Nothing on earth is the Arctic Circle where global warming is occurring more quickly than there is. Over the past two years, the Arctic has grown five degrees Fahrenheit cooler. Additionally, the tendency is getting more and more rapid, with the Arctic warming nearly four times as quickly as the rest of the world.
Arctic middle temperatures are expected to rise by up to 2 degrees Celsius annually over the next ten years, according to climate experts.
Although temperature normally change with glacier rate, in the Arctic those transformations are then visible to the naked attention: Last year marked a concerning increase in northern wildfires and flood.
The lakes of the Arctic Sea, which run from Russia’s northern Siberian coasts to Greenland, are opening at an extraordinary rate as climate change spreads apace. For the first time in observed history, regular industrial tracking is now available in the Arctic.
Efforts to traverse Eurasia are certainly not novel. Vitus Bering explored the antarctic lakes nearly three centuries ago in 1728, rounding the sea between Alaska and Siberia that bears his name.
The Northern Sea way across the Arctic’s Russian coastline was only fully mapped out by adventurers until the 1870s. And only in 2013 did a commercial vehicle basically make the entire extended north trek from Europe to Asia, even with an opener bodyguard.  ,
However, the Arctic Seas have drastically improved in the last ten years as a result of this. As a result, politics is fast arriving in the region, a pattern that I outline in my new book, Eurasian Maritime Geopolitics.
The financial stakes are, for one, higher than previously. The Arctic is a huge, untapped resource hub for natural elements essential to 21st centuries competitors. The region harbors roughly a quarter of the unexplored oil and natural gas reserves on earth, as well as 150 rare earth deposits, valued at around$ 1 trillion. The high-tech industries, and therefore the countries and businesses attempting to preserve professional power status, are dependent on platinum, nickel, and other rare metals kept underground.
With 240 species of fish in abundance, the Arctic Sea, which is about 1.5 days the size of the United States, is comparatively shallow, making it suitable for abuse when weather conditions are favorable.
The political-military bets are as high as the economical ones, with the international structure increasingly divided and the Arctic a perfect bone of contention. Due to its unique significance and its normal issue, the Arctic Ocean is a region of strange value. The closest proximity to the United States and Russia lies across the North Pole, making the Arctic seas a natural breeding ground for conflict in the atomic age.
The same political real has sequentially made Greenland critical: it is not accidental that the US submitted a bid to buy Greenland in 1946, that the US has maintained a big Strategic Air Command center in northern Greenland since 1951, or that President Donald Trump has been obsessed with Greenland as well.
The economic and military ramifications of Arctic competition are amplifying in the current international conflicts.
In particular, Russia has a lot of room for improvement in the rapidly developing Arctic sea lanes. Fifty-three percent of the Arctic shore lies in Russia ( compared with less than four percent for America’s Alaska ). As the continent’s temperature rises more quickly than that of the US-Canadian border, making it navigable along Russia’s northern Arctic shores.
Crucially, Russia has sought unimpeded access to the open sea since Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin for centuries, but which it has never been able to achieve elsewhere in the world.
The Arctic has likewise become a zone of strong geo-economic and geopolitical interest for China in recent years. The largest energy consumer on earth, of course, is naturally drawn to Arctic energy resources. China is especially motivated to win the race for the Arctic because it imports a lot of oil from the Persian Gulf via dangerous Indo-Pacific sea lanes, which are dominated by the United States.
Once accessible to China, the Arctic would solve the problem of American strangulation of chokepoints such as the Strait of Malacca. Additionally, it would make Beijing’s important minerals leader more difficult, putting pressure on Washington’s efforts to compete effectively. Additionally, Beijing’s friendly ties to Russia, a powerful force in the Arctic, are a further geopolitical plus.
Global economic and political-military stakes driving today’s Arctic geopolitical competition began in slow motion. Russia placed a titanium flag on the North Pole in August 2007. Moscow is now secretly claiming more than 50 % of the Arctic Ocean floor.
Two decades ago, with Vladimir Putin in power, Russia began refurbishing Cold War military bases in the North, and building more icebreakers. It currently has well over 40 bases, which is roughly a third of the total for all the major NATO allies in the near-Arctic, including Finland, Canada, and the United States, combined.
On the economic side, Russia has also pioneered exploitation of energy resources along the Arctic shores– with China’s help.
