The race for the North Pole heats up

Until a few years ago, the Arctic was one of the world’s few quiet regions, largely left alone. Recent geopolitical developments, however, are bringing the North Pole increasingly into focus. NATO also remained relatively restrained over the past three decades, but as times inevitably change, the Alliance must adapt to the new circumstances.

Individual NATO members with territory or territorial waters in the Arctic—Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and the United States—have now taken the initiative to advance their Arctic interests. The United States has also assumed a more assertive role in the region. At the Arctic Council ministerial meeting in May 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made clear, in addressing Russian and Chinese behaviour in the Arctic, that the US Air Force would station more fifth-generation fighter aircraft in Alaska and that the US Navy was reactivating its Second Fleet, responsible for the North Atlantic. The Department of Defense and individual services have published several Arctic strategies, or will shortly do so. The US Coast Guard published an Arctic Strategic Outlook in April 2019, followed by Arctic strategies from the Department of Defense in June 2019 and the US Air Force in July 2020. The Navy and Army are expected to follow with revised Arctic strategies at the end of 2020 and in 2021 respectively.

So far, however, all these strategies refer to the value of regional partnerships with like-minded states, raising the question: should NATO play a larger role in the Arctic? Some argue that it should, proposing that NATO establish an Arctic security forum with Russia or undertake visible contingency planning. Others believe that, in the absence of consensus within the Alliance on Arctic action, the matter should be left to individual member states. In a recent interview on the subject, NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment Camille Grand said: ‘I don’t think we’re there yet.’

Ideally, NATO itself should play a very limited direct role in the Arctic. The Alliance would need to undertake only limited contingency planning and occasionally hold a major exercise such as Trident Juncture in 2018. Doing more risks weakening Alliance unity and unnecessarily antagonising Russia. In particular, NATO should avoid creating a new Allied command for the Arctic, pushing for Sweden and Finland to join the Alliance, or establishing a new NATO–Russia Arctic security forum. These policy options have been discussed in expert dialogues and should, at least for now, be set aside. Instead of coordinating through NATO, member states and their non-NATO partners should address Arctic security risks through more frequent and intensive unilateral, bilateral or coalition-based defence cooperation focused on cold-weather training, regular military exercises and rotational troop deployments. This would continue current policy. It is a subtle but important distinction: some activities on the ground would look the same under this alternative policy, but would not take place under a NATO banner.

Climate change is altering the Arctic’s geopolitical circumstances. The Arctic is warming two to three times as fast as the rest of the planet, with corresponding ice melt, thawing permafrost, higher waves and erosion, and more frequent wildfires. This creates the potential for greater access to the Arctic, resource extraction and maritime activity, but also greater threats to the human security of Arctic populations, some of whom live in NATO countries.

America’s rivals are increasingly interested in Arctic affairs. Russia—long an Arctic power—has refurbished and expanded facilities and developed new military installations throughout its Arctic territory, primarily, though not exclusively, along the Northern Sea Route. The Russian Navy has also conducted exercises in the Baltic, Barents and Norwegian seas, while ground exercises simulate combat between Arctic states. Commercial fishing vessels are moving further north in search of previously inaccessible fish stocks, threatening the livelihoods of coastal communities.

Three of the eight Arctic states—Finland, Russia and Sweden—are not NATO members, and at least Russia has good reason to oppose a larger NATO role in the region. Moscow will, after all, assume the two-year rotating chairmanships of the Arctic Council and Arctic Coast Guard Forum in May 2021. China’s regional activities include increased scientific, diplomatic and maritime activity, as well as substantial investment. All these trends lie beyond NATO’s control, but could influence the perceptions and behaviour of its members.

Although NATO members face several challenges to their Arctic interests, developing a common Alliance policy on how to respond is extraordinarily difficult. NATO decisions depend on consensus, or at least on members refraining from vetoing a proposed initiative. Having five NATO members in the Arctic does not mean that each supports a greater NATO role there. Canada’s Arctic and Northern Policy Framework, for example, repeatedly stresses ‘Canada’s enduring Arctic sovereignty’ and the need to ‘enhance Canada’s military presence’ and ‘Canada’s domain awareness’ (emphasis added), with some references to bilateral security cooperation but no mention of NATO. Canada is not the only country that might oppose a stronger Alliance role in the Arctic. Allies in southern and eastern Europe could regard a greater Arctic focus as diverting NATO resources from security problems in the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, Ukraine or the Baltic Sea. In short, a stronger Alliance role in the Arctic requires persuading sceptical allies, and doing so may not be worth the diplomatic effort.

