far-right in the ‘war’ on liberal values. Eradicating ‘wokeism’ is one of Trump’s campaign issues, and climate and environmental protection are also described as part of woke culture. Signed Trump agreement Recently, the UiT Centre for Peace Studies signed an agreement sent out by the Trump administration. The agreement calls for institutions that receive support from American authorities to commit to not conducting research on climate, environment, diversity, gender, and sexual orientation, among other things. UiT Rector Dag Rune Olsen says the agreement was signed by accident and that the signature will be withdrawn. “It goes against our core values. It is not acceptable and will bind our organization in a way that we cannot live with,” Olsen tells the newspaper iTromsø. Winther explains to HNN that the financial support was for a course at NATO in Brussels, which will continue even if American support ends. If American research efforts in the Arctic were to decline, it would exacerbate the already demanding situation that applies to Arctic research cooperation. Cooperation agreements in the North What cooperation agreements does UiT have with American knowledge institutions? “UiT has cooperation agreements at the institutional level with 13 American universities. Furthermore, we have exchange agreements for students and employees under the University of the Arctic cooperation. These mechanisms are financed by Norwegian funds. Lastly, we have various forms of project cooperation,” says Winther. At Luleå University of Technology, they have bilateral cooperation agreements with six American institutions. They are also part of ISEP, a comprehensive international student exchange program. In addition, individual researchers and research groups can collaborate in ways that are not centrally coordinated.
Growing conflict risks in the Arctic
Gray, 4-15, 25, James was a Member of Parliament from 1997 to 2024, with a long-standing interest in defence, polar affairs, and international security. He began his career in the City’s shipping industry before becoming a government Special Adviser. In Parliament, James served as Shadow Defence Minister, founded the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Armed Forces, and chaired key inquiries into Arctic and Antarctic defence and environmental strategy. A graduate of the Royal College of Defence Studies, he represented the UK at leading international polar forums and sat on the Arctic Circle’s Advisory Council. James served for seven years in the Honourable Artillery Company, and his extensive travels across the polar regions inspired several books, including Poles Apart and In the Land of the Great Bear. He won the RCDS Prize for Crown vs Parliament and continues to write on military, constitutional, and geopolitical issues.
It used to be thought that somehow or another the Arctic was unlike anywhere else. It was a haven for scientific research, the eight Arctic Nations (including both Russia and America) peacefully cooperating. All of that has been destroyed in recent years by the fast-retreating Arctic ice, the opening up of all sorts of commercial activities as a result; by the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and by increasing Chinese interest in the ‘Polar Silk Road’. The opening up of the Northern Sea Route, which will allow commercial vessels to transit the shortest route from Pacific to Atlantic, looks likely to be a reality within a decade. Half of the world’s oil and gas reserves lie under the Arctic; as are a good per centage of those rare earths and critical minerals which are integral parts of every computer, every mobile phone, every battery-operated car. Despite a current ‘moratorium’ on fishing in the High Arctic, legitimate questions can be asked about how binding or long-lasting that would be if vast new fisheries are exposed; and tourism looks set to expand at a rapid rate, with all kinds of environmental and sea passage complications as a result. All of that brings with it growing inter-Arctic tensions about the ownership of the ice and rights of transit passage through it. And history demonstrates that where there are economic opportunities of this kind, diplomatic and military tensions will inevitably follow. President Trump’s Greenlandic ambitions are a (only slightly laughable) symptom of what I mean. “Owning Greenland is vital for US security… and economic security… It’s an absolute necessity and I cannot assure you that we would not use military or economic coercion” The last remaining umbilical cord attaching Greenland to Mother Denmark is the annual block grant of 3.9bn kroner (around $560m) which amounts to roughly 19% of Greenland’s GDP. That is, however, rather less than the US currently spend on the town of El Paso, Texas (!), and of course it pales into insignificance beside the mineral wealth which Greenland could increasingly own post-independence and in partnership with a deep pocketed USA. China too is showing a keen interest in Greenland having recently sought to make enormous investments – a deep seaport and two international airports have been discussed – which would require huge capital investment. Hardly surprisingly Denmark and the US together prevented any such geopolitically catastrophic development. There are two reasons why the great powers would want to own Greenland. Firstly, both Trump and the Chinese are slaveringly eyeing up Greenland’s rich natural resources. China’s near worldwide monopoly on fifty ‘critical minerals’ is challenged by Greenland who can provide thirty of them from their two largest rare earth mines in the world. However, with a population of just 57,000 people, many of them Inuit fishermen and hunters, they currently lack the capabilities and industrial infrastructure needed to extract those resources. China and America would be equally keen to provide that expertise and investment. The second is strategic. As the ice on Greenland progressively melts (it loses 270 billion tonnes a year, or 30 million tonnes an hour), the world is slowly coming to realise the strategically important positioning of this, the largest non-Continental island in the world. Greenland in a geographic sense commands the North Atlantic. It marks the top end of the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, which the US and NATO alike patrol carefully for Russian submarines, and which was so crucial in the resupply of Europe during the Second World War. Greenland is a crucial part of the US airspace and their ‘Pituffik Space Base,’ in the far North is a critical defence against any ICBM attack from the Kola Peninsula. So Greenland’s strategic and economic importance to the US is clear; and they are (perfectly reasonably) determined that no other great power should come close to controlling it. More importantly, it is but one tiny symptom of the economic, diplomatic, and military tensions, particularly between Russia and NATO which will inevitably follow the retreat of the ice. As Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov told the press in September 2024, “Russia is fully ready for a conflict with NATO in the Arctic. We see NATO stepping up drills related to possible crises in the Arctic.” The Russian Northern Fleet spokesman said of recent military exercises: “Current deployments are to rehearse repelling military threats and ensure the security of sea lanes and Russia’s areas of maritime economic activity in the northern seas in the event of a crisis.” Or again, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoygu explained the Northern fleet’s strategic submarine base at Gadzhiyevo which is roughly 100 miles from the Finnish border: “Given NATO’s desire to build up military potential near Russia’s borders as well as to expand the Northern Atlantic Alliance at the expense of Sweden and Finland, retaliatory measures are required to create an appropriate grouping of troops in North West Russia.” Most recently (in a speech on 27 March 2025 when he was in Murmansk to launch the latest Yasen-M nuclear-powered submarine Perm), President Putin himself said that “the United States will continue to advance its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Arctic. Geopolitical competition and fighting for positions in this region are also escalating.” He expressed concerns “about the fact that NATO countries are increasingly often designating the Far North as a springboard for possible conflicts and are practicing the use of troops in these conditions. We will respond to all this.” The sheer scale of Russia’s military deployments should perhaps not surprise us. The Kola Peninsula is home of their Nuclear and Electromagnetic arsenal. In the Baltic Sea sits their enclave of Kaliningrad – the most heavily militarised area per square foot in the world. Russian land forces in the Arctic were growing substantially at least until the invasion of Ukraine. They were proud of – and