MONTREAL — With ice clumping on the sidewalks, with winds swirling between downtown buildings, and with white mountains growing in designated snow-deposit sites across the city, it only feels like the Arctic here. But all of Canada is wondering whether a new Cold War is brewing 1,456 miles from here in the real Arctic.
That’s almost precisely the distance between Hartford, Connecticut, and Miami — but suddenly fears about the Arctic are close to home to Canadians, even the 90% of them who live within 150 miles of the American border.
One of the reasons is because Canada — rated the coldest country on Earth, colder than Russia, Norway and Finland — always has had a culture of the cold. A prime example: The reprise line of a beloved ballad about Quebec by the singer-songwriter Gilles Vigneault, which goes, “Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.” (“My country’s not a country, it’s the winter.”)
But another reason is the mounting evidence that Russia and China, seeking to make the Arctic a new sphere of influence, are transforming the region into a battleground for espionage, economic advantage and, perhaps, for military staging.
Though China’s northernmost reaches sit 930 miles from the southernmost part of the Arctic, it has declared itself a “near-Arctic state.” It speaks of developing a “Polar Silk Road” and has underwater listening systems that can be deployed in the Arctic, giving it the capacity to monitor activity in the region that surpasses Canada’s. Russia’s military presence in the Arctic has grown in recent years. It is redoubling its efforts to develop hydrocarbons, minerals and fisheries in the region.
“Given the threat emerging in the Arctic — climate change, Chinese and Russian interests — Canada and the United States need to work together to protect their respective regions,” Vincent Rigby, former Canadian national-security and intelligence adviser, said in an interview. “The two countries are going to have to do more to meet the rising threat. With Russia and China possibly working together, it is an urgent issue.”
The urgency of the issue was underlined earlier this month when Canada released a 39-page “Arctic Foreign Policy” document in which foreign minister Melanie Joly declared that the days of the Arctic as a “zone of low tension” have ended. The report argued that the Arctic increasingly is “a theatre of interest for many non-Arctic states and actors aspiring for a greater role” in the region and said that Canada’s adversaries are attempting “to achieve influence through non-military tactics, including cyber activities, foreign interference and economic coercion.”
But what sticks out to an American reader is the view that “Canada must work even closer with its closest ally, the United States, to maintain a secure North American homeland.” The document, which tellingly employs the term “North American Arctic” 13 times, was issued as President-elect Donald Trump began to refer to Canada as the “51st state” and to denigrate Justin Trudeau, himself under immense pressure to leave office as a “governor,” not as a prime minister of an independent sovereign state — comments that roiled Canada and renewed calls for the country to reorient its global profile away from its decades-old national-security dependence on the United States.
With its titanium, palladium and iron ore, the Arctic has become a theater of contention because of two unrelated contemporary issues — climate change, which, after centuries of frustration over the absence of a northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, has rendered the region passable by oceangoing ships; and the war in Ukraine, which has made Russia increasingly dependent on imports and military aid from China, some of which now is flowing through the Arctic. They conducted joint military drills this summer and have joined in patrolling in the Bering Sea, which sits between Russia and Alaska — attracting the attention, and concern, of both the State Department and the Pentagon.
The United States has been monitoring developments in the Arctic for years, with special focus on Russia’s military activities in the region, which includes modernizing its bases and airfields, deploying new air-defense missile systems, upgrading its submarine forces, and creating new combatant-command operations in the region.
“Despite current tensions stemming from Russia’s unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States seeks an Arctic region that is peaceful, stable, prosperous, and cooperative,” according to a White House National Security for the Arctic Region document, produced in 2022. “A peaceful Arctic will have guardrails to manage competition and resolve disputes without force or coercion.”
That vision originated in Joe Biden’s administration. The language, however, is remarkably similar to the language produced in Trump’s first administration aiming to assure that the Arctic “is a secure and stable region in which U.S. national security interests are safeguarded.”
Trump has had nothing to say about Arctic affairs in years, if ever. His contempt for Trudeau and his ridicule of Canada could affect American policy in his second term. He’s dismissed climate change (a “hoax”) and, in 2017, withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement on global warming. With the principles of U.S. Arctic policy based on climate change, and with Trump less restrained than he was in his first term, it’s possible Washington’s Arctic policy could be substantially overhauled.
In coming months, there likely will be more debate over the definition of the extent of the continental shelf in the western Arctic Ocean (an arcane issue that has enormous consequences when it comes to who controls contested waterways); fresh negotiations to resolve a longtime boundary dispute that dates to 1825 in the Beaufort Sea (a 167,770-square—mile area north of the Yukon and Alaska); and renewed efforts to produce initiatives for sustainable development in the Arctic (perhaps involving Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden).
With temperatures dipping to 60 degrees below zero, the Arctic remains an area of unusual romance for white people and a harsh homeland for Indigenous peoples. Until 1999, when a Chinese icebreaker arrived in Tuktoyaktuk in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the area was considered primarily as the venue for exploration and adventure for Europeans and for survival and sustainability for native peoples.
That period has ended. In its long winter nights and long summer days are the potential for conflict, even conquest. Robert Peary, Frederick Cook, Roald Amundsen and Richard E. Byrd have been replaced by Chinese and Russian commercial and military personnel. Even at the top of the globe, the world is different now.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