Moscow could attack European NATO members from the Russian Arctic, while China could lay the foundations for future military activity in the region. However unlikely, Russia might be tempted to open an Arctic front during a conflict with NATO elsewhere. A military crisis beginning in the Baltic states or the Black Sea region could also spill over unintentionally into the Arctic. NATO members might threaten or attack Russian Arctic targets from air- or sea-based platforms if they regarded Russia’s Northern Fleet or ground forces north of the Arctic Circle as a potential threat during a crisis. Military conflict could also arise through miscalculation or accidents between the two sides’ naval or air forces in the Barents Sea or North Atlantic.

Russia could threaten the United States or Canada by deploying stand-off weapons in the Russian Arctic to deter NATO from entering conflicts or engaging in ‘grey-zone’ activity in the Baltic states or Black Sea region. Russia’s recent Arctic militarisation does not change the fact that, for decades, it has possessed the capability to attack North America with long-range weapons delivered by missiles, submarines and bombers through the Arctic.

Although Beijing currently lacks sustained military capabilities in the Arctic, Chinese scientific or economic activities there could serve as a Trojan horse for defence activities, intelligence collection or non-military influence and aggression. Research vessels sailing through Arctic waters, for example, could also collect electronic or signals intelligence, map the seabed to support submarine navigation or detection, or deploy sonobuoys. Each has potential military applications. Other Chinese activities—such as attempts to exert economic influence or control supplies of rare earths—may be troubling from a Western security perspective, but do not constitute direct military threats relevant to NATO’s charter.

Against this background, four main options should be considered for NATO’s role in the Arctic: improving Arctic training, partnerships and operations outside NATO; creating a NATO Arctic command; inviting Sweden and Finland to join NATO; and establishing a NATO–Russia security forum. The first option is to accelerate training and exercises outside NATO.

NATO members could continue, or perhaps accelerate, existing unilateral, bilateral and multilateral operations and partnerships outside the Alliance’s framework. This is consistent with what the US Navy is already doing through its Second and Sixth Fleets alongside Norway—a rotating Marine force, submarine port visits, bomber flyovers and more regular exercises—and Iceland, with a rotating presence of P-8 aircraft and tankers. Additional rotations and exercises would build shared expertise in cold-weather operations among participating states and signal Western resolve to Russia. Although conducted outside the Alliance, these initiatives would align with NATO’s emphasis on training and exercises under its Connected Forces Initiative. Not least, a substantial rotational presence and exercises would enable more robust monitoring of China’s activities in the Arctic.

Russia is sensitive to NATO training and exercises in the Arctic. By avoiding an Alliance label, informal activities by individual NATO countries or groups of countries are less likely to provoke a counterproductive Russian response. In the past, Moscow has issued diplomatic statements and conducted military exercises when troubled by NATO military activity in the Arctic. Russia jammed GPS signals during NATO’s Trident Juncture exercise in 2018, for example. It held live-fire exercises after a NATO exercise in the Barents Sea in May 2020, and in February 2020 shortly before NATO’s Cold Response exercise in Norway. There are numerous smaller examples of Russian pilots and vessels behaving aggressively during NATO exercises. Another advantage of this option is that it avoids having to persuade southern or eastern European NATO members to devote resources to cold-weather training, potentially at the expense of more traditional training, particularly when defence budgets are constrained in a COVID-19 or post-pandemic world.

An alternative centred on the Alliance would be to establish a NATO Arctic Command headquarters exercising operational control over NATO forces at high latitudes. An Arctic command could be modelled on NATO’s new Multinational Division North, tasked with defending the Baltic states. The headquarters would add a dedicated NATO planning, command and control unit with High North expertise, presumably clarifying command relationships within NATO in an Arctic crisis or conflict. As with Multinational Division North, the Alliance could have redundant headquarters, one in the theatre of operations—perhaps Norway—and another outside the Arctic.

This option has several disadvantages. It duplicates some existing bilateral capabilities and relationships within the US–Norwegian defence partnership and the coordination of North Atlantic defence between the US Second and Sixth Fleets and NATO’s renewed Joint Force Command. Perhaps more importantly, an Arctic command would prioritise a collective NATO response to security challenges. In principle, that accords with NATO’s purpose and is a good thing. In practice, however, it creates problems within the Alliance. Canadians might see prioritising a NATO response as weakening sovereign control over their own territory, and the Danes might share this view. An Arctic command also runs counter to the spirit expressed by the Arctic coastal states—particularly Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States, not to mention Russia—in the Ilulissat and Chelsea declarations, which emphasised national rather than multinational control and regulation of most Arctic waters. Finally, an Arctic command raises the question of whose forces would come under it, bringing us back to many NATO members’ reluctance to contribute to an Arctic force. In short, this option would require Alliance consensus on the need for another command, followed by training the forces assigned to or rotating through it. The former is difficult; the latter is unnecessary.

