After his extraordinary rendition of Nicolás Maduro last weekend, Donald Trump has ramped up his threats to seize control of Greenland. The acquisition, which he sees as a “large real estate deal”, has been on his mind for nearly a decade. “I think we’re going to get it,” he said in an address to Congress last year. “One way or another, we’re going to get it.”
Kenneth R Rosen’s provocatively titled Polar War is therefore timely. It contends that the whole Arctic is warming up for a fight. Eight nations, including Russia and the United States, already maintain “research” bases in the region. All five military academies in the US now offer a course on the Big Northern White, and in 2021 India declared itself “a near-Arctic state”. “The possibility of conflict” up there, Rosen declares, “now feels inevitable”.
Russia, rather than the US, is “leading the charge”. “With more military bases in the Arctic, greater competency in cold weather operations, and a fleet of icebreakers that dwarfs the maritime Arctic fleets of every other nation,” it has become far and away the region’s biggest player. (Another Norwegian naval commander tells Rosen, “Putin is saying, ‘I’m the boss in the Arctic,’ and he is.”)
Russia has raised concerns, as in their 2020 Arctic Strategy report, about the region’s declining population, inadequate development and hobbled natural resources exploration industry posing threats to their national security. However, Rosen thinks that the invasion of Ukraine, along with “interventions in Western elections” and so on, “might indicate that Russia thinks as far as the Arctic is concerned, it has already won” the polar war, and can therefore move on to other zones of strategic value.
Meanwhile China is building icebreakers (four are already in service) to open up an exciting “Polar Silk Road”. Rosen suggests that the nation is “teaming up” with Russia to spy on NATO on or off Norway’s northern rim, citing a new Chinese satellite station in Kiruna, Sweden – which is theoretically collecting data, but whose spectral exterior is enough to rouse suspicions of surveillance. In the same area, Russia “is probing Sweden’s defences” with “hybrid attacks” that “remain deniable on Russia’s part”.
US unpreparedness is a major theme of the book, and hawks in the White House might (but won’t) take heed as they turn their eyes to Greenland. Rosen points out that “historically, the American desire to control Greenland has existed nearly as long as America itself… It was not Trump’s rhetoric of a takeover that struck me… It was the ineptitude surrounding the idea.” Such incompetence might either allow rivals to secure control of the Arctic, or trigger clumsy, uncoordinated US manoeuvres that tip a tense region into the war of the book’s title.
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