What We Should Worry About When We Worry About the Arctic

Melting ice, newly accessible sea lanes, and untapped resources are typically top of mind, especially in the evolving strategic competition with China. But are these the chief worries when one considers the security challenges the US and its allies are likely to encounter in the short to medium term? And, if not, does that mean the Arctic should not figure prominently in thinking about US and transatlantic security? The answers are “Not exactly” and “No.” The framing of the Arctic as an emerging theater of competition around thawing sea lanes is correct but incomplete. The Arctic is not a peripheral theater or NATO’s northern flank. It has been and remains the shortest path between nuclear powers, home to the core of Russia’s second-strike capability. It is, what one former advisor to President Trump called, “North America’s front door.” To be sure, it is a front door that is increasingly accessible: physically, economically, and militarily. If mismanaged, it could become an escalation accelerant in a broader crisis. Increasing accessibility only serves to exacerbate older concerns that Cold War predecessors would have known well: nuclear stability, homeland defense, alliance management, and the long-term geometry of great power competition. The question is not whether the Arctic matters but how it matters and what exactly we should be worried about.

Nuclear Stability and Escalation Risk

The Arctic is central to Russia’s strategic deterrence. Russia’s Northern Fleet in Severomorsk on the Kola Peninsula hosts the bulk of Russia’s sea-based nuclear deterrent forces, making it central to its second-strike capability. Defense and deterrence in the region are prioritized as such, especially given new concerns surrounding the accession of Finland and Sweden into the NATO Alliance. Russia’s ballistic missile submarines there operate under the protection of layered air defense, coastal defense systems, and anti-submarine assets. Moscow has signaled an objective to improve this posture by investing heavily in Arctic basis, radar stations, and airfields. Although the on-going war in Ukraine has delayed many of these plans, Russia still maintains and exercises the capability of striking inside western Europe from the region with conventional long-range fires like the Kinzhal hypersonic missile and has been keen to publicize recent Arctic amphibious landing exercises and naval live-fire exercises conducted close to the Norwegian border.

Another tool in Russia’s deterrent efforts has increasingly been Russian grey zone activity in the region, including GPS jamming around the Baltic and Barents Sea and intensifying espionage efforts in Norway’s High North. In June 2025, the increased Russian activity in and around the Barents Sea prompted Norway’s King Harald and Queen Sonja to visit the Svalbard archipelago’s settlement of Longyearbyen in a symbolic show of Norway’s century of sovereignty over the territory. The point is that, for Russia, the Arctic is not simply another conventional flank. It is the heart of Russian nuclear deterrence.

For NATO and Russia, this creates an escalation dilemma. The expanded NATO membership of Sweden and Finland, NATO exercises in the High North, and allied maritime patrol activity improves NATO deterrence posture and alliance resilience. For Moscow, however, these activities also occur in the geography most closely associated with Russian strategic deterrence. This has the potential of triggering, what Robert Jervis famously referred to as “misperception,” especially in how the two sides signal intent from positions of differing cognitive biases. For instance, US signaling in NATO’s High North meant to communicate red lines regarding the Baltic States could very easily be viewed in Moscow as an intent to signal a threat to Russian strategic nuclear deterrence. Given the centrality of the High North to this strategic deterrence, the region requires a different mental model. The challenge is not simply how to deter Russia in the High North, but how to do so while maintaining nuclear stability. It’s a difficult needle to thread.

Homeland Defense

Threading this needle is central to the second related worry for the US, homeland defense. The Russian nuclear submarines in Russia’s high northeast must navigate NATO’s High North in order to threaten the US east coast from the Atlantic. At issue are two choke points in the Barents and Norwegian Seas. The first is the relatively narrow and shallow strip of Barents Sea dominated by Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Known in military circles as the Bear Island Gap for the small island at its center, this strip of sea provides the US and its allies the first best chance for detecting and monitoring Russian nuclear submarines before they get into the expanse of the North Atlantic where they would be much more difficult to find. The second and final opportunity to track these submarines before they are free to clandestinely roam the Atlantic would come at the so-called Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap (G-I-UK) where two naval choke points northwest and southeast of Iceland constrain maritime maneuver. Russian submarines that successfully escape these two chokepoints without being discovered could hold cities like New York at nuclear risk with missiles and even the newly developed Poseidon nuclear torpedo that is reported to contain at least a two megaton warhead for use against coastal targets.

The only thing new about these worries are the new capabilities like the Poseidon torpedo or Russia’s latest Borei-A class nuclear submarines. Cold War era US strategist would have readily recognized the challenge, including the criticality of detecting and tracking the submarines before they enter the North Atlantic. They would have also recognized that the maritime worries associated with the Arctic as a strategic corridor are not the only concern. The Arctic is the most direct avenue for aerospace threats to North America from both eastern and western Russia. These threats include Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers, and new hypersonic glide vehicles like the nuclear capable Avangard boost-glide vehicle. For decades, early warning infrastructure in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland provided the backbone of North American defense against such threats. It is an architecture in need of upgrading, including the continued integration of space-based sensing, over the horizon radars, and domain awareness across air, space, and cyber. If policy makers treat the Arctic simply as an optional theater for competition for resources with China, they risk misallocating strategic attention from these longstanding and more central concerns of homeland defense.

NATO’s New High North Map

A third worry is the way in which NATO’s northern transformation impacts both nuclear stability in the Arctic and the region’s role in US homeland defense. The accession of Finland and Sweden into NATO has fundamentally altered the Arctic’s strategic map. Nearly the entire European Arctic is now NATO territory. This improves alliance depth, enhances land-based capabilities in extreme cold weather operations, and strengthens the Baltic-Arctic strategic linkage. It also sharpens escalation dynamics. Russia now confronts a more consolidated allied northern flank.

