Not so long ago, the Arctic—a remote and thinly populated region stretching from Alaska to Siberia—seemed immune to the kind of conflicts that beset so many other parts of the world. Scholars even had a phrase for it: Arctic exceptionalism. Territorial disputes were virtually nonexistent. Until recently, Finland and Sweden still served as buffers between an expanding NATO alliance and the Russian federation, which takes up more than half of the Arctic coastline. Over the last couple of decades, the member states of the Arctic Council reached international agreements on polar bear conservation, commercial fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean, and the rights of Indigenous peoples. The Norwegian phrase “High North, low tension,” came to serve as a kind of mantra and point of pride. 

But that cooperative spirit is now a thing of the past. It has been replaced by an emerging era of competition over resources, particularly rare earth metals and control of shipping lanes, increasingly accessible as sea ice melts, and the potential for outright conflict as the United States, Russia, and China all seek to project power in the region. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has fractured the Arctic Council and stripped it of much of the legitimacy and influence it once had. Since then, diplomatic relations between Russia and the so-called Arctic 7—Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the U.S.—have deteriorated badly. Russia has officially banned all data sharing with its Western counterparts, and indefinitely suspended scientific collaboration with the U.S. and the EU. Meanwhile, China has declared itself a “near-Arctic state” and is leveraging Russia’s relative isolation on the world stage to advance its own vision of a polar Silk Road. And the U.S. has become the most openly belligerent actor in the region amid Donald Trump’s renewed threats to acquire Greenland, an autonomous territory that is still part of Denmark.

As Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds argue in Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, the sense of shared responsibility that once defined the region has all but vanished. The focus is now on security and the military buildup that goes along with it, as well as resource extraction and territorial expansion, including claims to the lucrative metals believed to lie at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The effects of climate change and questions related to Indigenous sovereignty have largely been placed on the back burner. And even if some sort of agreement or ceasefire is reached in Ukraine, which at this stage seems unlikely, it will not as Bennett and Dodds write, “repair the now hard-wired distrust within the Arctic state community. The damage has been well and truly done.”

The plundering of resources in the Arctic is an old story, from furs and whale oil to metals and fossil fuels, and one that has often been wrapped in depictions of the region as an empty wasteland (most famously, perhaps, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens once held up a blank piece of paper to represent the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain). Its fate today is inextricably tied to the whims of its two most powerful actors—the U.S. and Russia—whose current leaders are driven by a kind of nineteenth-century vision of hemispheric consolidation and expansion. But increasingly they must also contend with a third actor, a rapidly warming climate, which is, perversely, opening up........

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