DEEP DIVE – As more Arctic ice melts and more avenues for navigation and commerce open up at the top of the world, there’s a geopolitical competition underway for Arctic dominance – involving Russia, China and the U.S. And increasingly, experts fear it may lead to conflict.
"That likelihood has increased over the last five years," Joshua Tallis, Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, told The Cipher Brief. "The possibility of a conflict starting somewhere else, whether it's the Baltic or the Black Sea, and expanding into the Arctic, I think has grown significantly over the last decade."
The Arctic has been a strategic prize since the Cold War, for its mineral resources and its location – straddling areas controlled by both Russia and the U.S. But climate change and the ice melt have opened the region to more competition, in particular from China, which now calls itself a "near-Arctic nation” and is seeking strategic and economic gains of its own in the region.
In its 2024 Arctic Strategy, the Pentagon warned that the “increasingly accessible region is becoming a venue for strategic competition, and the United States must stand ready to meet the challenge alongside allies and partners.”
That competition has intensified as China and Russia have strengthened their collaboration; in 2023, the two countries formed an Arctic partnership, focused on developing infrastructure along the Northern Sea Route. They have also held joint military exercises in the Arctic and discussed exploiting the region’s natural resources. The Arctic region holds an estimated 30 percent of the world’s untapped natural gas, 13 percent of latent petroleum reserves, and its mineral resources have been valued as high as $1 trillion.
Meanwhile, Russia has built more than 475 military facilities in the Arctic Ocean – including bases, airfields, electronic warfare infrastructure and coastal defense systems. Russia’s Northern Fleet, based in the Arctic city of Severomorsk, is home to more than 30 surface ships and more than two dozen submarines - including some that carry long-range cruise missiles that can reach Canada and the U.S.
The Cipher Brief spoke about the growing geopolitical competition in the Arctic, and the challenges for the U.S. with Tallis, from the Center for Naval Analyses, and with Sophie Arts, a fellow with GMF Geostrategy North.
They spoke with Cipher Brief reporter Alison Spann. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
THE EXPERTS
The Cipher Brief: Why should the average American care about what's happening in the Arctic at the moment?
Tallis: The shortest answer is that the United States is an Arctic power. It can be easy to forget that by dint of the state of Alaska, the United States is one of eight Arctic nations that ring the Arctic Circle. And that gives us a certain amount of voice and responsibility in Arctic affairs alongside those of allies and partners – Canada most proximately, but a number of allies across the European high north, and of course Russia, which dominates along the Eurasian periphery of the Arctic. So from a simple domestic geopolitics standpoint, the United States is an Arctic power and needs to act that way.
Then there are the implications of climate change for expanding access and use of alternative maritime supply lines, most prominently the Northern Sea Route. And then – something that we've heard a lot in the news lately – is access to rare earth minerals and other critical minerals and resources. Canada and Greenland in particular are important stores for mineral wealth and for mining. And there's a significant amount of hydrocarbons, oil and natural gas that are also present in the Arctic.
So for shipping that is becoming more accessible because of climate change, mining and mineral extraction, hydrocarbon extraction, and just the American domestic footprint in the Arctic – all those converge to make the Arctic a more significant topic these days.
Arts: What's most concerning at the moment is that U.S. alliances [regarding the Arctic] is being called into question. Because these alliances are really the U.S.’s greatest advantage in the Arctic. The U.S. has had a very close relationship with Canada, of course, especially when it comes to continental defense – North American homeland defense through NORAD. And it's had a very close relationship with many of the longtime NATO allies in Europe, as well as some of the newer NATO allies — Finland and Sweden.
What the U.S. should do is really leverage these alliances more, and make sure that it advances its posture in the Arctic together with its allies, rather than dividing or giving into efforts from Russia and China, which frankly have an interest in dividing the U.S. and its European allies.
This should be something that the U.S. should really double down on.
Tallis: There are a lot of important strategic security concerns for the United States that emanate from the European high north and the North Atlantic. This is a critical route by which the Russian Northern Sea Fleet can flush ballistic missile submarines and attack submarines down into the North Atlantic. And so there are concerns about both homeland defense for the United States, and also the defense of the flow of goods, people, materiel, perhaps soldiers if necessary, from North America over to Europe in the event of a contingency or crisis between NATO and Russia. On the other side of the world, you've got the North Pacific Arctic. This is the proximate area around Alaska and the other portion of Russia's coastal Arctic holdings. And here a lot of the challenges relate to mineral and resource extraction, but this is where the United States has one of the largest concentrations of fifth generation fighters, the F-35s that are based in Alaska. And they're there in part because of a relatively significant potential air threat from Russian aircraft and bombers operating from the Eastern reaches of Russia.
