President Donald Trump, in the face of domestic and international resistance, appears to have ruled out, at least for now, the use of military force to acquire Greenland. While the heat has been turned down in the short term, the longer-term consequences of Trump’s recklessness for the Arctic are unlikely to be worthy of celebration.
If Trump’s blustering over Greenland was genuinely meant to improve American security, it has almost certainly failed already. Instead, history may record this as the moment when the starting pistol was fired in an Arctic arms race.
Trump’s ever-shifting rationales for “needing” Greenland, such as the bizarre and unfounded assertion that hundreds of Chinese and Russian vessels are swarming around the island, were obviously false and effortlessly swatted aside. But Trump and others in his administration continue to raise dubious concerns about security threats in the Arctic.
“The new domain of international competition is going to be polar competition,” asserted White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. “That is where more and more resources are being spent by our nation’s adversaries and rivals, [on] the ability to control movement, navigation, lanes of travel in the polar and arctic region.”
And the U.S. Army declared that the Arctic is “an arena for competition, a line of attack in a conflict . . . and a platform for global power projection.”
The problem with this worldview is that it is nonsense. Notwithstanding breathless assertions to the contrary, conflict in the Arctic is entirely avoidable and unnecessary. The greater threat to the region is a self-fulfilling assumption that conflict is inevitable.
It is undeniably true that the Arctic is transforming rapidly as a result of climate change. The region is warming at four times the rate of the rest of the world and summertime sea ice is declining by more than 12 percent per decade.
It is also true that Russia is increasing militarization and industrialization along its Arctic coast and that China is investing in icebreakers and has expressed interest in developing a “Polar Silk Road.”
But Russia’s interests are focused on the Northern Sea Route, the ice-strewn passage to the north of its Arctic coast. And, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stated desire to develop it into a seaway to rival the Suez Canal, the navigational challenges it entails mean it is used primarily for domestic transport and shipping commodities to China.
China’s own Arctic ambitions merit just a few passing mentions in Beijing’s most recent five-year plans. And while the total of 1,781 ships that operated in the Arctic in 2024 is an increase of 500 over 2013, it is hardly significant globally when considering that 1,000 vessels are handled in the port of Singapore daily.
Besides, Arctic nations have proven more than equal to the challenges facing their region. In 2018, six of them, including the United States and Russia, joined China and three other countries in signing an agreement to regulate commercial fisheries in a future, ice-free Central Arctic Ocean. Russia and Norway reached concord after forty years of disagreement over their maritime boundaries in the Barents Sea. Canada and Denmark found a Solomonic solution to their territorial dispute over Hans Island.
Which is not to say there are no tensions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought Arctic diplomacy to a grinding halt and prompted long-neutral Sweden and Finland to join NATO. Moscow in turn sees that move as confirming its long-standing paranoia about NATO expansion.
But no Arctic nation had come close to outwardly threatening another’s sovereignty and security—until now. And it is Trump who is doing the threatening.
Trump’s bluster seems to have earned him little. The deal he says he struck with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, looks very much like an agreement that has been in place since 1951. Yet the cost of the President’s statements and actions will likely be significant. Far from improving America’s Arctic security, Trump has cast the country as the region’s most unreliable and hostile neighbor.
The Arctic is facing an actual threat to its security after all. And that threat is coming from the United States.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.