relatively open about – their plans to re-activate or build from scratch at enormous expense up to 100 bases along the Arctic coast from Murmansk to Wrangell Island. Nagurskoye Air Base in Alexandra Land (photo: Russian MoD) Aside from nuclear, the most important of all Russia’s Arctic military capabilities is her Northern Fleet – some 32 surface warships and more than 33 active submarines. They have at least seven nuclear-powered icebreakers and thirty diesel-powered ones, many of them armed with Kalibr Cruise missiles. An organisation which should be of particular concern to the West must be a shadowy body called GUGI. It claims to be a deep-sea research organisation, but it actually operates submarines specially adapted for deep diving to gather intelligence, maintain seabed installations, and carry out sabotage – especially of pipelines and cable networks. It has more than 50 ships, submarines and floating dry docks. Russian submarine activity up to the GIUK Gap has been reported as being “currently equalling or surpassing Cold War levels”, and a former deputy commander of NATO Maritime Forces Europe has described the situation as the ‘Fourth Battle of the Atlantic’. For comparison, the deployable part of the Royal Navy – worldwide – consists of: 2 aircraft carriers, 6 destroyers, 8 frigates, and 9 submarines plus allied ships, although reportedly only about 20% of them are currently seaworthy. And none of them – so far as I am aware – are currently deployed anywhere near the Arctic. There is another significant ‘side’ consequence for the Arctic coming from the war in Ukraine. For in the event of any kind of stalemate, or even worse of a possible Russian defeat, there must be a very real risk that Putin would use diversionary tactics elsewhere to test out our resolve. The Arctic may well be just such a testing ground. It would probably not be a conventional escalation, which would risk an Article 5 reaction from NATO (or at least not yet). But if Russian military theology – as demonstrated for example in the Zapad series of exercises – were to be followed with any aggression in the High North, the first evidence would be cyber and intelligence operations. Then unidentified ‘men in green uniforms’ with no distinguishing badges or marks would engage in low level (unattributable) tactical operations – setting up apparently harmless camps in perhaps disputed territory. Well, Russian (and Chinese) cyber aggression is already a regular feature; attacks on Critical National Infrastructure (like undersea cables) are becoming more frequent, as are attacks against personnel. There are regular snap military exercises, strategic bomber overflights and patrol activities, jamming of Global Navigation Satellite systems, and unidentified (and therefore unattributable) drone flights over Norway’s military and energy infrastructure. In November 2022 the Admiral Vladimirsky was spotted loitering near the RAF’s maritime patrol base at Lossiemouth. In Spring 2023, 50 Russian trawlers, research vessels and merchant ships were reported to be collecting data along the seabed and monitoring military and other sensitive information. And on Christmas Day 2024 the Estlink 2 power cable between Finland and Estonia was cut and four telecoms cables were damaged, allegedly by the Russian ‘dark fleet’ tanker Eagle S maliciously dragging her anchor. She was arrested by the Finnish authorities. Giving evidence to the House of Lords enquiry into the Arctic in 2023, the Director- General of MI5 said that “agents of Russia’s military intelligence agency are conducting arson attacks, sabotage and other dangerous actions with increasing recklessness.” And Lord Houghton, former Chief of Defence Staff, pointed out that Russia’s relative weakness by comparison with NATO in conventional warfare terms, very much increases the likelihood that they will use “even more damaging malevolent activity below the threshold of formalised warfare.“ Some kind of Russian military adventurism is another real possibility, for example, in Spitzbergen. The 1920 Svalbard Treaty prohibits the use of the islands for ‘warlike purposes’. Nonetheless, in April 2016 Chechen special forces instructors landed in Svalbard before holding a parachute exercise over the polar ice cap, and the Russian Zapad 2017 exercise included a simulated amphibious assault. There are two ready-made Russian bases: Pyramiden and Barentsburg. I have visited both, and Pyramiden in particular looks very much like any military base – barrack blocks, a parade square, huge gym and swimming pool, even a chapel, all around a statue of Lenin. Troops could move in tomorrow, perhaps masquerading as ‘maintenance troops’ (akin to the ‘scrap metal merchants’ who sparked off the Falklands War by occupying South Georgia). So Svalbard could well be a fairly obvious military flashpoint. NATO simply cannot continue to ignore the massive and growing Russian military presence in the Arctic and keep up the forlorn hope of the Arctic being an area of low tension, of scientific cooperation, a peaceful wilderness. The prospect of Russian power being projected from the High North into the North Atlantic is very real and a comprehensive strategy is needed to meet the threat. Yet the Arctic did not feature at all in UK defence and security policy documents until very recently. The 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review made no mention of the region at all; by 2015 there was an oblique reference to the Arctic warfare capability of the Royal Marines but again no mention in 2018’s National Security Capability Review. The UK Armed Forces have, as a result, few dedicated capabilities for Arctic operations. The RAF’s fleet of maritime patrol aircraft may be insufficient to maintain a constant presence in the High North alongside any long-term presence in the Indo-pacific and the protection of the nuclear deterrent. The Royal Navy has one (at 25 years rather aging) ice patrol ship, HMS Protector, but she spends most of her time in the South Atlantic and Antarctic. The Royal Navy’s ability to patrol and conduct surveillance operations under the Arctic ice has gone and now looks unaffordable. We can, it is true, make one important contribution to under-ice surveillance in the form of autonomous submarines. The £15.4m Cetus designed and built specially for the Royal Navy by Plymouth-based tech firm MSubs can fit inside a shipping container and be transported around the world to wherever the Fleet needs it. It is also laudable that the Royal Marines have uniquely preserved their cold weather warfare skills through their Mountain Leader Cadre, a group of highly trained instructors and specialists with expertise in mountain and cold weather warfare. Every year units from 3 Commando Brigade lead a series of exercises in Northern Norway to maintain that cold weather specialism, training marines to survive, move and fight in extreme weather conditions. When I visited the exercise, I was pleased and amused to see our Royal Marines training the US Corps of Marines. The winter warfare capability of the USMC lapsed over the years the Corps was heavily engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan and other generally hot weather climates. I mentioned this to the US Colonel there who confided in me that the US Marine Corps has such a high turnover of personnel that they lose specialist skills like arctic weather training which they then have to relearn from us. As well as the invaluable training which these exercises provide, they are also an important part of our reinforcement of the Northern Flank in Norway. It has taken 10 or 15 years of badgering, but NATO have relatively recently revised their stance over the High North (Atlantic and Arctic). They now accept that it is an area of increasing strategic importance and seems likely to become a theatre of ‘assertive naval diplomacy’. Their most visible response is perhaps the bi-annual Exercise Nordic Response, the most recent of which (in 2024) saw over 20,000 troops from 13 nations practice their Arctic warfare techniques and strategy. The mutual assurance offered by the NATO Treaty now covers all of the Arctic and Nordic states (bar, of course, Russia). Iceland is the only member who has no troops, air force nor navy, but whose contribution is the strategically vital airbase at Keflavik near Reykjavik, which houses inter alia US and British P8 submarine reconnaissance aircraft – so vital to watch over the crucially important Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap. The other major player worthy of strategic consideration in the Arctic is, of course, China, who are without doubt determined to be more than an observer. They have a sharply increasing commercial presence in the region, including substantial investment in mining operations in Greenland and in gas projects on Russia’s northern Arctic coast. China has built docks, railway lines and infrastructure in key Arctic ports, including on the Yamal Oil and gas terminals. China’s first most recent Arctic policy document in January 2018, entitled ‘China’s Arctic Policy by The State Council Information Office of the PRC’, declares their intention, “to work with the international community to safeguard and promote peace and stability in, and the sustainable development of, the Arctic.” “[as a] ‘near Arctic state, and a member of the UN Security Council, China shoulders the important mission of jointly promoting peace and security in the Arctic.” To do that, “China will bring opportunities for parties concerned to jointly build a ‘Polar Silk Road’ and facilitate connectivity and sustainable economic and social development of the Arctic.” Despite their protestations to the contrary, China are now rapidly developing their Arctic capabilities. They have at least five icebreakers: Ji Di, Tan Suo San, Xue Long 1, Xue Long 2 and Hao, and may well be developing more. Three of them were deployed in the Arctic in late 2024. The US Department of Defence produced a report in early 2025 expressing (surprisingly muted) concerns about Chinese military activity in the Arctic. “In the decade since gaining observer status on the Arctic Council in 2013 China has massively expanded its Arctic footprint and has begun to work closely with Russia in its attempt to be seen as an Arctic power. “The PRC’s expanding Arctic engagement has created new opportunities for engagement between the PRC and Russia and has resulted in unprecedented styles of collaboration.” The DoD report lists a number of joint Russian-Chinese military activities in the Arctic. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) sent a small naval flotilla into the Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska for the first time in 2015, and made visits to Denmark, Finland and Sweden around the same time. In September 2022 they conducted a combined naval patrol in the Bering Sea. China’s coastguard entered the Arctic for the first time in 2023 in a joint patrol with Russia, and in Summer 2024 several month-long combined operations including bomber, naval, and coast guard patrols in the Alaskan ‘Air Defence Identification Zone’ jointly with Russian assets. In themselves, these are not enormously significant, but they do point to an increasing interest in the Arctic and deepening cooperation with Russia. China will in the years to come without doubt further develop their Arctic military capabilities. I have it on good authority that they are planning to have a nuclear (propelled and armed) submarine with under-ice capabilities within 5 years. That must surely send a cold shiver down all of our spines.
Climate in a feedback loop that is melting Arctic ice
Jack Marley, April 6, 2025, https://phys.org/news/2025-04-doom-loops-climate.html, Doom loops’ are accelerating climate change—but we can break them
Vicious cycles are accelerating climate change. One is happening at the north pole, where rising temperatures caused by record levels of fossil fuel combustion are melting more and more sea ice. Indeed, the extent of Arctic winter sea ice in March 2025 was the lowest ever recorded. This decline in sea ice means the Earth reflects less of the sun’s energy back into space. So, more climate change leads to less sea ice—and more climate change. Human behavior is not immune to this dynamic either, according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). It identified another troubling feedback loop: demand for coal rose 1% globally in 2024 off the back of intense heat waves in China and India, which spurred a frenzy for air-conditioners and excess fuel to power them.
Russia aggressively pursuing the Arctic
Brendan Cole, April 5, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/arctic-united-states-climate-russia-2054872?ref=biztoc.com, Russia Just Laid Claim To More Arctic Territory
Nearly two decades before U.S. President Donald Trump eyed the strategic value of Greenland for the U.S., Russian explorers planted their country’s flag on the seabed 14,000 feet below the North Pole. Since that statement of intent by Moscow in 2007, some things in the far north haven’t changed—Russian President Vladimir Putin is still in power, Arctic ice continues to retreat and the race remains for countries vying for influence. In the winter, Arctic sea ice levels covered 5.53 million square miles—about 1.1 million square miles less than last year—the lowest since records began nearly five decades ago, according to NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the U.S. With some climate models predicting ice-free summers in the Arctic by 2050, competing claims for access to the region’s resources will heat up along with the temperatures, posing a security challenge for the U.S. “The growing great power interest in the Arctic is directly linked to climate change,” said James Rogers, executive director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute. “The Arctic is warming between four and seven times faster than the rest of the world,” he told Newsweek, and “as a result, you have more access for transit, more access for military activity and more access to natural resources. Less sea ice over the summer periods in the Russian Arctic is allowing for increased transit through that region and a change in the great power interests there.” Moscow has moved to militarize the Arctic and stake a claim to shipping routes and energy reserves expected to open as climate change melts the region’s ice. Speaking in the world’s largest Arctic Circle city of Murmansk, home to a Russian naval fleet, Putin told a forum last week that the region could be a staging area for war. Dismissing Trump’s Greenland grab as a matter between the U.S. and Denmark, not to mention the semi-autonomous island itself, Putin did take a swipe at NATO for recent drills in the region involving the alliance’s newest members, Finland and Sweden. The alliance is “designating the Far North as a staging area for possible conflicts,” Putin said, even if these exercises follow increased Russian drills near NATO’s borders. Read more Arctic Map Shows US and Chinese Aircraft Carriers in Pacific This Week Crimea Video Shows Kyiv Strikes on Russian Black Sea Fleet Satellite Images Reportedly Show Russia’s Huge New Black Sea Flagship U.S. Targets Houthi Link to Russia The Russian leader’s announcement coincided with the launch of the Perm nuclear-powered submarine built by the nearby Sevmash shipyard, equipped with hypersonic Zircon missiles. “Russia has invested more in its Arctic security which is something that has been a key part of Putin’s strategic planning since at least 2014,” said Rogers. Moscow has deploying Arctic drone squadrons to safeguard critical infrastructure and building new military bases on the northern rim of the Russian mainland and islands within the Northern Sea Route (NSR). This is the shortest shipping route between the western part of Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific region where Russia wants to expand its shipping via beefing up its fleet of icebreakers from 11 to 17. “What Putin wants is to make sure they have the technology, the infrastructure and the military capabilities to make sure they can traverse the Arctic while securing it at the same time,” said Rogers. “Putin made it very clear that what happens in Greenland is a matter for the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark.” “Putin’s game is very different—he’s looking to make sure he can get up to one-third of the world’s untapped oil and gas.” Russian President Vladimir Putin Russian President Vladimir Putin is pictured on March 26 while visiting a military base of a nuclear fleet in Murmansk, Russia. Cooperation With Beijing The U.S. has been facing direct challenges in the Arctic where Moscow is getting help from Beijing to project strength. In October, four Russian and Chinese vessels got to 440 miles southwest of St. Lawrence Island, a part of Alaska, the northernmost point Chinese vessels had been observed, the U.S. Coast Guard said. “It’s not the Fifth Fleet or a big aircraft carrier group operating in the Arctic yet,” Malte Humpert, founder of Washington, D.C., nonprofit Arctic Institute, told Newsweek, “but it doesn’t take much imagination to see that happening in 20 or 30 years.” Humpert said it was notable here that was no U.S. icebreaker nearby to shadow them because both were undergoing repairs. While the ships could still be monitored through subsea and aerial assets, “there’s a lot of optics.” “If you have Russian and Chinese patrol vessels going up and down the Alaska coastline and you don’t have any American vessels nearby to show force—that projects a certain image,” he added. Months earlier, Chinese and Russian long-range bombers had also patrolled near Alaska for the first time, prompting the U.S. and Canada to scramble their fighter jets.
Greenland critical to minerals and energy needed to power AI
Linda Moynihan, March 28, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/here-s-why-musk-bezos-gates-and-thiel-really-all-want-a-piece-of-greenland/ar-AA1BQNhB?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=e7f0623a9d7345578a176472ac49a1ad&ei=30, Here’s why Musk, Bezos, Gates and Thiel really all want a piece of Greenland
The US delegation’s planned visit to Greenland — led by Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance — has captured the imagination of top political officials and tech billionaires alike, even as Prime Minister Mute Egede slammed the trip as being “highly aggressive.” While recent excitement about the vast, frigid island has puzzled me, Silicon Valley sources (who take credit for the idea of buying Greenland) view it as deeply tied to America’s ambitions in space and information technology — especially concerning AI. They also see it as a critical “play for the future,” as one source put it. Notable tech figures have shown varying degrees of support. Elon Musk is all for purchasing Greenland and Peter Thiel backs the idea of establishing an autonomous colony on the island. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have advocated for mining projects because of the wealth of natural resources, like rare earth minerals, critical for high-tech manufacturing. “Take what’s needed for the US to maintain information technology dominance: data storage and computing power deployment,” Tom Dans, former commissioner of the US Arctic Research Commission, told me. “Greenland offers abundant potential energy, strategic metals and minerals, and proximity to key US population centers — all in a highly controllable environment.”
Greenland key to missile intercepts and defending against China
Linda Moynihan, March 28, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/here-s-why-musk-bezos-gates-and-thiel-really-all-want-a-piece-of-greenland/ar-AA1BQNhB?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=e7f0623a9d7345578a176472ac49a1ad&ei=30, Here’s why Musk, Bezos, Gates and Thiel really all want a piece of Greenland
It’s roughly 1,800 miles from New York City to the capital of Nuuk, where freezing temperatures offer a hospitable climate for energy-intensive data centers. The island’s isolation reduces physical security risks faced by mainland US data plants. “Greenland’s strategic importance to the United States goes beyond its frozen landscape … far into space. President Trump gets this. Elon understands it better than anyone,” Dans adds. “Telemetry, tracking, missile intercepts, early warning systems and Northern latitude launch sites are all part of America’s Arctic past, present and future. Greenland is key.” The Arctic location could also be strategic for military defense and surveillance — which is partly why Chinese companies seek a foothold, too.
Greenland key to space launch
Linda Moynihan, March 28, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/here-s-why-musk-bezos-gates-and-thiel-really-all-want-a-piece-of-greenland/ar-AA1BQNhB?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=e7f0623a9d7345578a176472ac49a1ad&ei=30, Here’s why Musk, Bezos, Gates and Thiel really all want a piece of Greenland
While the idea of annexation gained traction in Silicon Valley nearly a decade ago — in part from startups like Thiel-backed Praxis, which aims to build a futuristic, autonomous city in Greenland — since then the vision has expanded. Sources note that the Danish territory’s proximity to the Arctic Circle also offers an ideal trajectory for polar orbits, providing a clear path for space launches that avoids densely populated areas — unlike Florida or Texas, where safety and airspace restrictions complicate operations. Its vast, uninhabited expanses and stable climate also minimize weather delays and land-use conflicts, making it a potentially superior US spaceport site. And tech’s role in keeping the dream of Greenland alive is reflected in President Trump’s pick for ambassador to Denmark: Ken Howery, a “PayPal Mafia” member who co-founded Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and is a friend of Elon Musk. He is still awaiting confirmation but, in Trump’s first term, Howery served as ambassador to Sweden — gaining insight into the Arctic Circle’s security and geopolitical importance.
China and Russia increasing Arctic capabilities to engage in surveillance of Canada’s military operations and threaten its territory
Leyland Cecco in Inuvik, 3-9, 25, The Guardian, Canadian military flies the flag in frozen north as struggle for the Arctic heats up, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/09/canada-arctic-military-exercise
The winter sun hasn’t yet risen above Inuvik’s jagged horizon of black spruce trees, but already, more than 150 nervous soldiers have gathered in a community recreation centre. Tables clear of their breakfast and fingers fiddle with pens, a giddiness akin to the first day of school settles over the room. Few have traveled this far north before, more than 200 kilometres above the Arctic Circle in Canada’s Northwest Territories. For some, the trip here marked the first time they had ever been on an airplane. “You are here to be exposed to the Arctic environment,” Lt Col Darren Turner, the land taskforce commander, tells the group, which snaps to attention when he enters. “You are here to demonstrate our sovereignty and that we can protect and defend our territory from all threats.” a distant figure, seen through a circular opening, walks across a frozen landscape View image in fullscreen The aim of Operation Nanook, a joint exercise with more than 650 people, is to ‘project force’ but also to sustain that force amid frigid conditions. Photograph: Leyland Cecco/The Guardian Running from mid-February until 9 March, Operation Nanook was Canada’s sprawling military exercise in the hostile theatre of the Arctic. In aircraft and slogging on foot through the tundra, nearly 650 personnel simulate retaking key infrastructure, testing cutting-edge equipment – and, most importantly, learning to survive the cold. The operation, conducted alongside allies from the United States, United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden and Finland, reflects an aim to “project force” in the Arctic, but also to sustain that force amid frigid conditions. A ship surrounded by a vast sea of ice. US, Canada and Finland form ‘Ice Pact’ to project influence into Arctic region Read more The backdrop of the mission is a recognition that Russia and China – which now calls itself a “near-Arctic nation” – have a growing interest in a region that makes up nearly half of Canada’s land mass. Thinning sea ice has opened up the North-west Passage for a longer window of time and thawing permafrost holds the promise of immense fossil fuel and critical mineral wealth. The national defence minister, Bill Blair, warned on Thursday that climate change was upending the region and providing “growing access to Arctic resources and shipping lanes that, unfortunately, is enticing other adversarial nations to engage in heightened competition”. “Both nations are seeking to challenge the existing unipolar world and exert national spheres of influence in the Arctic region,” Maj Andrew Melvin, who oversaw the short-term land operations, told the reservists. While a direct, armed confrontation with Russia or China is “highly unlikely”, he warned the two countries had sophisticated intelligence-gathering tools and could use the mission to gain new knowledge of Canada’s operations.
two human figures and a helicopter in a frozen landscape View image in fullscreen The Arctic region is harsh and remote. Spare parts for a helicopter took three days to arrive from a base near Ottawa. Photograph: Leyland Cecco/The Guardian “We are out here. We are demonstrating our sovereignty and our ability and capability to operate in high Arctic conditions. They don’t like that. They want to demonstrate through messaging that we are not able to maintain our sovereignty in the Arctic,” said Melvin. “You are here to prove them wrong. You are here to show that what we do, we do the best in the high Arctic.” But threats to Canada’s sovereignty have also come from a closer quarter. In recent weeks, Donald Trump has threatened to make Canada the 51st US state, an idea roundly condemned by all Canadian political leaders. While the threats have frayed diplomatic relations, senior military figures say Operation Nanook reflects a “business-as-usual” approach by the two countries’ armed forces. “We are working with our allies like we would. We don’t let politics get in the way of our professionalism,” said Turner. “We’re professional soldiers, doing our job and fulfilling our purpose. We’ll let the politicians worry about that.” Most soldiers duck the issue of tension with a longtime military ally. But some are blunt in their rejection of the idea. “We’re Canada. We’re not a state and we never will be,” says one. Last year, Canada’s federal government paid C$8.6m (US$4.7m) to acquire a privately owned aircraft hangar – known as the Green Hangar – next to Inuvik’s Norad airbase, following interest from China and Russia. a human figure is silhouetted in the opening of huge hangar dooers View image in fullscreen The ‘Green Hangar’ recently purchased by the Canadian government, following interest from Russia and China. Photograph: Leyland Cecco/The Guardian In March, Blair promised Ottawa would invest more than C$2.5bn in northern military “hubs” – nearly 10 times the previously pledged amount – to build airstrips, logistics facilities and equipment to augment infrastructure already in place. But hiccups during Operation Nanook highlighted a dire need for greater resources. As teams moved to transport tens of thousand of pounds of gear to a remote frozen lake, one of the Chinook transport helicopters was grounded until spare parts could be found. But the only source for the parts was a military base near Ottawa and took three days to ship. Last week, the Canadian Press reported that the country’s spy agency, CSIS, believes the Arctic is an “attractive, strategic and vulnerable destination” for foreign adversaries like China and Russia. CSIS warned that resources projects, shipping and possible militarization of the region could be used by other countries to push into territory already claimed by Canada.
Canada’s governing Liberals intend to revive the role of Arctic ambassadors, with postings in Nuuk, Greenland, and Anchorage, Alaska, to strengthen diplomatic relations. Much of the focus on the Arctic centres around increasingly navigable waters and the vast quantities of critical minerals and fossil fuels beneath the permafrost. “It’s about access and it’s about resources,” said Turner. “You can access the north more easily than you have ever been able to. And that’s going to change even more drastically over the next 10 years.” While Canada has promised to purchase new ice breakers, Russia is developing more powerful ships that can outperform Canada’s current – and future – vessels. a highway in a frozen landscape View image in fullscreen A highway that stretches from Inuvik to the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk is a key supply route. Photograph: Leyland Cecco/The Guardian “Once a route is opened, they will come. We need to have an interest in that,” he said. “We need to have the capabilities to interdict, to stop, to block that movement.” While Canada has designated all Arctic Canadian waters as indefinitely off limits to future offshore Arctic oil and gas licensing, a recent agreement between the federal government, the Northwest Territories and Yukon governments and the Inuvialuit, looks to give greater autonomy to Indigenous groups to develop fossil fuel projects. “We have so much stranded oil and so much stranded gas,” said Jackie Jacobsen, a former lawmaker in the Northwest Territories. He said the Inuvialuit Petroleum Corporation’s M-18 project, which aims to convert an estimated 278bn cubic feet of gas into into usable natural gas and synthetic diesel, would help a people who have long seen their lands used by outsiders. The project recent received a C$100m loan from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, with the aim of creating a local supply of fuel for energy, heating and transportation for the next half-century. “We’re finally the ones that are going to get something out of it. The Inuvialuit will get what’s theirs, not just the big oil companies,” he said. Jacobsen, who also served as mayor for the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk on the edge of the Beaufort Sea, said if a region was invested in resources, “it becomes an asset worth defending.” people, vehicles and buildings are seen in a frozen landscape View image in fullscreen Residents in the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk attend a community feast with members of the Canadian, Swedish, US, Belgian and Finnish militaries. Photograph: Leyland Cecco/The Guardian For others, however, the promise of sustained, large-scale investment in the region rings hollow. “We know we have massive oil and gas reserves, because they found them in the 1960s,” said Invuik resident Ryan Lennie who also works as a Canadian Ranger. “And so Inuvik has gone through the boom and bust. We were told we would have so much investment up here, and then soon, it goes back to nothing.” The rangers, a unit of the army responsible for remote areas, serve as both scouts for the military and a lifeline for soldiers venturing into the north for the first time. “It’s hard to know what to make about these claims. But at the end of the day, I’m more worried about the lack of infrastructure we have up here than running into a Russian when I’m out on my snowmobile.”
Invading Canada means a 20-year war and lead to China and Russia global dominance
Don Braid, March 7, 2025, Calgary Herald, Braid: Invading Canada would spark guerrilla fight lasting decades, expert says, https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/braid-invading-canada-would-spark-guerrilla-fight-lasting-decades-expert-says
An expert on insurgency says an American military incursion into Canada would be a disaster — for the United States. Article content Article content A military move by President Donald Trump could eventually destroy America’s worldwide power, says Dr. Aisha Ahmad, an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Article content Dr. Ahmad has studied insurgencies and visited many conflict zones for more than 20 years. She sees a pattern of resistance that repeats itself every time. Article content Advertisement 1 Story continues below Article content When a country gets invaded, a growing portion of the people fight back. Article content Calgary Herald Noon News Roundup Noon News Roundup Your weekday lunchtime roundup of curated links, news highlights, analysis and features. youremail@email.com Sign Up By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Article content Would Canadians do that? You bet we would, Ahmad says. Canadian “niceness” is a myth that would vanish overnight in the face of invasion. Article content Canadians haven’t been forced to see America as an enemy for nearly 200 years. Many won’t want to consider it now. Article content But we’re learning to take Trump at his own words. Now he wants to tear up the 1908 treaty that fixed our border. Article content He told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau he considers the agreement invalid. He’s after land, the Great Lakes and access to rivers. Article content This is the Putin playbook. Claim that you own territory, then take it. Article content If Canada doesn’t agree to Trump’s mythical new boundary, the next step is sending troops to secure it. Article content What happens if fighting begins? Article content “Looking at the sheer size of the American military, many people might believe that Trump would enjoy an easy victory,” Dr. Ahmad wrote in a widely circulated article. Article content That analysis is dead wrong, she says, because the result would not be determined by a fight between conventional armies. Article content Advertisement 2 Story continues below Article content “Rather, a military invasion of Canada would trigger a decades-long violent resistance, which would ultimately destroy the United States. Article content Stories You May Like Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a news conference about the U.S. tariffs against Canada on March 4, 2025 on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, as (L-R) Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, Minister of Finance and Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic Leblanc and Minister of Public Safety David McGuinty look on. Trudeau said that President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada to destroy the country’s economy to make it easier for the United States to annex its northern neighbor. The extraordinary warning about Trump’s threat to Canadian sovereignty came as the U.S. president delivered on his vow to impose 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian goods. Braid: Trudeau says Trump wants economic collapse; Republican alludes to military force A petition is circulating in an effort to rename Yankee Valley Blvd. in Airdrie. Airdrie resident shares petition to change name of Yankee Valley Blvd. Advertisement embed-more-topic Article content “Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest without resistance. Article content “That decision would set in motion an unstoppable cycle of violence. Even if we imagine a scenario in which the Canadian government unconditionally surrenders, a fight would ensue on the streets. Article content “Even if one per cent of all resisting Canadians engaged in armed insurrection, that would constitute a 400,000-person insurgency, nearly 10 times the size of the Taliban at the start of the Afghan war.” Article content She states the obvious fact that Canada’s vast territory would be impossible to cover and control, no matter how many troops the U.S. sent. Canadian Forces loyalists would likely mobilize civilian recruits into guerrilla groups “that could strike, retreat into the wilderness and blend back into the local communities that support them.” Article content That’s what happened in the French resistance of the Second World War. The fighters were funded and armed largely by the British and Americans. Article content We wouldn’t be alone today, Ahmad adds. Commonwealth and European allies could provide money and supplies. America’s many enemies would be encouraged to attack at vulnerable spots elsewhere. Article content Other academics point out that despite our high-minded disdain for U.S. gun culture, Canada ranks among the most heavily armed nations in the world, with an estimated 12.7 million weapons in civilian possession. Article content First Nations alone could give the Americans a shockingly hard time. Article content “A chronic violent insurrection in North America could financially and militarily pin down the U.S. for decades, ultimately triggering economic and political collapse,” Ahmad says. Article content Advertisement 3 Story continues below Article content This would give Russia and China “an uncontested rise to power.” Article content Such a struggle would virtually destroy Canada, too, she concludes. Article content “No one in their right mind would choose this gruesome future over a peaceful and mutually beneficial alliance with a friendly neighbour.” Article content We’re getting into overheated hypothetical territory here. But Ahmad’s views on insurgency are backed by history. Article content The Americans were run out of Vietnam and Afghanistan. The heroes’ welcome they expected in Iraq turned into an eight-year military quagmire. Article content It’s hard to imagine anything like this coming to our soil. Article content But now there’s a crazed commander-in-chief down south who says it’s not our soil at all.
