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The common ground in the Arctic has eroded in recent years, leaving uncertainty where it appeared cooperation would prevail.
“Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic” By Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds; Yale University Press, 2025; 366 pages; $30. On Oct. 1, 1987, a year after his summit with then-President Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland, launched the the thawing that would ultimately end the Cold War, General Secretary of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech in the Arctic city of Murmansk that was to have tectonic repercussions in subsequent decades.
“Let the North of the globe, the Arctic, become a zone of peace. Let the North Pole be a pole of peace,” the Soviet leader proclaimed.
“We suggest that all interested states start talks on the limitation and scaling down of military activity in the North as a whole, in both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. ” With those words, an era of cooperation across the eight nations possessing territory lying within the Arctic Circle began building connections, embarking in trade, collaborating on scientific research and more.
Meanwhile, Indigenous groups across the planet’s northern land tier asserted themselves on levels rarely seen elsewhere. In 1996 the Arctic Council was formed, composed of the United States, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, as well as Indigenous organizations representing the Inuit, Athabascan, Saami, Aleut, Gwich’in and Indigenous peoples of the Russian north.
In the headily optimistic days of the 1990s, when liberal democratic governance and the free movement of goods and peoples seemed to be the fate of all the world, the term “Arctic Exceptionalism” emerged. The North, it was proclaimed, was indeed a zone of peace, setting an example for all the world to follow. Within a few years it all came tumbling down.
How a promise all but taken for granted proved to be little more than empty words is the topic of “Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic” by Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds. Bennett is an associate professor of geography at the University of Washington, while Dodds is the honorary professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London.
As explained in the book’s preface, the two enjoy a longstanding acquaintance fueled by their shared fascination with and extensive travels and studies in the Arctic. The story they tell is one of conflicting interests, outside involvement, rapidly escalating climate change, resources rushes, resumed militarization and political shifts that tore at the fabric of the northern concordance that once seemed so promising, leaving uncertainty and perilous standoffs in its wake.
Bennett and Dodds weave their way back and forth through history in these pages. Early on they emphasize the difficulty of simply defining what the Arctic. There is, of course, the Arctic Circle, and also an Arctic Ocean. But culturally and environmentally, the lines are not so easily demarcated.
Nations and Indigenous groups span both sides of the geographically accepted Circle, and nations lying close to but not within the Arctic consider themselves part of its broader realm. Great Britain, for instance, makes its claim by history and location. China looks north with an eye on investment, resource extraction and diplomacy aimed primarily at building the nation into superpower status. Even faraway Australia considers itself an interested party.
The authors show how all of these factions have converged in a region known to contain tremendous volumes of oil, gas and minerals. Much of these resources lie within national boundaries. But the Arctic Ocean is thawing, and underwater extraction in international waters is tempting for any country capable of undertaking such efforts. The Arctic is also crisscrossed by communications cables and pipelines that cross national boundaries.
Launching facilities can send rockets over and into adjoining countries. Data centers whose owners have no strong loyalties to any nation are springing up, often mining cryptocurrencies that are even more untethered from established governments. Happenings elsewhere have also demolished the brief era of cooperation. Russia has been the primary offender.
Planting a flag on the ocean floor at the North Pole in 2007 was mostly a stunt, but the invasions of Crimea and Ukraine have been anything but. Vladimir Putin’s expansionist violence has caused a permanent rupture in Arctic cohesion. Russia’s land borders with Norway and Finland where people moved back and forth with relative freedom two decades ago have been hardened once again. Americans and Russians are no longer traveling across the Bering Strait with regularity.
And the Cold War era dividing line that kept Indigenous peoples on both sides of the sea from historic interactions that date back millennia is once again separating them. The United States has also become a hindrance. Apart from Russia, all of the Arctic nations are members of NATO . But under the Trump administration, the pact’s viability is at risk as the president rails at longstanding allies while embracing America’s enemies.
Donald Trump’s hostile moves toward Greenland and his gruff talk about absorbing Canada have demolished the trust that held the Western international order together since the end of World War II. The mercurial president, who seems to have no coherent foreign policy beyond bullying tactics, is now wreaking nearly as much damage on Arctic solidarity as Putin. Indigenous groups have their own conflicts.
Outside of Russia they’ve enjoyed greater sovereignty than Indigenous peoples elsewhere, but they don’t always share the same goals. Those living in resource rich regions generally seek development and the wealth it will bring, while those mostly dependent on traditional sources of subsistence fear losing their lands and livelihoods.
“More than just a mosaic of frameworks and actors, Arctic governance is a veritable bazaar,” the authors write, adding a few pages later: “In the 2020s, whatever common ground there was in the Arctic is giving way. ” Gorbachev’s dream of a “zone of peace” is little more than a memory now.
With political instability, regional conflicts, economic competition, climate change, expanding military presence and several potential flashpoints, what the authors hope the Arctic doesn’t become is a zone of war. What is clear is that there are too many variables to predict what will happen there in coming years.
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