The Pentagon’s New (Upside Down) Arctic Map

DoD’s 2024 Arctic Strategy Continues America’s Pivot Away from Humanity’s Collective Climate Change Challenge to Containing Adversaries (Real and Imagined) – Risking a New and Unnecessary Cold War. Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

With the release of the 2024 update of US Department of Defense Arctic Strategy on June 21, 2024, we see the continuation of America’s recalibrated approach to Arctic cooperation – which since 2016 has been increasingly framed through an alliance-centric lens as Arctic international relations becomes ever more bifurcated, particularly in Europe as Russia’s war with Ukraine stumbles into its third year with few signs of abating, and where a reanimated Cold War between NATO and Russia continues to intensify. While DoD’s Arctic strategy describes itself as a “new strategic approach” that is driven jointly by “climate change and shifts in the geostrategic environment,” in actuality the Pentagon continues along the trajectory presented two years prior in the White House’s 2022 National Strategy for the Arctic Region (NSAR), which itself built upon a gathering strategic shift from its post-1991 soft-power approach to its post-2016 Westphalian hard-power restoration that followed Moscow’s 2014 hybrid-invasion of eastern Ukraine and lightning annexation of Crimea a decade ago, sounding alarm bells across the western world – thus reflecting, eight years on, more continuity than change.

In a new twist – one gathering stream ever since Beijing unveiled its own Arctic strategy in 2018 – side-by-side with America’s decade-long articulated concerns regarding Russia’s resurgence, we find in DoD’s new Arctic strategy heightened concerns with Beijing’s Arctic ambitions, capabilities and presence, which are now elevated to the top of the Pentagon’s new strategic map of the Arctic. This is, in many ways, counterintuitive, since China is not, has never been, and in most likely future scenarios will never be an Arctic state. As articulated in the 2024 strategy’s executive summary, these rising concerns reflect China’s rise as a world power more generally, more so than its Arctic policy: “Implementing this strategy will enable DoD to achieve our desired end state for the region, aligning with efforts to strengthen homeland defense, safeguard U.S. interests, and improve interoperability with Arctic Allies and partners while preserving focus on the pacing challenge of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) globally.”

Non-Arctic China’s heightened position within American Arctic policy places it ahead of other, more traditional (and to many Arctic residents, more pressing) pillars of US Arctic policy, such as addressing and mitigating the risks of climate change which topped America’s priorities in its 2013 NSAR – discussed by Mihaela David on the website of The Arctic Institute – while continuing to foster collaborative partnerships with friends and allies in the Arctic as it has, with particular enthusiasm after the White House’s 2009’s Arctic strategy update, albeit through an alliance-centric lens rather than its earlier lens of circumpolar unity across the old East-West divide. The 2024 DoD strategy aims to “strengthen the ability of the United States to build integrated deterrence and effectively manage risk to U.S. interests in the Arctic region by enhancing our domain awareness and Arctic capabilities; engaging with Allies, partners, and key stakeholders; and exercising tailored presence.” As with earlier iterations of America’s Arctic policy and strategy, this diverse array of stakeholders includes “partner nations; U.S. Federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies and governments; industry; inter-governmental organizations; and non-governmental organizations.”

While DoD’s new Arctic strategy reiterates America’s continued commitment to cooperation with its Arctic allies, it effectively breaks the Arctic into two emergent and contending blocs. It is this bifurcation of the long united Arctic that poses the greatest danger. As Arctic geopolitical expert Lassi Heininen has recently argued in “Rethinking Arctic Peace and Stability: Moving from Speculation to Reaffirming Commitments” in the Arctic Circle Journal, “Ultimately, while seven [NATO-aligned] Arctic states may share the thinking that Russia is no longer a reliable partner, they nevertheless still share with Russia the undeniable knowledge that the benefits of cooperation and stability are much greater than those of conflict and confrontation” – and as a result, he adds, the Arctic “is still free of armed conflicts, warfare and uprisings, unlike many other parts of the world.” To this we must now add China, which like Russia, surely shares this self-same (as Heininen has so aptly described) “undeniable knowledge that benefits of cooperation and stability are much greater than those of conflict and confrontation,” and whose Arctic ambitions equally depend upon the preservation of the long-established cooperative foundation that has shaped Arctic diplomacy for so long – and keeps the prevention of a new Arctic Cold War, with renewed effort and commitment to preserving this cooperative foundation, within the realm of the possible.

The West can still pivot back to its important, inclusive and collaborative work of saving the Arctic (and humanity) from the real and truly menacing dangers of climate change, environmental risk, and the many other pressures of our modernizing world which while not entirely ignored in the latest iteration of DoD’s recalibrated Arctic strategy has become increasingly (and regrettably) de-prioritized in favor of a more zero-sum, Westphalian hard power approach to securing the Arctic from increasing overstated, indeed illusory, threats – as a unified West, more tightly bound together within the expanded NATO alliance, turns its collective attention away from these real, complex challenges toward newly perceived, oversimplified, and exaggerated threats. Putting this into reverse will take much effort, and require a more nuanced, flexible, and creative diplomatic approach. As Arctic environment and climate expert Ed Struzik eloquently put it on the website of The Arctic Institute: “The Arctic has long been a model for optimism and international cooperation. A lot needs to be done to keep it that way.”

The following report analyzes DoD’s new Arctic Strategy in greater detail and seeks to add to the conversation about what US security priorities should be in an increasingly bifurcated global north that is also facing extensive threats due to the climate emergency. 

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD is a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut and a Senior Fellow (Arctic Security) at the Institute of the North. He is the author of Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Books, 2024).