CP: Canada-US superstate
Herman, 3-8, 25, Arthur Herman is the Director of Hudson Institute’s Quantum Alliance Initiative and author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II., The Case For A U.S.-Canada Superstate, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-case-for-a-u-s-canada-superstate
Pooling U.S.-Canada resources from energy to AI to defense would be a boon for global and hemispheric security. In the last month, President Donald Trump has managed to rile the traditionally still waters of U.S.-Canada relations. From his offer to make Canada the “fifty-first state” to imposing a 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods and a 10 percent tariff on Canadian energy exports to the United States, Trump’s controversial moves have alienated some, inspired others, and stunned nearly everyone. Still, once the dust settles from the current controversies, the Trump démarche signals it’s time for a fruitful debate on where Washington-Ottawa relations need to go in the future, as well as where they are in the present. More than one commentator (including media personality and former Canadian citizen Kevin O’Leary) has raised the specter of a U.S.-Canadian economic union, even a North American monetary union, with Canadians retaining their national sovereignty while enjoying the benefits of integration into the much larger, and substantially more tax-free, U.S. economy. The truth is, we are on the brink of what futurist Herman Kahn would term a U.S.-Canada “superstate,” that will dominate the fate of the Western Hemisphere as well as global markets. Hudson Institute founder Herman Kahn coined the term “superstate” to describe a country that has the resources to become “an economic, technological, and financial giant,” but chooses not to use that status to gain power and influence over other nations, i.e., to act as a “superpower.” Since the United States already holds that superpower status, the role of Canada (and perhaps eventually Mexico) would be to expand the benefits of superstate status to enhance the security, lives, and fortunes of its own citizens, as well as those of American citizens. While Canada’s GDP remains a fraction of that of the United States, the planned coordination of U.S.-Canadian resources across a broad range of sectors, from energy to AI, could yield not only economic benefits to the citizens of both countries, but major strategic advantages, especially regarding the superpower we all face on our Pacific shores, namely China. Here are four areas where a U.S.-Canadian consortium or “superstate” can have a powerful impact. The most obvious is energy. Today, Canada is the fourth-largest producer of oil (5.76 million barrels per day in 2023) and the fourth-largest in natural gas (18.1 billion cubic feet per day in 2023). Taken together, the United States and Canada produce about 30 percent of the world’s natural gas and 25 percent of the world’s oil. A North American energy bloc, including LNG exports and cross-border pipelines like the still-suspended XL Pipeline, would dominate global markets as never before, while also reshaping the overall geopolitical landscape of energy production. The second area is the extraction of strategic minerals. While the proposed mineral deal with Ukraine will take years—even decades—to yield results, Canada is already a major producer of gold, iron, nickel, and copper. It also sponsors important projects involving its rich reserves in rare earth elements such as lithium, cobalt, graphite, and vanadium. The global demand for lithium is expected to more than quadruple from 720,000 metric tons in 2022 to an estimated 3.1 million metric tons in 2030. The IEA projects that demand for cobalt will climb from 215,000 metric tons in 2023 to 454,000 metric tons by 2040. Meanwhile, the demand for nickel is slated to triple by 2030, thanks to the demand for electric vehicles—including in China. While China has sought to dominate supply chains in all these critical minerals, a proactive U.S.-Canada consortium could displace China as a major supplier to world markets. Indeed, Canadian companies could help to revive the United States’ own mining industry, which ceded global leadership to countries like China, Canada, and Australia thanks to outsourcing and over-regulation (the United States even closed its Bureau of Mines in 1996). Working together, the American and Canadian mining sectors can set clean and environmentally safe standards for the extraction of all these materials. The third area is AI and quantum technology. While we rightly think of the United States as the global leader in AI and machine learning, according to Deloitte’s 2023 AI report, Canada ranks third among G7 countries in total funding per capita for generative AI companies, and first in AI publications per capita. At the same time, Canada has emerged as one of the leading centers for the research and development of quantum technologies, including quantum computing. The University of Calgary in Alberta, the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, and Sherbrooke University in Quebec are among the world leaders in quantum technology. Together with America’s already established leadership in AI, especially in generative AI and quantum computing, both countries could be on the verge of launching a new era of advanced information technologies—truly a digital Golden Age. The fourth and final area is coordination on national and hemispheric defense. In addition to border security, coordinating American and Canadian defense spending, including on advanced technologies, should be a major topic of discussion between Ottawa and Washington in the second Trump administration. For example, working together to secure the Arctic region will become a security priority, as the region becomes a focus of great power competition with Russia and China. Coordinating strategic operations in and around Greenland and coordinating space power effects shared between the U.S. Space Force and the Canadian Air Force should also be a significant priority. Despite the current challenges facing Washington-Ottawa relations, the emergence of a U.S.-Canada “superstate” ought to come as no surprise. As I noted in my book How The Scots Invented the Modern World, “Canada and the United States should be more alike than they are.” Both countries are nations of immigrants sharing a common language and common geography, despite differences in their respective constitutions and political systems—differences that may be too intractable to overcome. Still, the possibility of bringing together the productive forces and resources of both nations to enrich the lives of their respective citizens and dominate the global scene for decades to come will be too important to ignore—perhaps even too inevitable to evade.
