Strategic Competition in the Arctic: Navigating a Complex Security Nexus
This article first appeared in Europäische Sicherheit und Technik Special Edition: Munich Security Conference 2025 on February 10, 2025.
Over the last two decades, the Arctic region has become strategically more important to Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific powers due to shifting geopolitics. Environmental issues, economic interests, and security challenges are deeply interlinked in this theatre.
Rising global temperatures, which are leading to melting sea ice and thawing permafrost, have focused scientific attention on the region, which is disproportionately impacted by climate change. All these conditions have also fuelled economic interests in resource exploration and extraction (e.g., of fossil fuels, minerals, and protein), shipping, and tourism. Interest in these opportunities extends beyond the eight states that hold territories within the Arctic Circle and together comprise the Arctic Council: Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States. Increased shipping and competing national interests have gone hand in hand with heightened security risks and threat perceptions in today’s era of strategic competition. Most recently, Donald Trump’s declarations that he intends to buy or take over Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and, by extension, a NATO ally, have rattled the transatlantic partners and further highlighted the centrality of the Arctic for North American homeland defense vis-à-vis Russia and China, and for western economic competitiveness.