China, explained.
People wave Greenlandic flags as they take part in a demonstration to protest against the US president's plans to take Greenland, 17 January 2026 (Rampazzo/AFP via Getty Images)
The region is far less important, and less contested, than commonly claimed.
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The truth about Arctic "strategic competition"The truth about Arctic "strategic competition"
Despite claims that climate change is transforming the Arctic into an arena of great-power competition, the region’s strategic fundamentals remain largely unchanged. Territorial disputes persist and are largely procedural, shipping and resource incentives are overstated, and US rhetoric on Greenland is strategically incoherent.
Several long-standing territorial disputes illustrate this dynamic. The North Pole itself is contested between Canada, Greenland/Denmark, and Russia, while the United States, alone among the eight Arctic States in not ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), maintains an unresolved maritime dispute with Canada in the Beaufort Sea. Canada and Denmark only settled a territorial dispute over Hans Island in 2022.
Yet these disputes have not driven instability.
Governed by established legal frameworks and involving limited material stakes, the disputes over Arctic territory persist primarily because there is little urgency to resolve them. The fact that the Arctic Council has survived following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine owes less to any notion of Arctic exceptionalism than the region’s relative mundanity. Cooperation endures because the strategic payoff from confrontation remains low. Yet reports continue to claim, as if it is a matter of fact, that rising temperatures and receding ice will make the Arctic an arena for increased competition.
Commercial behaviour offers a more reliable indicator of risk than strategic speculation. Shipping routes that are central to global trade tend to attract sustained investment and infrastructure development. Arctic routes exhibit neither of these characteristics. Transit remains seasonal and unpredictable, with even summer navigation subject to severe weather, limited search-and-rescue coverage, and high insurance costs. As a result, shipping through the Arctic is best understood as supplementary rather than critical.
Nor would increased Arctic transit imply heightened militarisation. Major disruptions to global shipping in recent years, most notably in the Red Sea, have stemmed from non-state threats such as piracy, not from competition between great powers over access to sea lanes. Comparable dynamics are unlikely to emerge in the Arctic, where traffic volumes remain low and strategic dependence is minimal. With year-round passage not anticipated until 2100, Arctic shipping lacks both the immediacy and economic significance required to drive militarisation.
While the Arctic is indeed rich in resources, those resources do not particularly equate to competition unless they are economically viable, politically contested, and legally ambiguous — conditions that do not generally apply to the Arctic Ocean.
While the Arctic is indeed rich in resources, those resources won't necessarily produce competition unless they are economically viable, politically contested, and legally ambiguous — conditions that do not generally apply to the Arctic Ocean.
For a large offshore oil rig, the time from discovery to first oil can be more than a decade. There are currently no public plans for offshore Arctic oil rigs. The conditions are far too harsh, the costs far too high, and there is no guarantee that petroleum demand will hold into the future. Even if there were, this would hardly be cause for great-power competition. Arctic maritime territorial disputes are largely procedural, unresolved primarily due to political disinterest rather than controversy. This is evident in the resolution of Russia and Norway’s Arctic maritime boundary in 2010 with a treaty dividing the Barent Sea. To the degree that offshore resource deposits will become available as Arctic ice retreats, they are more likely to be economically marginal and legally and politically manageable than cause for a geopolitical maelstrom.
Arctic and non-Arctic countries alike revel in demonstrating Arctic combat capabilities. An Arctic-capable fighting force is a cold weather fighting force. But demonstrating Arctic capabilities does not imply a looming Arctic conflict; it simply allows nations to showcase their potential. Arctic war planning does not inevitably follow from cold weather capability building and signalling. Notably, the United States has not treated Alaska, its more direct point of access to the Arctic, as a locus for sustained militarisation.
Any strategic objectives the United States might seek to advance through Greenland can be achieved within existing mechanisms. Over-the-horizon radar, intelligence collection, and access to Arctic operating areas are all attainable through NATO cooperation, without the political and strategic costs that would accompany unilateral action. Indeed, the United States does not currently operate any major naval bases in Alaska, which offers comparable geographic advantages and direct access to the Arctic via the Pacific and a controlling position of the North West Passage. Through NATO, allies with established Arctic capabilities already act as force multipliers in and around Greenland; this collective advantage would be weakened, not strengthened, by coercive efforts to alter Greenland's sovereignty.
Any marginal strategic gains from annexation would therefore be outweighed by the immense damage such a move would inflict on alliance cohesion, trust, and US credibility — costs that would reverberate far beyond the Arctic. The persistence of annexation rhetoric appears less grounded in strategic necessity than in transactional thinking, a view captured by President Trump’s 2019 characterisation of Greenland as “essentially… a large real estate deal”.
About the author
Saxon Wright-Casanova
Saxon Wright-Casanova works at the Embassy of Sweden in Canberra and previously worked at the Australian Embassy in Copenhagen (Denmark, Norway, and Iceland).
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