In response to increased Arctic uncertainty, NATO could formally invite Sweden and Finland to join the Alliance. Their membership would mean that seven of the eight Arctic states were NATO members, creating an uninterrupted Allied land bridge across the European Arctic and along the northern and southern shores of the Baltic Sea. An open-source assessment indicates that both countries have strong armed forces. Finland would add substantial ground forces to NATO’s capabilities. Sweden has advanced Gripen fighter aircraft, fast patrol boats and submarines. Both countries would, in all likelihood, be welcome in the Alliance, with little objection from existing members.

This option assumes, however, that Sweden and Finland actually want to join NATO and have public support for doing so. Although both maintain close ties with NATO, they have chosen to remain outside the Alliance, largely because of concerns about Russia’s reaction. Their membership could also complicate NATO defence planning: both states are within range of many Russian military systems, and Finland shares a 1,340-kilometre border with Russia. Reinforcing either country would require crossing the Baltic Sea, flying through contested airspace, crossing a vulnerable railway bridge from Denmark or the two southern railway routes from Norway into Sweden, or traversing the Scandinavian mountains separating central and northern Norway from Sweden. NATO forces would still then have to cross the Gulf of Bothnia or the inhospitable terrain of Norway’s Finnmark to reach Finnish Lapland—all within easy range of Russian firepower.

This option would risk triggering a larger crisis with Russia. Moscow has repeatedly warned that Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO would be seen as an overt threat to Russian territory. The resulting political crisis could escalate, leading to miscalculation or accidents. Russian rhetoric aside, bringing both countries into NATO would do nothing to fundamentally change Russian military plans, since these must already factor Western-oriented Sweden and Finland into security calculations. Finally, their accession would do nothing to mitigate Chinese security threats.

The final NATO option considered here would be a new NATO–Russia forum for discussing Arctic security. Advocates of Arctic security forums argue that these could improve communication and de-escalate incidents, including through a regional military code of conduct. They could also relieve existing non-security Arctic forums, such as the Arctic Council, of pressure to address military issues. All this makes a forum attractive.

This option nevertheless appears unworkable when NATO’s participation is envisaged. The NATO–Russia Council, an existing forum pursuing a similar purpose, suspended military-to-military consultations following Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014. For better or worse, NATO as an institution shows no sign of relaxing that ban. For this option to work, Russia’s military and defence establishment would have to participate at a high level, and Russian personnel would have to abide by the agreements reached. Russia failed to do the former in the Arctic Security Forces Roundtable. Similarly, dangerous Russian flyovers and naval activities demonstrate a willingness to flout agreed codes of conduct in international waters and airspace, quite apart from its actions in Ukraine, the Black Sea and Syria.

Western security officials are paying closer attention to the Arctic, and NATO’s role there is a major topic of debate. Given climate change, Russian activities in the Arctic and China’s growing regional role, NATO officials may be tempted to assert an Alliance role in the region. At present, however, the threat environment does not require robust NATO action.

A collective NATO response to Arctic security challenges is not advisable at present. Instead, individual member states should continue and expand rotational-presence operations and regional exercises. These would help mitigate immediate security threats and, by involving NATO members, prepare the Alliance for a greater Arctic role in future if required. They would also build on current NATO policy and that of its Arctic members. Allies bordering the Arctic should continue developing military capabilities—for maritime domain awareness and a ground presence, high-latitude communications and positioning systems, and sustained cold-weather operations—that signal Western intentions and support more robust options, such as a NATO Arctic command or inviting Sweden and Finland into NATO, should the security situation deteriorate. These unilateral, bilateral and coalition measures would give Russia tangible incentives to behave constructively.

One day, NATO may be compelled to act in the Arctic. People will say: ‘Don’t just stand there. Do something!’ But today is not that day. For now, willing NATO members and partners should focus on more robust training, exercises and a rotational presence in the Arctic. Conducted outside NATO’s formal command structure, these measures could advance the Alliance’s own security interests and prepare it for a stronger regional role should Russia and China intervene by force.