Moscow’s original proposals, which included Western multinationals like Exxon, Shell, and British Petroleum, were made 20 years ago with their superior drilling technology for Arctic climes. However, Western businesses quickly vanished, both for economic reasons and as a result of the sanctions imposed by the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea.
In 2013 Russia began construction on the massive$ 27 billion Yamal LNG project on the Arctic shores, with China’s CNPC as a 20 percent shareholder. The first Yamal LNG train was finished in 2017.
Russia started working on the nearby Gydan Peninsula Arctic II project in 2018 with East Asian support, once more. In exchange for the provision of capital and equipment, China receives Russian oil from these specific projects today– and does so illicitly through the Northern Sea Route.
Economic logic: Russian’s vast resources, combined with the economic expansion of Asia, fueled the gradual development of the Arctic sea-lane for fifteen years in the early twenty-first century. However, the age of serious Arctic maritime geopolitics is now in full swing because of short, sharp periods of structural transformation like war.  ,
One catalytic event was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but much more significant was the Western sanctions following Russia’s occupation of Crimea. That resulted in a number of significant geo-economic and geo-political adjustments that are currently influencing the intense Arctic maritime geopolitics that are emerging.
Climate change, as noted above, is a quiet background factor raising the stakes of geopolitical conflict: When the seas are opened, economic and political-military opportunities become  , more realistic.
However, the decisive actions of key players in the new Russian aggression gave stale geopolitical rivalries new life. The most significant additions to NATO were the addition of Sweden in March 2024 and Finland in April ( April 2023 ). Following their actions, seven of the eight nations directly bordering on the Arctic were members of NATO, with only Russia – with the longest Arctic coastline and the strongest economic stakes – excluded.
Unsurprisingly, Russia used its own countermeasures to address the new geopolitical environment surrounding the Ukraine conflict. Due to its strategic importance and economic potential, Russia is an “indisputable priority” with Russia, as Putin himself has already stated.
To consolidate its position in a vital region, Moscow has both escalated provocative actions of its own in the Arctic, as in the Baltic seas also, and simultaneously teamed up with China to put pressure on NATO and on the US bilaterally.
In 2023, Russian and Chinese ships jointly patrolled the Arctic Seas, and in July of that year, Russian and Chinese bombers launched a joint investigation in the US ADIZ over the Bering Sea within 200 miles of the Alaskan coast.
Russian and Chinese Arctic brinkmanship has naturally influenced the United States. In 2013, following the first Arctic seaway transit of China’s icebreaker Xue Long ( Ice Dragon ) and the inauguration of Russia’s Yamal LNG project, the Obama administration articulated a US Arctic strategy.
Washington made major Crimea sanctions a result of controls over  , the supply of cutting-edge US cold-water oil drilling technology. In 2024 the Biden administration’s Department of Defense issued an update to the 2013 strategy, mentioning both Russia and China as primary challengers, with the goal o curbing Russia’s long-term Arctic development capacity.
The US has steadily put more of a focus on the Arctic and has put an increasingly bipartisan emphasis on the area.
Despite making foolish diplomatic gestures and having a laudable concern about  , environmental dangers, the United States has remained silent about the pressing geo-economic issues that are now afoot along the Arctic sea lanes.
Most importantly, the US has failed to build up its domestic icebreaker capacity, nor has it begun developing related naval capabilities that would allow it to actively contest and contain the rapid Russian and Chinese buildup along the Arctic sea lanes.
And it has done remarkably little to support its Arctic friends with regard to infrastructure investment support up until recently. For instance, the US does not have any deepwater ports in the Arctic that can accommodate large container ships. Canada has only one, lying 500 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
Russia currently has more than 40 heavy or medium-duty icebreakers operating in the Arctic, with several of them being nuclear-powered. The Great Lakes are the only places that the US’s icebreaker capacity is concentrated.
The July, 2024 ICE agreement with Canada and Finland, concluded at the 2024 Washington NATO summit, does begin to address the icebreaker crisis in multilateral fashion. Despite the obvious shortcomings of America’s own domestic shipbuilding sector, which are rooted in its own flagrant shortcomings, it continues to be a deficient.
Too many of the high cards still ominously lie in Russian and Chinese hands in the new game of Arctic maritime geopolitics.
Kent Calder is Director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University SAIS, former Special Advisor to the US Ambassador to Japan and the recent author of , Eurasian Maritime Geopolitics , ( Brookings, 2025 ).