From the U.S. homeland defense standpoint, the shortest pathway for a missile being shot from Russia towards the United States would typically come over the Arctic Circle. And so there's a really important requirement for early warning for air defense capabilities in partnership with Greenland and Denmark and in partnership with Canada as well, in order for the United States to have enough time to identify a potential launch of a ballistic missile or hypersonic missiles heading towards the mainland United States.
The Cipher Brief: Tell us about the growing presence of Russia and China in the Arctic – and your take on it.
Tallis: China and Russia are certainly collaborating. Over the last four or five years, we've seen a significant uptick in combined bilateral maritime exercises between the Russians and the Chinese. In 2024, we saw some coordinated bomber and strike flights near the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone. And then on the maritime front.
It's worth noting that [the collaboration] can create some friction between the two. Russia and China have certainly grown closer over the Arctic, in the last five or six years in particular, but Russia is sensitive to the fact that the Arctic is a strategic Russian domain. And it has always tried to strike a balance between bringing China in on the one hand, but also trying to keep China a little bit distant on the other.
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Arts: Russia has long had a very deep interest in the Arctic region, and more than 50 % of the Arctic coastline is Russian territory. The Arctic is very important economically and strategically to Russia, and it's worked over the last decade on really advancing and bolstering its Arctic region security posture – despite the great demands that Russia's war against Ukraine is having on the war economy and specific assets and forces.
With China, the interest in the Arctic is newer. China declared itself a “near-Arctic” state in a 2018 white paper. China has also been really interested in the Arctic region from an economic perspective. It’s important to emphasize that while the Arctic is not a core interest to China, it's increasing its posture and interest there, as well as in the Antarctic. It's very interested in both poles, from an economic perspective, a political perspective, scientific perspective, and also a strategic perspective.
Russia has also been looking to China to develop some of its infrastructure in the region that supports shipping traffic along the Northern Sea route, as well as its energy infrastructure. And of course, Russia has heavily concentrated resources of oil and gas in the Arctic region. And so the region is very important to Russia when it comes to bringing those raw materials to market. And it has looked to China as a primary partner there. The thing with Russia and China is that their civil and military activities aren't as easily separated as they are in Western democracies. A lot of scientific efforts may also serve military interests and strategic ends. So we've been watching that very closely.
And then of course, what has gotten the most attention is the military collaboration – joint naval patrols, joint air patrols, which analysts say still remains fairly parallel and are not fully interoperable. But it's certainly been causing a lot more concern and a lot more focus from the United States and its European allies.
Tallis: It's worth acknowledging that a lot of the interest, particularly on the part of Russia, in expanding the use of the Northern Sea Route is because Russia sees that as central to helping to expand the economic viability of its long Siberian Arctic coastline.
There's lots of critical minerals there. There's significant natural gas projects happening up in that part of the country. In order to get those materials or the hydrocarbons out, you need to be able to get ships in. And in order to be able to bring in the heavy mining and infrastructure equipment that you need, a lot of which now comes from China, you again need that ingress and egress route. So in addition to the security consideration and the challenges that poses for NATO and for the United States, Russia also has legitimate economic interests in expanding its use of the Northern Sea Route. And where it becomes problematic for the United States and for others is in the extent to which Russia tries to exert what we would regard as unfair or illegal control over the Northern Sea.
From the China standpoint, China has had a longstanding challenge as a consumption and manufacturing powerhouse: it doesn't create enough oil and natural gas to sustain its economy. A huge proportion of that comes from the Persian Gulf and travels through a number of choke points, whether it's the Strait of Hormuz or the Straits of Malacca in Singapore, all the way through the South China Sea over to ports on the East Coast of China. The United States has much greater capacity through the Navy and the Marine Corps and the Air Force to control the choke points that China has to flow through in order to keep its economy healthy. So for years now, China has sought to expand and invest in its use of the Northern Sea route, for economic but also political and military considerations, to give itself some alternative pathways in the event that the U.S. ends up in some conflict or militarized trade dispute with the Chinese.
