Distant War and Thinning Ice Open Cracks in Arctic Security

The Arctic is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, yet it is of immense strategic importance. The northern frontiers of eight countries—Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States, inclusive of possessions and territorial waters—extend above the Arctic Circle. For the most part, these neighbors have formed a relatively cooperative relationship in recent decades dealing with matters of mutual concern and bilateral complaints.

However, distant war, economic dislocation and shifting weather patterns are challenging existing arrangements and offering opportunities for China to insert itself as a “near-Arctic” power, further upsetting the status quo of the “High North.”

“There used to be a narrative of High North, low tension,” said Commander Rachael Gosnell, U.S. Navy, a military professor at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies with expertise in maritime security and Arctic strategy. “But I think that era of Arctic exceptionalism, that it’s a peaceful area whatever was going on elsewhere, is over. Although the Arctic region has experienced unprecedented cooperation since the early 1990s, we’re seeing a rise in global interest, along with increasing tensions and securitization.”

The Russia Problem

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created an effective breakdown in the Arctic Council, the international forum for the Arctic nations, regional indigenous peoples and many observer countries. Russia happened to hold the chair of the council when it launched its invasion in February 2022, and the other seven policymaking members decided not to go to meetings under those circumstances.

Norway assumed the chair in May 2023, and Russia promptly dropped out. While the non-Russian members of the organization are putting a brave face on the situation and claim they can still get things done, many experts wonder whether the Arctic Council’s end is nigh. Adding insult to injury from Russia’s perspective is that Finland and Sweden have recently joined NATO, meaning that the rest of the council’s top nations are aligned against it, at least politically and militarily.

The Arctic Council does not have any powers of enforcement, but it has served as a useful body for resolving issues without escalating them to the attention of the United Nations. The central portion of the Arctic Ocean is outside territorial waters and therefore is open ocean and free for all under the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea, which the U.S. (somewhat awkwardly) has not signed but nevertheless essentially supports and effectively polices with its Navy.

While it might be tempting to try to get along without Russia in an abridged Arctic Council, it is by far the largest Arctic power and its national interests cannot be ignored. CDR Gosnell said that arguably no other nation depends more on the Arctic region than Russia.

“The numbers are a little bit hard to come by now, but before 2022 between 10% to 20% of Russia’s GDP came from the Arctic zone,” she said. “That’s a startling amount. Up to 95% of its natural gas and up to 75% of its oil reserves are in the Arctic zone. Russia relies on the economic development and viability of these resources—on and offshore—and also of the waterways of its Arctic coastline in order to maintain a sea route for that economy.”

For its part, the Unites States simply does not have the same scale of economic interests above the Arctic Circle as Russia. Comedian Dennis Miller once likened Alaska to the freezer you keep out in the garage: The stuff is there in case you need it. Government bans on oil and gas leases on federal lands will keep more than 70% of Alaska’s fossil fuel resources in the ground for the foreseeable future.

Gosnell pointed out, though, that direct economic development does not have to be the only incentive for improving Arctic access. All the Arctic nations have indigenous peoples who have not always enjoyed the fruits of national economic development yet are still important regional stakeholders. By supporting indigenous communities in Alaska, she said, the U.S. would strengthen these communities’ ability to act as partners in regional security and stewardship.

In a 2019 edition of the U.S. Naval Institute publication Proceedings, Gosnell wrote:

Ensure indigenous communities are protected. Additional government funding can be allocated to improving infrastructure for local communities to harden them against the evolving landscape. Port infrastructure should be improved to offer accessibility to communities while also serving as logistics hubs for U.S. Navy and Coast Guard assets.

Mind the Icebreaker Gap

In the meantime, Russia is scrambling to improve its Arctic access. President Vladimir Putin, perceiving greater NATO hostility after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, ordered the occupation and refurbishment of military installations in the Arctic that had remained fallow since the Cold War. The effort has seen deployments of troops, aircraft, air-defense missiles, anti-ship missiles, and increased radar coverage and fleet units.

Few Arctic security issues have received more attention in the U.S. Congress than Russia’s clear dominance in the field of icebreakers and other types of ice-hardened ships. Experts say Russia operates a fleet of about 40 icebreakers—including nuclear-powered ones—some of which are armed with anti-ship missiles. The U.S. Coast Guard (which has icebreaking duties) operates one heavy icebreaker, which is generally deployed to support U.S. activities in Antarctica. A new heavy icebreaker and a new class of polar security cutters are, not surprisingly, years behind schedule.

At a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing in November 2023, as reported by The Hill, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), appearing as a witness, said: “We need to make sure that we are trying to close a very, very significant icebreaker gap. Even China’s icebreaker capacity is on pace to surpass ours in 2025 ... and they are not even an Arctic nation.” 

According to Gosnell, Russia’s prioritization of icebreakers says more about the challenges imposed by its geography, however vast its landmass and extensive its coastline, than the threat it poses to U.S. and allied Arctic interests. As she indicated previously, Russia absolutely depends on its Arctic zone for the health of its economy. Its limited and seasonal access to domestic warm-water ports means it has to escort cargo ships with icebreakers just to enable many exports and imports. This is an expensive, time-consuming and even dangerous proposition.

“I think we love to emphasize the icebreaker mismatch between the U.S. and Russia,” Gosnell said, agreeing that our aging icebreakers are in dire need of replacement and augmentation. “But when you fundamentally look at the public records, they are for overcoming economic liability.”