Expansion of US control of Greenland means Russia is isolated, lashes out militarily, and forms and alliance with China
Buchanan & Sokolov, 2-7, 25, Elizabeth Buchanan is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the National Interest. Anton Sokolov is a member of the Expert Board of the Russian Gas Society.
The militarization of Greenland and the wider Arctic region may push Russia and China closer together. The Russia-U.S. relationship (or lack thereof) has long dominated Arctic geopolitics. Geography makes the two neighbors and stakeholders sharing the challenges of a warming region. President Trump’s enduring interest in acquiring Greenland injects further potential geostrategic challenges in the region’s icy arena. When the idea was floated during his initial term in office, the immediate response from Russian leadership, state-operated media, and the public was a flood of memes. The second time around, however, Russia’s domestic discourse has a more strategic flavor. Discussions now appear to focus less on the “novelty” of such an acquisition and more on understanding the “objectives.” Three potential scenarios for U.S.-Greenland relations are being debated in Moscow in terms of the strategic implications for Russia. The primary scenario is the maintenance of the status quo. Maintaining the status quo would undoubtedly work in Russia’s favor, as it would allow Moscow to maintain its position as the major military stakeholder in the Arctic. Moscow is wary, however, of the Danish Government’s potential to respond to Trump’s rhetoric by deepening ties with China. The Russia-China relationship is complex, integrated, and fueled by the regional ambitions of both players. Greenland has long provided a potential platform for increased Chinese presence in the Arctic, which pushes both Moscow and Beijing to deepen cooperation. Of course, Denmark (and Greenland) has a successful track record of pushing back on China’s economic encroachment. Attempted investments in Greenlandic airports and key sovereign infrastructure have been thwarted. However, Russian discourse appears concerned over the current state of confusion and uncertainty in European politics. This may yet provide fertile ground for China’s agile foreign policy with Russia’s encouragement to take root in the High North. A second scenario discussed in Russia is the incremental expansion of the U.S. presence in Greenland. This poses significant challenges for Russia. These challenges can be categorized into three primary areas: the strengthening of U.S. military presence in the Arctic, control over strategic sea lines of communication in the High North, and control over rare earth mineral deposits. An expansion of Greenland’s Pittufik military base, formerly known as Tula, or the modernization of its infrastructure to accommodate missile defense systems or advanced radar technology would enhance U.S. capacity for monitoring the GIUK gap. This is a strategic entry point into the North Atlantic for Russia’s maritime fleet. Additionally, the deployment of large-scale non-nuclear missile systems would likely be perceived as a direct threat to Russia’s interests (which are not limited to state survival) in the Russian Arctic region. Linked to this is the strategic narrative in Moscow, which fears the return of a Cuban Missile Crisis—only this time, in the Arctic. An inevitable pursuit of parity in both defensive and offensive capabilities will lead to further militarization of the Arctic. Moscow would likely reinforce its Arctic brigades and deploy hypersonic missiles on proximate Russian islands in the Arctic Ocean. There is already a precedent of Moscow engaging in retaliatory measures in the Arctic. Immediately after the 2021 U.S.-Norway Agreement on expanding military cooperation in the Arctic was signed, Russia conducted a large-scale (scientific) expedition called Umka-2021. This expedition was organized by the Russian Navy in collaboration with the Russian Geographical Society. However, it had a distinct military flavor. A third scenario being discussed is the United States “taking” Greenland through military force. The prospect of Washington establishing military control over Greenland is largely shrugged off but not altogether absent from Russian strategic discourse. This would be a stark departure from recent U.S. policy. The United States is leading key collaborative efforts in the Arctic, notably supporting allies to “consolidate” all potential fissures in Arctic-nation bilateral relations. The recent settlement of the longstanding territorial dispute between Canada and Denmark regarding Hans Island is another example of U.S. policy to foster a collaborative Arctic climate. Russia’s strategic Arctic objectives remain rather fixed: maintaining military dominance, securing sovereign control over the Northern Sea Route (NSR), and protecting vital access to and control of Arctic mineral resources. All three of the potential scenarios ruminating in Moscow when it comes to Trump’s Greenland play pose at least some threat to Russia’s Arctic objectives. A point of commonality is that any future U.S. designs for Greenland (from an uptick in diplomatic ties to outright annexation) will serve as an impetus for the (re)militarization of the Arctic Trump 2.0 will almost certainly usher in a shift of strategic tempo in the Arctic. The notion of annexation by force might be unlikely, but the potential outcomes for Moscow are severe, if not fundamental, challenges to Russia’s strategic calculus in the Arctic. Primarily, Moscow is concerned about the United States using Greenland to counter Russia’s claims to sovereignty over the NSR more effectively. The NSR is a strategic game-changer for Asia-Europe shipping and reorients global transportation with profound implications. Moscow is likely to find itself in a controlling position over global trade routes. At least for the looming Asian Century. Perhaps more concerning for the long-term global strategic balance is just how far the U.S. Greenland policy will push Moscow and Beijing, and eventually New Delhi, to work together in the Arctic. All three scenarios discussed in Russia lead to the expansion and deepening (to various extents) of Russia-China Arctic relations. U.S. Greenland policy, whatever comes out in the wash, will likely spark a renewed round of cooperation between Moscow and Beijing. Pushing China and Russia closer to the Arctic is an outcome that does not correlate with Russia’s preferred position of full Arctic sovereignty. However, this might yet be framed as a necessary process on the pathway to building a multipolar world. It would seem the Arctic is set to be the first real test of this new world revered both in Moscow and Beijing. And this is the long-term strategic problem facing Washington in the Arctic.
