This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
As Philippe Cousteau Jr, grandson of the late Jacques Cousteau, once said, “The world cannot live without the Arctic.” The region “affects every living thing on Earth and acts as a virtual thermostat”. In Polar War, Kenneth Rosen warns that the Arctic is not merely a virtual thermostat. As climate change elevates temperatures, the Arctic is fast becoming a very real hotspot for great power competition.
With Donald Trump pushing for territorial control over Greenland, Rosen’s work serves as a clarion call to listen to the geopolitical concerns engulfing a region whose moniker as a “zone of peace” is rapidly fading.
In this highly personal testimony-cum-geopolitical treatise, Kenneth Rosen draws upon his journalistic experience in the High North to demonstrate just how a region known for being a passive victim of climate change has rapidly transformed into a volatile flashpoint. The melting of ice sheets, collapse of ecosystems, and relegation of concerns of indigenous peoples are highly deleterious developments for its inhabitants.
For great powers, however, they present new-found opportunities. Thawing ice opens new routes for Russian nuclear submarines in the North Atlantic, underwater cables and pipelines connecting the region to Europe become more vulnerable to Russian and Chinese hybrid warfare, and shorter routes for shipping gas and oil, inter alia, allow states to save cash. Moreover, the once-Cold War relic of US and Russian intelligence-gathering has revived as Arctic rivalries intensify, and dormant stations awake from their slumber.
These developments are hardly new. Quests to the North Pole at the turn of the 20th century by US explorers demonstrated the value of Greenland’s iron meteorites. One year after Nazi Germany invaded Denmark, on 9 April 1940, the US and Denmark signed a treaty respecting Danish sovereignty over Greenland but allowing Washington to establish military bases on the island as a defence against Nazi aggression.
A further agreement, signed in 1951 — which, alas, is omitted from the book — allowed the US to maintain its three military bases at Thule, Sondrestrom and Narsarsuaq. Only one base, at Thule (renamed in 2023 as the Pituffik Space Base) remains, and is home to a small number of Danish Armed Forces and cervine ilk.
What makes the contemporary situation particularly egregious is just how quickly the vast Arctic region has become home to a tripartite power struggle between Washington, Beijing and Moscow. Possessing 53 per cent of the Arctic coastline, Russia has been leading the way in mining rare earths and advancing energy projects. It has also established settlements, not least on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, to which Rosen pays particular attention.
One such settlement, Barentsburg, is home to predominantly Russian nationals, a Russian consulate, and Russian state-owned mining and tourism companies. In May 2023, the consulate even hosted a military parade commemorating the 1945 Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. With the town having become “bona fide Russia soil”, Svalbard’s governor predictably declined an invitation to attend the parade.
The Kremlin’s ever-increasing desires to control the Arctic only underscores the strategic value of the region, which has become a bastion for Russia to protect its nuclear-armed submarines and allow its Northern Fleet a convenient gateway to the Atlantic. At the same time, the Arctic has not evaded Beijing’s gaze. The ongoing mutual suspicion between Russia and China has done little to prevent the two from strengthening their proclaimed “no limits partnership” to oppose the West.
China’s official arctic policy underscores how Beijing views itself as a “near-Arctic” state. The policy, revealed in January 2018, articulates how countries outside the region have the right to conduct research, fish, lay submarine cables and pipelines, and explore and exploit resources. It is no surprise that Beijing has stressed its interest in participating in Arctic governance, “complementing the Arctic regime” and “promoting peace and stability in the Arctic”. It goes without saying that Beijing’s definitions of peace and stability are anything but.
Rosen reminds us of the sheer unpreparedness of the West in confronting the intensifying power struggles in the High North. Since the end of the Cold War, Washington and NATO have failed to devote enough attention and resources to the Arctic. Just as the West underestimated Russia as the first Cold War neared its end, so too did it overlook the prospect of another Cold War in the Arctic.
Notwithstanding the red tape that stymies diplomacy amongst the eight Arctic states — which include the USA and Russia — Washington ought to understand the “geopolitical whirlwind connecting the Arctic to the future of the world” sooner rather than later.
It must be said that many of Rosen’s geopolitical concerns are not unique to the Arctic. East Asia, for instance, has long been a hotbed of Sino-US confrontation owing to Beijing’s land-based aggression. The Arctic, however, clearly demonstrates how Beijing’s and Moscow’s quests to stamp their legacies in the global history books are not limited to land. What is more, the interconnectedness of Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific theatres of conflict, evinced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, looks only to accelerate.
Rosen’s work serves as a rallying cry that the Arctic must not be omitted from global considerations. As the NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte, recently warned, a Taiwan contingency could lead to Russia maximising its distraction tactics by instigating yet another conflict. Instead of Eastern Europe, the victim this time could be the Arctic.
The current international order, Rosen posits, is no less fragile than the frozen ground succumbing to rising temperatures. His arguments raise the question of the relevance of the Norwegian slogan “high north, low tension” to the Arctic. At a time when many states, including Britain, seem more concerned with appeasing Beijing rather than preparing for a future global conflict, Rosen’s work serves as a prescient warning for the multifaceted challenges the Western world will face.
Rosen stops short of revealing whether, during his visit to Barentsburg, he was successful in obtaining a matryoshka doll in the shape of Donald Trump. What can be said with greater certainty, however, is that an Arctic controlled by Xi, Putin or both will be far more detrimental to global security than any haphazard attempt by a businessman-turned-politician to control Greenland. Certainly, as Rosen argues, Trump’s push for territorial control over Greenland could “unhinge the legacy of American cooperation and alignment with Greenland in Denmark”, but Greenland is no Venezuela. Nevertheless, whilst war in the High North may be “wildly unthinkable”, we should learn to expect the unexpected in a world underpinned by the tragedy of great power politics. The West must not consign the Arctic to its rear-view mirror before it is too late.