The fact is, the United States should be thankful it has an abundance of perennially ice-free ports giving it global access. In U.S. doctrine, even though the Coast Guard operates icebreakers, it regards icebreakers as enabling its other missions, not as a core mission itself, according to Gosnell.

“Absolutely an icebreaker can be used for enabling scientific missions, it can be used for search and rescue operations, it can be used for law enforcement,” she said. “We don’t need it economically. And you’re not going to be using it for warfighting because it’s a sitting duck.”

The (Bactrian) Camel’s Nose

If the People’s Republic of China is outpacing the U.S. in icebreaker production, that’s par for the course for shipbuilding more generally. Nevertheless, the reality of China’s icebreakers plying Arctic waters is part of a larger context of the nation’s expansion as a world power.

China proclaimed itself a “near-Arctic” nation in a defense white paper in 2018. While this claim makes about as much geographic sense for Poland as for China (they share a similar northern latitude), for China it represents a natural step in its ascension.

Then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at a speech before the Arctic Council in Finland in 2019, rejected China’s assertion, saying its observer status in the organization was all it was entitled to. However, he also hinted at the would-be-interloper’s motivation: “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade. This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days.”

World powers are making plans for an Arctic region that may be significantly less icy in the near future than it has been in the recent past. In a strategy described as “presence before power,” China has established a number of scientific ventures in the Arctic region, many of them located in territory controlled by Western nations. The global financial crisis of the late 2000s, particularly a 2008 banking collapse in Iceland, gave China the opportunity to gain ownership of ports and other facilities, although its ability to capitalize strategically on these to date has been questionable.

However, China’s investment in access and infrastructure along Russia’s Northern Sea Route represents a direct challenge to the status quo of the High North. The long-term potential offered by reduced sea ice has been reinforced by Russia’s isolation from the West caused by its invasion of Ukraine.

When Putin first decided to reinforce his northern flank to ensure Russia’s ability to develop its economy there, he probably would have balked at having China’s Xi Jinping as his partner. Russia’s strategic defenses, including its land-based ballistic missile and bomber forces, are deployed largely in the Arctic region. Its ballistic missile submarines come and go from Arctic ports. Historically, these capabilities have existed as much to deter China as the United States.

That has now changed with Western sanctions and Russia’s loss of many of its markets. China has stepped in to fill the void, both as an eager customer of Russian fossil fuels and other raw materials, and as a supplier of technology and other goods Russia can no longer obtain in the West. This has led to a change in the strategic situation in the High North.

According to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China has identified a number of useful ports along the Northern Sea Route, and Chinese firms have invested heavily in developing these and other high-profile infrastructure projects. The report concludes: “If successful, these projects could further embed China’s state-owned champions deep into the Russian Arctic.”

With such a presence, China would be an Arctic power, by interest if not geography. This raises the prospect of a divided Arctic rather than a cooperative one.

Break Out the Parkas

At the same time, events in the High North still move glacially. The Northern Route—and the corresponding Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic Archipelago—remain potential prospects a decade or more in the future, and they may not materialize at all. While Arctic countries are staking claims over continental shelves in order to assert exclusive access to resources, this does not signal a new gold rush. These claims need to be sorted out at the U.N. and would not affect most of the Arctic Ocean’s status as the high seas.

Gosnell pointed out that operating in the Arctic is extremely demanding, to say the least. This is even more true for operations trying to exploit resources from the region’s seabed. While Norway has signaled it intends to extract minerals from the Arctic Ocean, drawing the ire of environmentalists, such offshore projects are rare even in the planning stages.

“I don’t see a big resource grab,” Gosnell said, adding that the majority of the Arctic is sovereign territory or falls within a nation’s Exclusive Economic Zone. “Of course, the central Arctic Ocean is international seas, but it’s an incredibly inhospitable part of the world. Even with climate change driving ice melt, you have extreme cold, darkness and unpredictable storms. There’s a real lack of infrastructure and search-and-rescue capabilities. The technology to exploit resources in the depths of the central Arctic Ocean doesn’t exist now and probably won’t for a while.”

“With the Arctic, I think you have to be planning decades into the future because it is so difficult to operate there and the equipment that you need is so specialized,” she concluded. “It’s not a pickup game.”

The main point is that the U.S. has time to prepare itself for a period of rising tensions in the Arctic. The bad guys are probably not coming over the Pole tomorrow. Yet they are out there, and the days of dropping Arctic priorities to the bottom of the list should be behind us.

Rather than the U.S. going on a crash icebreaker program, Gosnell recommends increasing the tempo of military exercises in the High North, both at sea and in NATO territory above the Arctic Circle. She said the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO will improve the West’s ability to operate in the region because those nations have excellent capabilities in that area already and will shift NATO’s center of gravity northward to enhance deterrence there.

At sea, Gosnell credits Admiral Lisa Franchetti, currently Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, for her visionary approach to the region, which included rotating groups of ships from Europe into the High North when she was commander of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet between 2018 and 2020. The practice continues today.

“You have to have fluency in cold weather operations to be able to be successful,” she said, adding that figuring out proper crew watch schedules, clothing and even the right batteries requires time on station. “And I think that’s ultimately the most important thing: You have to demonstrate the capability, the commitment, and then signal that in order to deter effectively.”

Politics, geography and changes in the climate are conspiring to make the High North yet another arena of rising tensions between Russia, China and the West. The United States can defend its priorities and those of its friends with cool-headed planning and constant practice.