For years, the Arctic has been treated as a remote curiosity — a place of melting ice, scientific expeditions and occasional diplomatic theatre. But that illusion is collapsing. Recent conversations and public statements reveal something far more serious: NATO is waking up far too late to a region that is rapidly becoming central to global power politics. Instead of shaping events in the High North, the alliance is scrambling to respond to pressures it should have anticipated long ago.

When NATO’s Secretary General, Mark Rutte, said allies were “discussing the next steps” to keep the Arctic safe, he was not unveiling a bold new strategy. He was admitting that the alliance is still trying to catch up with developments already in motion. His warning that newly opened sea lanes invite greater Russian and Chinese activity only underscored the point: NATO is reacting to risks it failed to take seriously until they were impossible to ignore. Even President Donald Trump’s blunt insistence that the United States must control Greenland to prevent future Russian or Chinese encroachment — however theatrically expressed — reflects a broader Western anxiety about losing ground in a region it once assumed would remain strategically quiet.

The uncomfortable truth is that NATO’s bandwidth has been consumed by the war in Ukraine. That focus is understandable, but it has left little space for a wider threat analysis process. In practice, the alliance has been so fixated on the eastern front that it has been blindsided in the north. The Ukraine conflict has absorbed so much Western........

© Eurasia Review