The Arctic is warming fast. The summer 2025 minimum ice cover was 39% less than in 1980. The rate of shrinkage has slowed of late but probably only temporarily. The thaw is attracting commercial activity such as shipping, mining, fishing and tourism. The US Geological Survey believes the Arctic holds the world's largest undiscovered reserves of oil and gas. It is also rich in critical minerals.
The shortest cargo route between East Asia and northern Europe would cut straight across the Arctic, but will not be feasible before the ice cap melts almost entirely in summer. The North-West Passage, through Canadian waters, remains tricky. The Northern Sea Route (NSR), hugging the Russian coast, is the main Arctic shipping lane: it is largely ice-free in summer and shaves 2,500 nautical miles off the 10,600 nautical-mile journey from Shanghai to Rotterdam via the Suez Canal. The Centre for High North Logistics, an industry think-tank, counted 52 full transits along the NSR between June and August 2025, up from 45 in the same period the previous year—mostly carrying Russian oil, gas and other bulk cargo to China. The Istanbul Bridge, an ice-strengthened container ship, set off from Ningbo in China on September 22nd and docked at Britain's Felixstowe on October 13th 2025, inaugurating what Chinese boosters say will be a regular "Arctic Express".
Russia is a giant in the Arctic, revamping facilities and bases. China has invested in some of them, seeing Russia as key to creating a "polar silk road" and affirming itself as a "near-Arctic" nation. China had five research vessels in and around the Arctic in the summer of 2025. America suspects they serve both civilian and military purposes—surveying the seabed for mining opportunities and to enable submarine operations. "Science is the precursor to everything you want to do in the Arctic, including hybrid attacks" such as cutting submarine cables, according to Heather Conley of the American Enterprise Institute.
In September 2025 China's icebreaker Xuelong 2 completed the country's biggest ever Arctic expedition, involving a hundred scientists and China's first crewed deep-sea dive beneath the ice. In October a Chinese-operated container ship finished the first scheduled transit from China to Europe via the Arctic without icebreakers; Chinese media hailed its 20-day voyage on the Northern Sea Route as the "fastest delivery in the history of container shipping".
China outlined a "polar silk road" in 2018 as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, declaring itself a "near-Arctic state" and saying new sea routes and mineral opportunities could "have a huge impact on the energy strategy and economic development of China". Yet at two conferences in Tromso in Norway in early February 2026—including the annual China-Nordic Arctic Research Centre meeting—Chinese participants did not mention the polar silk road and instead played down security-related aspects of their Arctic plans, presenting China as a partner in climate-change research. Zhao Long of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies said European governments must understand that "China has very limited goals regarding the Arctic."
The modesty stems from a shift in the region's geopolitics. Nordic countries that once hoped to preserve the Arctic as a zone of peaceful co-operation have started to prioritise security since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Sweden stopped China from gaining access to an Arctic space station in 2020 and withdrew from the China-Nordic Arctic Research Centre in 2023. Finland has scaled back projects involving China. Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign-policy chief, raised fears that China could weaponise Arctic shipping routes and mineral supply chains. Danish intelligence warned in December 2025 that China aimed to operate naval ships and submarines in the Arctic within five to ten years.
China's earlier, more aggressive approach entailed efforts to invest in three airports in Greenland, another in Finland and a vast tract of land in Iceland. Norway was upset by nationalistic displays at China's research station in the Svalbard archipelago. China has one research station in Svalbard.
Russia has grown increasingly reliant on China because of Western sanctions and Chinese support for the war in Ukraine. The two countries work together to develop the Northern Sea Route by investing in ports, technology and training. Dozens of the 90-odd ships which used the route in 2025 are part of a sanctions-busting "shadow fleet" ferrying Russian oil to China. They also collaborate on science, joint expeditions and data-sharing. Western officials suspect that data on water temperature and salinity are critical for submarine operations as well as climate research, and that atmospheric research helps guide missiles. "They're not studying the seals and the polar bears," declared General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's top commander in Europe, in January 2026. China and Russia conducted their first joint coastguard patrols in the Arctic and their first joint flight of strategic bombers off Alaska, both in 2024.
On conventional maps the Arctic looks marginal. But adopt a polar perspective and it becomes the crossroads of great powers. The shortest trajectories between many of America's, Russia's and China's biggest cities pass over the top of the world. Ditto those countries' missiles and bombers. Radars across North America, from Shemya in the Aleutians to Pituffik in Greenland, monitor the skies. Submarines hide under the ice cap. America's missile-defence interceptors are mostly in Alaska.
