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As the polar ice melts, Russia, already a major Arctic power, wants to make the region its own.
China covets a “Polar Silk Road”.
And NATO is embracing Finland – and Sweden too, Washington hopes – giving the alliance a new reach in the Far North.
Tobias Billstrom, Swedish Foreign Minister, receiving Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday. Photo TT News Agency/via Reuters
Climate change is accelerating and amplifying competition in the Arctic like never before, opening the region to greater trade and strategic competition just at a time when Russia, China and the West are trying to expand their military presence there.
The growing importance of the region is underscored by the trips of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is due to attend an informal meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Norway on Thursday.
Blinken is also scheduled to visit Sweden and Finland, and meet with the leaders of all three countries as they press Turkey to ratify Sweden’s rapid NATO membership.
He is scheduled to deliver a major speech on Russia, Ukraine and NATO on Friday in Helsinki, the capital of NATO’s newest member.
For a long time, countries were reluctant to talk about the Arctic as a possible military zone.
But that is changing rapidly.
Russian aggression plus climate change make up “a perfect storm,” said Matti Pesu, an analyst at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
There is a new cold war atmosphere, mixed with the thaw, which affects military planning and opens up new economic possibilities and access to natural resources.
So all of these are connected and magnify each other,” Pesu said.
“This makes the region intriguing.”
Although NATO has welcomed Russia’s difficulties in Ukraine, the alliance does in fact have significant vulnerabilities in the north.
Russia remains a major Arctic power, with naval bases and nuclear missiles stationed in the Far North, but also along Russia’s western edge:
on the Kola Peninsula near Norway, where Russia keeps most of its nuclear-armed submarines, and in Kaliningrad, which borders Poland and Lithuania.
With climate change, shipping lanes are becoming less iced and easier to navigate, making the Arctic more accessible and attractive for competitive commercial exploitation as well as military adventurism.
According to Robert Dalsjo, director of research at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, Russia has declared that it wants to make the Arctic its own – a fifth military district, on a par with its other four.
China has also been very busy trying to gain a foothold in the region and use new unfrozen routes, one of the reasons why NATO sees China as a major security challenge.
In its most recent strategic document, approved last summer in Madrid, NATO declared that Russia is “the most significant and direct threat to the security of the allies and to peace and stability”, but for the first time it referred to China , stating that his “stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values”.
How to create a “northern bubble” to deter Russia and police China is one of NATO’s biggest and latest challenges.
In response to NATO enlargement, “Russia is placing more and more emphasis on the Arctic, where they are strongest and least surrounded by NATO,” said Pesu of the Finnish Institute.
Russia may have reduced its troops to fight in the Ukraine, but it retains its air power, its Nordic fleet, its nuclear submarines and its nuclear-armed missiles in the northern kingdoms.
“So it’s still a pretty pressing concern,” he said.
Finland, Sweden and Norway “see this with the utmost urgency,” even if some in NATO do not, he said.
As a consequence, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark have decided to merge their air forces, creating one with more planes than Britain or France.
Until now, competition in the region was largely mediated through the Arctic Council, founded in 1996, which includes Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States, and promotes research and cooperation. .
But it does not have a security component, and soon all but Russia will be members of NATO.
The Council has been “on hiatus” since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
When the Russian presidency ended in May, Norway took over, so activity may resume.
Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea sparked rethinks across NATO, and there was new anxiety over the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – combined with the Swedish submarine hunt and more serious war games, said Anna Wieslander, director for Northern Europe at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research institution.
General Philip Breedlove, then the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, called for “a denial of access to the area” to prevent Russia from entering the Baltic Sea from Kaliningrad, the isolated Russian stronghold with access to the sea.
China began making inroads around 2018, trying to buy ports in Finland and mines in Greenland, opening scientific research stations as it pursues its “Polar Silk Road,” Wieslander said, prompting former President Donald Trump to offer to buy greenland.
Washington then began to reinvest militarily in the Arctic with more ships, planes and military exercises, as did other NATO countries in the region.
In 2018, NATO even created a new operational command, a kind of regional headquarters that plans and carries out military operations to defend specific NATO areas.
The new command, based in Norfolk, Virginia, is focused on the Navy and defends the sea lanes of the Atlantic, Scandinavia and the Arctic.
Concerns remain that China, which now has even closer ties with Russia, is still active in the Far North, building huge icebreakers. “China will reach Europe through the Arctic,” Wieslander said.
One of the main questions is whether the real Russian threat to Scandinavia will come from the sea, as Norway fears, or from the land, with a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic states or Finland, and then a move west.
Both Finland and Sweden, when it joins, want to be part of the same NATO operational command, given their long history of defense cooperation.
Norway belongs to the Norfolk command, and it is logical that both Finland and Sweden belong to that command, since the reinforcements would probably come from the west, across the Atlantic.
But perhaps it makes more sense, given the current Russian threat, for them to join the Brunssum, Netherlands-based ground command tasked with defending Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland and the Baltic nations.
“There is logic to both,” said Niklas Granholm, deputy director of studies at the Swedish Defense Research Agency.
“It’s not resolved yet.”
According to the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, NATO recommends including both countries in Brunssum’s command, despite Finland’s early interest in being part of Norfolk, which Sauli Niinisto, Finland’s president, visited in March.
This is because it is easier for Finland to receive reinforcements from Norway and Sweden, said Pesu, an analyst at the Finnish Institute.
The fear is that a modernized Russian Northern Fleet could swoop through the straits between Greenland, Iceland and Great Britain, a maneuver known in NATO as a “red right hook”, to cut off sea lanes and undersea cables and threaten the US East Coast. with cruise missiles.
Dalsjo of the Swedish Defense Research Agency, who calls himself a heretic, warns in a recent article that this threat is real but may be exaggerated, especially after the Russian losses in Ukraine.
Russia is predominantly a land power, and its northern fleet is considerably smaller than it was during the Cold War, when there were concerns about the kind of large Soviet naval attack described in Tom Clancy’s novel “Red Storm Rising.”
“If they didn’t do it then with 150 ships,” Dalsjo asked, “why would they do it now with 20?”
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