NATO must determine how the Arctic fits into its command structure. Is the High North a supporting theater for Baltic defense? Is it a maritime domain problem? Or is it a distinct operational space requiring tailored capabilities and planning? Of course, the answer to each is yes, but where NATO chooses to place its focus has important implications. Treating the High North as a supporting theater for Baltic defense suggests the need for the integration of Swedish and Finish defensive plans with those of NATO’s northeast, while the maritime domain problem suggests the integration of this new NATO territory into defensive plans to secure the North Atlantic. The unique characteristics of this region have even resulted in some observers calling for the creation of a new NATO Joint Force Command focused specifically on the unique challenges of the High North. Over militarization remains a real risk. The Arctic has historically been insulated from some forms of geopolitical confrontation. The erosion of this exceptionalism could normalize constant military signaling in a region where the maintenance of nuclear stability has been job one. Alliance management, therefore, becomes critical. Coordination between North American US and NATO commands, like NATO’s Joint Force Command Norfolk, and European Commands, like NATO Joint Force Command Brunssum, clarity about supported and supporting relationships, and disciplined signaling matter more in the Arctic than in most other regions.

Great Power Competition with China

The fourth concern to highlight is the long-term geometry of great power competition. This geometry has been altered significantly by the emerging three-body problem China’s rise on the global stage has meant for global security and stability. To be sure, China is not an Arctic military power. It does not possess Arctic territory, nor does it field significant military forces in the region. However, China has declared itself to be a “near-Arctic state.” Beijing is investing in Arctic research and pursuing infrastructure and energy projects, especially with Russia. In 2024, China mounted its largest Arctic expedition to date with three icebreakers. Though ostensibly a research expedition, such efforts align with PRC interest in exploiting a shorter shipping route through the Northeast passage along Russia’s Arctic coast, diversifying Chinese energy supplies, and developing influence over emerging maritime corridors. Nevertheless, when compared to the PRC’s military activities and efforts to increase economic influence elsewhere on the globe, PRC Arctic presence remains relatively limited. More worrying is the PRC’s increased military activity elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific, especially around Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Japan. If there is an immediate worry for the US when it comes to PRC military activity in the Arctic, it is in the Pacific Arctic, where Russia and the PRC have increased joint military presence, including a 2023 joint military exercise near Alaska and 2024 joint bomber operations in Alaska’s Air Defense Identification Zone.

The worry regarding the PRC’s Arctic ambitions is twofold: immediate and longer term. In the short term, increasing PRC-Russian military cooperation in the Arctic complicates the maintenance of nuclear stability and US homeland defense. The potential for misperception and miscalculation increases with the introduction of a third great power with its own national interests and priorities, especially given deepening Russian dependence on China resulting from Moscow’s costly war in Ukraine. Deterrence in the Arctic may increasingly become a three-body problem with Russian and Chinese interests obscured by the increasing imbalance in their relationship. In the longer term, China’s ambitions in the Arctic represent a structural challenge. Scientific research promotes greater domain awareness of how to operate in Arctic conditions. Investments in ports, telecommunications, and energy projects will create leverage and access. The question is whether this is a five-year or twenty-year problem. The answer likely lies closer to the latter. For now, US policy should focus on Arctic governance standards, investment screening, and allied coordination to prevent access dilemmas from hardening into faits accomplis.

As to the shorter-term challenge of increasing PRC-Russian cooperation may pose in the North Pacific, the US ability to operate in the Pacific Arctic needs to be improved. This includes not only the development of capabilities, like Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE) with Finland and Canada to build 11 additional vessels, but it also includes improving US Arctic infrastructure in Alaska. Currently, Dutch Harbor, Alaska is the closest U.S. deep water port to the Arctic Circle, 800 miles south of the Bering Strait. The project to develop the port of Nome, Alaska into the US’s first deep-water port north of the Arctic Circle is projected to restart after a year-long delay in the spring of 2026. These are positive developments. In addition, the US military might reconsider its own command and control arrangements in the North Pacific. The US’s INDO-PACIFIC Command in Hawaii is rightfully focused on PRC activities in the Western Pacific, though its area of responsibility extends north and east up to the approaches to the Bering Strait. This should prompt a discussion of whether the US Northern Command, the US major command currently charged with homeland defense, might be better positioned to focus on this sea and air space that is increasingly important to its mission.  

Conclusion

Taken together, these four worries suggest that there is plenty to worry about when it comes to the Arctic. Most of these concerns, however, are not new. There is little evidence of imminent resource wars in the Arctic. Energy development remains expensive and commercially risky. There is no indication of near-term PRC Arctic basing. Nor is there a plausible scenario of a large-scale conventional invasion across the polar ice. There is a risk, however, that the US and its allies will lose site of what makes the Arctic a critical region for the maintenance of nuclear stability and a frontline for US homeland defense. The management of security and defense of NATO’s expanded Arctic and near-Arctic territory and the structural challenge of China’s slow-burn efforts to expand its influence in the Arctic will complicate the first two priorities. The omission of any reference to the Arctic in the 2025 National Security Strategy is positive in the sense that US policy makers do not appear to be overly indexed on Arctic concerns like an imminent resource and land grab for newly thawed polar riches. However, perhaps the biggest worry of all is that the omission signals that policy makers are not worried enough about the real reasons we should still worry about the Arctic. To ensure the Arctic remains a zone of managed competition rather than open conflict will require disciplined deterrence, calibrated signaling, alliance coordination, and capability and infrastructure investments. We should not worry about the Arctic because is newly accessible. We should worry because it has always been and remains strategically central.

Image credit: Brocken Inaglory., CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons