In 2016, a sudden crack in the ice opened beneath the site of the U.S. Navy’s flagship Arctic exercise several hundred miles north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, forcing experiments to come to an abrupt end and leaving researchers scrambling to evacuate. Five years later, an early freeze trapped roughly two dozen commercial vessels in the East Siberian Sea, with some forced to wait weeks for Russian icebreaker assistance. And during a Canadian-led multinational military exercise in 2025, allied forces encountered a punishing combination of environmental conditions: extreme cold grounded helicopters, broke snowmobiles, and knocked out communications equipment even as thinning sea ice forced U.S. pilots to search 25,000 miles of coastline for a patch of ice thick enough to land on.
These incidents were not failures by unprepared or inexperienced Arctic actors. Instead, they involved three of the region’s most proficient nations, each operating in territory it knew well. Yet there was a clear common thread: the Arctic has a consistent way of humbling those who operate within its bounds. Its vast distances, prolonged darkness, extreme weather, and sparse infrastructure consistently expose the hard limits of even the most capable governments and militaries.
This reality creates a profound geopolitical paradox. The Arctic serves as a main approach to the U.S. homeland and a vital platform for projecting power at the top of the world. That is precisely why, as global competition intensifies, Washington is becoming increasingly focused on protecting its sovereignty and securing its strategic interests in the region. Yet no single country—not even the United States—possesses the capacity to see, maneuver, and sustain itself across the entirety of the Arctic. Effective sovereignty in this unforgiving environment relies fundamentally on building robust networks of dependence.
A recent tripartite agreement between Greenland, Denmark, and the United States vividly illustrates this point. After months of intense negotiation, the three parties struck a symbiotic deal that codifies U.S. military access while firmly affirming Danish and Greenlandic self-governance. U.S. President Donald Trump has hailed the arrangement as a clear win for American interests, while leaders in Denmark and Greenland have similarly framed it as a victory for sovereignty. Both assessments are accurate, as nearly every mission that makes Greenland strategically valuable—including missile warning, submarine detection, basing, and resupply—only functions effectively because the United States is deeply embedded in an established alliance system.
This agreement could well mark a turning point in how Washington approaches Arctic security. Earlier political rhetoric from the Trump administration regarding acquiring Greenland or making Canada the 51st U.S. state cast self-reliance as the ultimate goal, thereby straining relations with key Arctic partners. By contrast, the new agreement signals a much more pragmatic and productive direction. Working closely with allies preserves the structural advantages the United States already holds while actively closing the gaps—in both physical presence and allied political unity—that geopolitical adversaries are eager to exploit.
However, fully embracing the role that allies and partners must play for the United States to achieve its objectives in the Arctic will require a notable shift in a long-held national mindset. For the United States, pursuing interdependence remains an uncomfortable strategy. Traditional notions of self-reliance are closely associated with national power, and Washington has historically approached Arctic shortfalls by asking what additional U.S. capabilities it needs to generate on its own. Yet decades of deprioritizing the Arctic, compounded by the region’s vast and forbidding geography, leave the United States with little choice but to work hand-in-hand with trusted partners. In practice, the interdependence required with allies in the Arctic is already found everywhere, and Washington must now continue to build systematically upon it.
Seeing Together
The basic ability of the United States to understand and communicate what is happening across the expansive Arctic region depends entirely on partnerships. Awareness in the Arctic remains uniquely fragmented across three distinct regions: North America, Europe, and the Pacific. Information is further dispersed across a wide variety of militaries, scientific institutions, intelligence agencies, and local indigenous communities, whose generations of traditional knowledge regarding the changing environment far exceed the capabilities of any newly deployed sensor.
Since the early 1960s, shortly after the creation of the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the United States has intentionally based some of its most critical missile-defense systems in Canada and Greenland. Because of persistent gaps in its own coverage, the United States now relies heavily on a Japanese satellite to detect the extent of Arctic sea ice, a metric that is integral to understanding the evolution of commercial and military sea routes. The United States further depends on allied monitoring over the European Arctic to understand threats approaching U.S. territory, as well as allied judgment to interpret competitors’ intent in the region. Nordic nations possess decades of experience observing the Russian military’s behavior around the Kola Peninsula, which houses a vast portion of the country’s nuclear capacity, making their localized observations indispensable to Washington’s ability to distinguish between routine activities and escalatory behavior. The United States, for its part, provides crucial visibility into patterns of Chinese and Russian activity near Alaska that European allies might otherwise miss.
While the United States already gains a great deal of visibility from its Arctic allies, these systems are not always designed to connect seamlessly across geographies and stakeholders. NORAD and NATO, for instance, each hold a critical piece of the broader Arctic picture, yet information and communications do not flow effortlessly between them. Addressing this challenge does not require creating one overarching operational picture or surrendering control of sensitive information; rather, it requires the United States to play the same standard-setting role it has historically maintained to keep allied systems interoperable. This imperative matters even more today as allies build their own sovereign sensors and communications networks. Furthermore, scientific cooperation demands a similarly intentional and collaborative approach. Because the Arctic is warming and changing faster than anywhere else on Earth, climate and environmental research is increasingly integral to understanding daily operating conditions, ranging from submarine sonar performance to search-and-rescue operations and escalating wildfire risks.
Moving Together
The reliance of the United States on regional partners becomes even more obvious when Washington needs to deploy forces. The nation faces a distinctive geographic dilemma: it seeks to project power into both the Atlantic and Pacific sectors of the region, yet Alaska remains its sole sovereign Arctic territory. Everywhere else across the North Atlantic and the European Arctic, U.S. operational reach must run directly through its allies.
The United States has spent decades building and maintaining this access. In 2018, when the USS Harry S. Truman conducted the first U.S. carrier strike group operation in the Arctic since the Cold War, the deployment depended heavily on Norwegian and NATO logistics, resupply capabilities, and the natural shelter of Norway’s deep fjords when a severe storm swelled seas to 30 feet. In 2023, Iceland permitted a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine to enter its territorial waters to receive vital supplies and conduct a crew exchange for the first time. The following year, Finland, Norway, and Sweden signed comprehensive defense cooperation agreements granting the United States military access to dozens of strategic sites. These agreements were not diplomatic favors; they reflected the Nordic states’ calculated assessment that a robust U.S. presence, advanced equipment, and reliable resupply strengthen deterrence against Russia, alongside a clear recognition that allied geography and U.S. military capacity are most effective when joined together.
The United States does not need to maintain a physical presence everywhere in the Arctic, and practically speaking, it cannot. Even as the Pentagon deepens its operational ties with allied Arctic militaries, Washington should empower its partners to take primary responsibility where they are best positioned to act, constituting a meaningful and balanced form of burden-sharing within the NATO alliance. For example, Norway and other Nordic states have been leading efforts to invest heavily in the infrastructure, platforms, and sensors required to monitor Russian hybrid activities—such as undersea cable sabotage and GPS jamming—along the northern approaches to the Atlantic. Sharing this operational burden would allow the United States to concentrate greater attention and critical resources on Alaska and the Pacific Arctic, where decades of underinvestment continue to impact nearly every category of regional infrastructure, including ports, icebreakers, runways, energy systems, and search-and-rescue networks.
Building Together
Beyond the necessity of thinking creatively about access, the Arctic offers an increasing number of opportunities to advance allied industrial capacity, particularly in specialized domains such as space programs and icebreaking fleets, which Washington has historically treated as sole symbols of national power. Many Arctic systems are unusually specialized and expensive, requiring an industrial capacity and technical expertise that very few countries can sustain independently. Icebreakers are a prime example. After years of struggling to rebuild its own delayed fleet, the United States turned to Canada and Finland in 2024 to cooperate on pooling shipyards, technical knowledge, and skilled labor. Over time, this cooperative effort will not only create a much-needed maritime presence but will also help rebuild domestic U.S. expertise and strengthen the broader allied shipbuilding base.
Washington should broadly embrace this collaborative model rather than treating it as a rare exception. It could spearhead the development of an integrated Arctic industrial strategy that draws upon the absolute best capabilities found across the alliance. Doing so would allow the United States to leverage its own defense industrial base while continuing to shape the technical standards and interoperability that make allied systems function smoothly together.
Clear opportunities for such a strategic approach already exist. Washington could facilitate collaborative architectures for Arctic military satellite communications to ensure that participating nations can interact seamlessly during a crisis. It could invite select allies—with Canada at a minimum—to participate in the ground- or space-based elements of broader missile defense systems, thereby extending the coverage and system redundancy that allied geography naturally provides. It could coordinate with partners on producing specialized cold-weather gear tailored to the harsh North American Arctic climate to achieve meaningful cost-sharing. It could pool crucial research for advanced energy technologies, such as cold-hardened batteries and small modular reactors, which would greatly enhance troops’ operational reach while providing off-grid communities with sustainable alternatives to costly diesel generators. Finally, it could pursue critical mineral development, processing deals, and joint stockpiling initiatives to secure the fragile supply chains underpinning many emerging technologies.
Such a collaborative industrial strategy would not require the United States to become dangerously dependent on single foreign suppliers, nor would it demand the creation of sprawling, bureaucratic multinational procurement programs. Instead, the United States and its allies would make deliberate, strategic choices regarding what each nation builds domestically, what they purchase from one another, and where developing capabilities cooperatively makes far more sense than duplicating scarce expertise.
Join or Die
The primary geopolitical rivals of the United States already understand the inherent value of Arctic cooperation. Although Russia controls roughly half of the entire Arctic coastline, Moscow is increasingly turning toward Beijing for capital, infrastructure development, satellite-based positioning and navigation, and scientific endeavors in the far north. While the two countries have no absolute guarantee that their long-term strategic interests will permanently align, they are steadily deepening their mutual interdependence in the Arctic nonetheless.
By contrast, the United States begins from a far more advantageous position. It possesses a network of capable allies across the Arctic and beyond whose geography, expertise, infrastructure, and industrial capabilities directly complement its own. If organized with clear intent, these alliances will become an indisputable source of strategic strength.
Operational cooperation among Arctic allies is arguably at an all-time high. Recent Nordic integration, expanded NATO defense planning, and new industrial partnerships have created unprecedented opportunities for collective action. However, the ability of the United States to take full advantage of these developments depends heavily on sustaining mutual trust, both with allied capitals and with local indigenous communities whose traditional knowledge and voices are integral to making informed decisions about the region’s future.
Washington has at times tested this fragile trust. Following recent instances where the United States briefly suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine, several Arctic allies quietly moved to invest in their own sovereign satellite and surveillance capabilities to reduce their operational dependence on Washington. Others have sought to diminish their reliance on U.S. defense technologies altogether. Furthermore, in the wake of earlier rhetoric regarding Greenland, even closely aligned foreign capitals have privately wondered whether future U.S. military access could become a source of political leverage rather than steadfast reassurance.
This underscores why political cohesion must be treated as a core pillar of operational capability. The natural institutional instinct to maximize unilateral U.S. control and freedom of action can ultimately have the opposite effect if it weakens the foundational relationships upon which all effective U.S. action depends. The United States does not become more powerful in the Arctic by making its allies less willing to share vital intelligence, provide crucial access, or build alongside it.
Critics of interdependence may argue that relying on other sovereign nations creates its own inherent vulnerabilities, noting that a partner might fail to share intelligence quickly enough, deny operational access, or lack capacity when it is needed most. Yet self-sufficiency carries severe risks of its own, particularly when it exists more in political rhetoric than in operational reality. A United States that talks like a dominant Arctic power without the physical capabilities to match is inherently weaker than one that relies deliberately and effectively on trusted allies.
Since the United States unveiled its first official Arctic Strategy in 1994, successive administrations have espoused grand visions for the region, repeatedly promising to protect both national interests and the fragile environment. Yet multiple administrations over the course of three decades have never fully resourced these ambitious plans. While this is not an outright failure—given that the Arctic has never been Washington’s sole global priority—it represents a recurring pattern that the United States can no longer afford to follow as the physical environment changes and strategic competitors rapidly move to fill the gaps. A realistic reading of history leads to a singular conclusion: Washington’s overarching ambitions can be achieved only by relying extensively on trusted partners. In the Arctic, the cold reality remains that the future will be shaped by the coalition best able to act in concert, not by the single nation that tries to guard its sovereignty alone.