And then the last bit, of course, is the movement of naval craft, whether that's submarines, whether that's service craft. Obviously, the extent to which both Russia and China can leverage greater directions of mobility in order to create more challenging problem sets for the United States and its Western allies, that puts greater onus and challenges on the United States to be able to defend from a greater variety of vectors.
The Cipher Brief: Has the joint military activity between China and Russia altered the strategic balance in the region?
Arts: It has had a big impact. It's definitely integrated the European theater and the Pacific theater more. It's been an important impetus for defense planners in NATO to think more about China's growing role in the Arctic and in Europe, but especially for the United States, because a lot of the activity that we've been seeing, especially the military activity, has been very focused on the Bering Sea and the area around Alaska.
The Cipher Brief: What do you think the United States and its allies need to do to respond to this evolving relationship between Russia and China in the Arctic?
Tallis: The U.S. strategy, at least from the standpoint of the Department of Defense right now, is best characterized as monitor and respond. For years, we've had a perspective strategically on the Arctic that says we will watch what happens. We will develop the capabilities and the capacity to respond as needed, but it's not a priority theater.
I think most Arctic experts expect that that will have to change, in part because as the Arctic becomes more accessible, it becomes this central linchpin linking the Indo-Pacific, Asia, Europe, all of that converges over the top of the globe. And it's largely as a result of the inaccessibility of the region that we haven't had to think about operating in that space.
I would expect to see that geographic convergence happening at the same time as this political convergence between Russia and China really starts to pique people's attention. Russia has demonstrated, at least in Ukraine, that it has some significant challenges in terms of multi-domain operations. China is much more sophisticated as a competitor. Those two together, however, can really create some challenging dilemmas for the United States. If we end up in a war in the Indo-Pacific and China can exert through Russia political leverage and challenges on a 90-degree axis, up in the Arctic, that really starts to stretch the U.S. capacity thin in order to respond to two crises in two different regions simultaneously.
Arts: A lot more cooperation would be helpful. I think that the European allies are very eager to cooperate more with the United States in the Arctic. Of course, everyone has limited capacity, limited capabilities, but I think they've been looking for ways to help bolster the NATO posture or the posture of the seven states in the Arctic that are all now part of NATO, all the states except Russia. They’ve been looking at different cooperative frameworks to help bolster capabilities and contribute to forces as far as possible. It's important to note that NATO's focus on the Arctic has been primarily on the European Arctic and the high north and the North Atlantic. So it's primarily aimed at deterring Russia, which remains the greatest threat in the Arctic.
The Cipher Brief: Do you think the United States needs more investment militarily or otherwise in this region?
Tallis: There’s a really good argument for air and missile defense and space capabilities, and a more expansive presence in the Arctic, in coordination and partnership with Canada and Greenland, who have largely been incredibly open to working with us – Greenland, obviously, through the support of the Danish government.
And a lot of this work is already underway. Well before the election, Canada had announced significant reinvestment in some fairly antiquated infrastructure for missile detection systems in the high Arctic. So that work is ongoing and that work is really necessary.
Any expansion that we can get that provides us more options in the Arctic and more survivability is good for American security. In the more politically contentious category, I'd argue, is a fairly long-running debate over the need for icebreakers. The United States has really struggled. We've got one heavy and one medium icebreaker. They're both incredibly old as ships go, and we have struggled to recapitalize the U.S. Coast Guard's ice-breaking fleet over the years. I think we'd expect, given the focus we've heard lately, that the second Trump administration would be focused on icebreakers.
And then the other more politically charged question is the need for more enduring U.S. Navy basing in Alaska. So whether that's interest in a deep-water port in Nome, or interest in facilities that have been shuttered, that's a more challenging discussion, because the very nature of naval vessels is that you can move them around without necessarily having to permanently base them in places.
With the expansion now of NATO to include Sweden and Finland, the Arctic really is split between either NATO or Russia. And I think historically the expectation on the part of most Arctic watchers is that we wouldn't see a conflict start in the Arctic, but we might see a conflict expand into the Arctic.
And I do think that that likelihood has increased over the last five years. Now that every country in the Arctic is either in NATO or Russia, I still think we might expect that the likelihood of a conflict originating in the Arctic is relatively low, but certainly not zero and has risen over time. But the possibility of a conflict starting somewhere else, whether it's the Baltic or the Black Sea, now expanding into the Arctic, I think has grown significantly over the last decade.
Cipher Brief reporter Alison Spann contributed to reporting.
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