Nuclear war risk high
Norman et al, 1-13, 25, By Laurence NormanFollow , Daniel KissFollow , Ming LiFollow and Peter SaidelFollow, Wall Street Journal, The Bomb Is Back as the Risk of Nuclear War Enters a New Age
Fears of nuclear conflict are growing again as arsenals expand, alliances shift and treaties dissolve At the end of the Cold War, global powers reached the consensus that the world would be better off with fewer nuclear weapons. That era is now over. Treaties are collapsing, some nuclear powers are strengthening their arsenals, the risk is growing that nuclear weapons will spread more widely and the use of tactical nuclear weapons to gain battlefield advantage is no longer unimaginable. The path to resurgent fears of nuclear war began in 1945, with the first nuclear test blast at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. When nations first acquired nuclear weapons 1945 N. Korea U.S. 2000 ’50 Soviet Union Pakistan U.K. ’90 ’60 ’80 Dissolution of Soviet Union‡ ’70 France China Israel* India South Africa† *Israel has never openly admitted to having nuclear weapons. †South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons in 1989. ‡Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus turned over their nuclear weapons to Russia in the 1990s. Note: These dates correspond to a first test or, where there was no test, their first nuclear bomb. Source: Federation of American Scientists In 1963, during the throes of America’s Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, President John F. Kennedy described his fear of a nuclear age without guardrails, in which dozens of nations possess weapons of mass destruction—what he called the “greatest possible danger and hazard.” For decades, arms-control agreements, technological challenges and fears of mutually assured destruction kept such a doomsday on the distant horizon. As years passed, U.S. and Russian stockpiles of nuclear warheads grew, then shrank—while China, in recent years, began its ascent. Total number of warheads, 1966 The U.S. detonated its first atomic bomb in 1945. The Soviet Union followed in 1949, and the Cold War arms race was under way. Total number of warheads, 1986 Since the start of the Cold War, at least 16 countries have worked seriously on the development of a nuclear-weapons program. By the 1980s, tens of thousands of nuclear warheads had been built. Total number of warheads, 2023 Ten of these countries have joined the ranks of nuclear powers; only South Africa has left the group. Note: Data as of 2023 Source: Our World in Data The global stockpile reached a peak in the mid-1980s, and has since been significantly reduced. In the first Start treaty, signed in 1991, the U.S. and Soviet Union agreed to cap the number of their warheads. But one of the two critical nuclear-arms-control pacts between Russia and the U.S., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, has collapsed. The New Start treaty, which placed even tighter limits on the number of deployed warheads on each side and the missiles and bombers that carry them, expires early next year. Estimated nuclear-warhead stockpiles U.S. Soviet Union/Russia 1968 1987 Intermediate–Range Nuclear Forces Treaty 1991 1972 1979 Non–proliferation Treaty START I SALT I SALT II 45 thousand 40 1993 2002 2010 35 START II SORT New START 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1950 ’55 ’60 ’65 ’70 ’75 ’80 ’85 ’90 ’95 2000 ’05 ’10 ’15 ’20 ’24 Source: Federation of American Scientists Senior officials in Washington now say the U.S. needs to be prepared to expand its nuclear force to deter growing threats from Russia and China—raising the potential of a new arms race. China’s growing stockpile of nuclear weapons is expected to triple by 2035, according to some estimates. U.S. estimates for Chinese nuclear-weapons stockpiles 1,600 1,400 DOD estimates 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 DIA* 200 FAS estimates 0 1990 ’95 2000 ’05 ’30 ’35 ’10 ’15 ’20 ’25 *Defense Intelligence Agency Sources: Federation of American Scientists; U.S. Department of Defense (DOD estimates for 2030 and 2035) The latest estimates indicate that China has about 600 intercontinental ballistic missiles in its arsenal, all of which can reach the U.S. mainland, according to a Pentagon assessment of China’s military released in December. Beijing has rejected past proposals that it meet with the U.S. and Russia to negotiate formal limits on nuclear forces. Advertisement Estimated Chinese nuclear forces by ballistic-missile type Warheads Launchers Land-based SEA-BASED Air-based 2020 2030 2020 2030 2020 2030 456 344 264 204 144 96 48 30 20 48 20 20 Note: Estimates as of 2020. Source: Federation of American Scientists The leading nuclear powers have intercontinental nuclear weapons. The U.S., Russia and China are all triad nuclear powers—meaning they can deliver nuclear weapons from land, sea and air, allowing them to launch an attack on any of their potential foes. The images below cover only currently deployed, land-based weapons. The Earth’s circumference is roughly 24,900 miles. The world within range: land-based missiles The U.S.’s longest-range nuclear weapon, Minuteman III, can travel around 8,050 miles. The range of Russia’s SS-18 missile is believed to be around 6,835 miles. The longest-range Chinese nuclear weapon, the DF-5, reaches around 8,077 miles. North Korea’s Hwasong-14 missile can deliver nuclear weapons that reach 6,213 miles, far enough to hit the U.S. Sources: Center for Strategic and International Studies, William Alberque of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. While the U.S. and Russia whittled down their stockpiles, concerns have risen about the use of tactical nuclear weapons. These are weapons with shorter ranges and smaller yields, which could make a big difference on the battlefield in an otherwise conventional war without sparking a wider nuclear conflict. Moscow has hinted that it might use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and introduced a doctrine in November that made the grounds for potentially using them broader and more explicit. Western powers feared Russia might decide to use tactical weapons in the conflict if it found itself on the defensive. Estimated tactical or nonstrategic warheads arsenal Russia 1,558 U.S. 230 Sources: Federation of American Scientists (Russia); Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (U.S.) Advertisement Efforts to contain nuclear threats have centered on the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT, which now has 191 signatories that have pledged never to acquire nuclear weapons or, for those that have them, pursue disarmament. But three nuclear-weapon states never accepted the NPT, and North Korea officially withdrew from the treaty in 2003. Iran, while a party to the treaty, could be months away from building a nuclear weapon; Saudi Arabia has said it would follow suit if that happens. The NPT gives the United Nations atomic agency only limited powers to prevent that. Iran is on the cusp of developing weapons if it chooses to, according to some officials and experts. They say it would be capable of producing a crude nuclear device in a matter of months. If Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia has said it would follow. Turkey has said it could develop nuclear weapons in what some fear could become an arms race across the Middle East. The U.S. has accused Moscow, which has a growing military partnership with North Korea, of flouting United Nations sanctions imposed on Pyongyang over its nuclear and missile programs. Some officials in South Korea have argued that the country should obtain nuclear weapons in response to threats from across the border. Source: Atomic Archive President Kennedy’s warning of the perils of a global arms race was an argument for a continued effort to limit arsenals through treaties. While those treaties, especially the NPT, have bound many nations into staying away from nuclear weapons, those commitments could be tested in a world of serious global tensions and the weakening of traditional alliances.
Investment in Greenland boxes out Russia and China, secures REMS and other natural resources
Ashley Fields, 1/12, 25, https://thehill.com/policy/international/5081040-stavridis-says-trumps-plan-for-greenland-not-a-crazy-idea/, The Hill, Stavridis says Trump’s plan for Greenland ‘not a crazy idea’
James Stavridis, former NATO supreme allied commander, said he doesn’t think President-elect Trump’s comments about Greenland are “crazy.” “It’s not a crazy idea. … We could do an awful lot in terms of business, investment, box out the Russians, box out the Chinese, and work very closely with Greenland,” he told radio host John Catsimatidis in a Sunday interview on “The Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM. Stavridis said he thinks Greenland is a “strategic goldmine for the United States,” expressing support for Trump’s idea. “It sits at the very top of the North Atlantic. It protects approaches to our own country. … It’s geographically very important. It’s full of strategic minerals, rare earth, probably a lot of gold. It’s got a lot of natural resources,” he said earlier in the interview. “It doesn’t have to become the 51st state, but it can certainly be an economic objective for us,” he added. “I think that’s how it plays out. … The prime minister of Greenland said, ‘We are not for sale. But we are open for business.’ I think we ought to take him at his word.” The Hill’s Headlines – January 12, 2025 Trump last week expressed his ambitions for the U.S. to acquire Greenland, the world’s largest island. Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte Egede said Friday that “Greenland is for the Greenlandic people. We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American. We want to be Greenlandic.” Egede also said that he is “ready” to talk with Trump.