Russia has reopened and modernised more than 50 cold-war bases along its 15,000 miles of Arctic coastline. Its fleet of icebreakers dwarfs the maritime Arctic fleets of every other nation, and it has much greater proficiency in cold-weather operations. America's 11th Airborne Division, an Alaska-based unit specialising in Arctic fighting, has struggled with disturbingly high suicide rates among soldiers.
Foreign military aircraft have increasingly tested the air-defence identification zone (ADIZ) around America and Canada—virtually all of them around Alaska and none around Greenland. In late September 2025 two Russian Tu-95 "Bear" bombers with two fighter escorts were intercepted 30 miles off an American island in the Bering Sea. NORAD has counted 95 Russian and Chinese intrusions in the North American ADIZ since 2020: 91 around Alaska, four beyond Canada, and none around Greenland. In 2024 a joint Chinese-Russian strategic-bomber patrol came within 140 nautical miles of Alaskan territory—probably the closest Chinese bombers had ever come to America. The Chinese planes had taken off from a Russian base to reach the Arctic. When a Chinese-Russian patrol entered America's exclusive economic zone in the Bering Sea in 2022, just a single coastguard cutter was able to monitor it. Russia has deployed seven new submarines in the Pacific since 2022—more than all the submarines America built over the same period. China and Russia appear also to have conducted their first-ever joint submarine patrol.
Three American combatant commands abut the Arctic but none controls all of it. EUCOM focuses on Russia yet has nearly no role in the Pacific; NORTHCOM is taken up with the southern border and the Caribbean; and INDOPACOM, which controls most forces in Alaska, thinks about a possible war in the western Pacific more than one in the north.
The town of Adak, on the Aleutian Islands stretching between the Alaskan and Siberian land masses, was born in war and died in peace. A base was built in 1942 to expel the Japanese from Attu and Kiska, farther west along the chain. In the cold war Adak was a listening post and a base for tracking Soviet submarines. The naval air station was abandoned in 1997. A fish-processing plant shut in 2020; the high school in 2023. A 6,000-strong community has shrunk to about two dozen. Adak still has two runways, a deep-water harbour and fuel storage. It lies close to great-circle shipping routes between America and Asia and to new Arctic shipping routes. In a war with China over Taiwan, Adak would be a good 1,000 nautical miles closer to the action than big bases in continental Alaska.
The heads of both INDOPACOM and NORTHCOM want the old base revived. Dan Sullivan, a senator for Alaska, calls Adak the "gateway in the Arctic" and insists: "It flanks China and Russia. It makes a lot of sense to reopen that base." Tucked in Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" is $115m "for exploration and development of existing Arctic infrastructure"—a euphemism for Adak, according to Senator Sullivan. Work on a deep-water port in Nome, the nearest American deep-water port to the Bering Strait (more than 700 nautical miles from the strait), is to start next year.
America's coastguard struggles to monitor increasing Arctic activity. It acquired a second (medium-size) icebreaker in the Arctic in 2025. In contrast, Russia has scores of icebreakers, several nuclear-powered. Even in Greenland, America relies on a Canadian icebreaker to resupply Pituffik. In 2012 an ice-strengthened Russian tanker had to deliver emergency fuel to the Alaskan harbour of Nome. Trump's "big, beautiful bill" allocates $25bn for the coastguard, including $9bn for new icebreakers. On October 9th 2025 Trump struck a deal with Finland's president, Alexander Stubb, for Finland to build four icebreakers and then, using Finnish technology, for American yards to build a further seven. The bill also authorises $25bn for "Golden Dome" missile defence.
The Arctic has no universally agreed definition: some draw the line at the Arctic Circle; others use the boundary where steppe turns to tundra, a line that shifts with climate change. Canada claims the Northwest Passage, an Arctic sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is part of its territorial waters; America claims it is an international waterway. A low-level dispute over Arctic territory between Denmark and Canada—the so-called "whisky war", in which each country deposited local liquor on a remote island to stake its claim—was resolved only in 2022.
Despite its wealth and power, America has arguably fallen behind its European allies in Arctic capacity. The icebreaker Healy, America's main Arctic vessel, lacks an ice-breaking propeller, and its gyroscope and radar have repeatedly failed. Norway, whose main icebreaker is the KV Svalbard, has long experience operating near Russia. America relies more heavily on Norway than Norway relies on it, given American radars, drone bases and training grounds in Norway's north.
Seven of the eight members of the Arctic Council, a forum to discuss regional issues, are NATO members. Co-operation with Russia, the eighth member, has come to a near-standstill.
Several of the eight Arctic coastal states claim an "extended continental shelf", with exclusive rights to mine the seabed beyond their exclusive economic zones of 200 nautical miles. Some of the claims overlap.
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