Elizabeth Buchanan – So you want to own Greenland? Lessons from the Vikings to Trump
This is an academic work with a rare and welcome sense of humour. Buchanan carefully points out how attempts to ‘control’ Greenland, dating back to the centuries of Viking settlement, have repeatedly foundered. Imagining conflict between the belligerent Trump administration and NATO ally Denmark does not account for the practical difficulties such a conflict would present. Arctic bases are increasingly affected by melting ice as the global climate changes, quite apart from the considerable distances involved.
Given that a mineral cooperation agreement between the USA and Greenland has existed since 2019, threats of invasion and founding additional US bases by the current Trump administration appear more like politics for a pliant American audience than pragmatic foreign policy.
A serious challenge to those who see warfare everywhere is that actual military confrontation is not occurring across the Arctic, despite the behaviour of some Arctic States (Russia and the USA) elsewhere. China, as a major power and shipbuilder, needs a peaceful Arctic to facilitate trade with Russia in both directions. Maritime trade with the rest of Europe also benefits from an open Northern Sea Route, as Russia names it, or the Northeast Passage, as other countries know it.
China has been rebuffed by Denmark in its attempts to invest in Greenland, over which Denmark retains sovereignty despite the fact that Greenlanders favour independence. Yet this has not led to armed conflict. A more realistic potential source of escalating confrontation involving China is the 16-year Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement, which came into force in 2021. The Agreement bans commercial fishing in a designated area, and Russia is also a signatory. Given the scale of Chinese and Russian fishing globally, the end of the Agreement – if it is not renewed – could become a flashpoint among Arctic States.
Four scenarios
Buchanan suggests four possible scenarios for Greenland, each with different implications for the Arctic policies of other states:
- Conscious de-coupling of Greenland from Denmark, meaning in practice a prolonged diversification of Greenland’s economic relationships. It is worth emphasising that Greenland has a population of just 55,000 – smaller than many towns in England – illustrating that it is not a large market from the perspective of other trading states.
- Independence, perhaps better described as “hyper-autonomy”, as Buchanan suggests.
- Greenland as the 51st State of the USA: a prospect that could further damage US-EU and NATO relations.
- Continuation of the complex relationships that broadly resemble the present.
Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds – Unfrozen: The fight for the future of the Arctic
Bennett and Dodds qualify the word “fight” in their book’s title. They envisage increased competition for resources, access and influence in the Arctic, and perhaps territory, referencing Greenland as one possible example. Whilst they recognise today’s multipolar Arctic, they do not discount the important roles of Indigenous peoples throughout the region, particularly in Canada.
Arctic wildfire impacts
The authors quantify the climate impact of the growing number of Arctic wildfires. Since 2003, these fires alone have released an average of 207 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year. This feature of climate emergency has transformed the Arctic from a carbon sink into a carbon source. And the 4 million people who live across this northern Polar region are on the frontline.
The Arctic as a cooperation story
The authors provide a concentrated and thorough history of the modern Arctic, meticulously explaining the extent of Arctic cooperation that evolved after the Cold War before being overshadowed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The latter passed without major geopolitical changes; the former led to Sweden and Finland joining NATO, rearmament across Europe, and Ukraine seeking membership of both the EU and NATO during an intense conflict that, at the time of writing, has at last begun to show signs of growing unrest within Russia. At present, the EU has announced that formal negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova are to begin.
It is important to not see a simplified repeat of the past in our present or future. What is unfolding is not a replay of the Cold War. For example, Putin has even commended Trump on his desire to acquire Greenland. Unfrozen makes it clear that the Russian government seeks to increase its authority over territories formerly part of Soviet Union, so favouring Trump’s version of expansionism appears to encourage further division between the USA and Europe. This is not unlike Russia’s cultivation of support from past Orbán governments in Hungary, in contrast to its lack of influence elsewhere in the EU. Happily, the Hungarian electorate eventually ended that relationship at the ballot box.
Russia allocated around one-third of its government budget to defence spending in 2024. How long this level of expenditure can be sustained, given significant losses of personnel and military equipment, remains unclear.
Kieran Mulvaney – Arctic Passages: Ice, exploration, and the battle for power at the top of the world
Mulvaney’s account of the Arctic, drawing on both its history and contemporary politics, is particularly effective in conveying the scale of the region and its sparse population. Around four million people are dispersed across the Arctic, with relatively few centres of population. Nunavut in Canada is the second largest ‘country’ in the world by area yet has a population of only around 40,000. Other more substantial communities include Tromsø, Norway, with 75,000 residents, and the largest Arctic city, Murmansk, on Russia’s Kola Peninsula, with around 300,000.
Russian ambitions for the Northern Sea Route remain far from surpassing international importance of tonnages moved through the Panama or Suez Canals. Russian assertions of sovereignty over the route before and after the current war in the Ukraine are very unlikely to improve this situation. The Trump administration’s conflict with Iran also illustrated that the Straits of Hormuz remain considerably more important to the climate emergency-fuelling movements of fossil fuels than the ‘Northeast Passage’.
The AMOC question
It is a somewhat surprising that neither Mulvaney nor Buchanan gives greater emphasise to the risks associated with the ongoing decline, and possible future collapse, of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Such a development would fundamentally change the Arctic region, the weather of northwest Europe, and make shipping and fishing trades throughout much of the region implausible for large parts of each year.
How the Arctic is warming
Mulvaney concisely explains why the Arctic is warming much faster than other parts of the planet. First, the ‘weather layer’ of the atmosphere is thinner above the Polar regions than elsewhere, allowing greater warming from incoming solar energy. Secondly, the protective cover of snow and ice, which reflects sunlight, diminishes as melting exposes darker rock and open waters. These absorb far more heat and then radiate it, further exacerbating melting. The result is higher Arctic temperatures, more wildfires, and additional warming as sea-surface temperatures continue to rise. Sea-ice coverage and volume are trending downwards, exposing more ocean that is no longer covered by reflective ice.
Mulvaney recognises that there is no evidence of actual military conflict in the Arctic at present. He does identify possible future sources of tension, particularly over access to sea routes. Yet the long history of establishing satisfactory agreements that govern fishing suggest there will be less conflict as such agreements, and others concerning trade, might be at risk. Military conflict would imply that a major power, perhaps the USA, has decided that reliance on the Panama and Suez Canals was unacceptable and instead regarded access to the Northern Sea Route as essential. Recent events demonstrate that belligerence can be economically disruptive. Excluding another wild turn by a future US administration, America can continue shipping trade across the Pacific without relying heavily on the Northern Sea Route. Moreover, apart from trade by air, the long-term decline of maritime trade of fossil fuels is already underway. For example, Crude oil movements by sea declined from 29% of seaborne trade in 2000 to 18% in 2023.
Conclusions
All three books offer valuable historical and informed contemporary commentary on the Arctic. None, however, give sufficient attention to the dramatic decline of fossil fuel reserves globally, or the increasing scarcity of resources in regions such as the North Sea. Nor do they devote enough space to considering how a weakening, or potential collapse, of the AMOC might impact fishing, maritime trade, agriculture, and the economic viability of communities across northern Europe and northern Russia. Such changes could likely cause significant migration southwards from northern communities as winters become longer and colder.
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