In 2016, a sudden crack in the ice opened directly beneath the site of the U.S. Navy’s flagship Arctic exercise, situated several hundred miles north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The unforeseen hazard forced researchers and military personnel to terminate their experiments early, scrambling to execute a hasty evacuation. Five years later, an unusually early freeze trapped roughly two dozen commercial vessels in the East Siberian Sea, leaving some operators stranded for weeks as they waited for Russian icebreaker assistance. During a Canadian-led multinational military exercise in 2025, allied forces encountered an exceptionally punishing combination of environmental conditions: extreme cold grounded helicopters, fractured snowmobiles, and knocked out vital communications equipment, even as thinning sea ice forced U.S. pilots to scour 25,000 miles of coastline just to locate a patch of ice thick enough to land on safely.
These incidents were not failures born of unprepared or inexperienced Arctic actors. On the contrary, they involved three of the region’s most proficient nations, each operating within territory it knew intimately. Yet they shared a common, humbling thread: the Arctic has an enduring way of humbling those who attempt to operate within its domain. Its vast distances, prolonged darkness, extreme weather conditions, and sparse infrastructure brutally expose the physical limits of even the most technologically capable governments and militaries.
This harsh reality generates a persistent geopolitical paradox. The Arctic serves as a critical strategic approach to the U.S. homeland and an essential platform for projecting power at the top of the world. That precise geographical truth explains why, as global competition intensifies, Washington has grown increasingly focused on safeguarding its sovereignty and securing its vital interests in the region. Yet no single country—not even the United States—possesses the independent capacity to see, maneuver, and sustain itself comprehensively across the entirety of the Arctic. Effective sovereignty in this unforgiving environment relies fundamentally on building robust networks of dependence.
A recent landmark agreement between Greenland, Denmark, and the United States vividly illustrates this principle. Following months of intensive negotiations, the three parties struck a symbiotic deal that formally codifies U.S. military access while simultaneously affirming Danish and Greenlandic self-governance. U.S. President Donald Trump has hailed the arrangement as a significant win for American interests, while counterparts in Denmark and Greenland have characterized it as a major victory for local sovereignty. Both assertions hold true, largely because nearly every mission that renders Greenland strategically valuable—including missile warning, submarine detection, forward basing, and logistical resupply—functions effectively only because the United States is deeply embedded within a collaborative alliance system.
This agreement could ultimately mark a turning point in how Washington approaches Arctic security architecture. Early rhetoric from President Trump concerning the potential acquisition of Greenland or the integration of Canada as a 51st U.S. state cast self-reliance as the ultimate policy goal, a stance that strained diplomatic relations with critical Arctic partners. By contrast, the new trilateral agreement signals a much more pragmatic and productive direction. Working closely alongside allies preserves the distinct 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 indispensable role that allies and partners must play for the United States to achieve its long-term objectives in the Arctic will require a profound shift in a deeply ingrained national mindset. For Washington, pursuing strategic interdependence has historically been an uncomfortable strategy. Complete self-reliance remains closely intertwined with traditional definitions of national power, and U.S. leadership has traditionally approached regional shortfalls by asking what additional capabilities it needs to generate purely on its own. Yet decades of systemic underprioritization of the Arctic, combined with the region’s vast and forbidding geography, leave the United States with little viable choice other than to work hand-in-hand with trusted partners. In practice, the interdependence required with allies in the Arctic is already an established reality across numerous operational domains—and Washington must now commit to building upon that foundation.
Seeing Together
The fundamental capacity of the United States to understand and communicate unfolding developments across the sprawling Arctic region depends heavily on partnerships. Regional awareness remains uniquely fragmented across three distinct geographic theaters: North America, Europe, and the Pacific. Information is further dispersed across a wide variety of national militaries, scientific institutions, intelligence agencies, and local indigenous communities, whose generations of traditional knowledge regarding the changing environment far surpass 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 stationed some of its most critical missile-defense systems within Canada and Greenland. Due to inherent coverage gaps in its own domestic sensor architecture, the United States currently relies on a Japanese satellite to accurately detect the extent of Arctic sea ice, a metric that is integral to understanding the evolution of both commercial maritime shipping lanes and military routes. Furthermore, Washington depends heavily on allied intelligence monitoring over the European Arctic to identify and evaluate threats approaching U.S. territory, as well as allied analytical judgment to interpret the true intentions of competitors in the Far North. Nordic nations possess decades of specialized experience observing Russian military behavior around the Kola Peninsula, which houses a substantial portion of Moscow’s nuclear capabilities. These local observations are completely indispensable to Washington’s ability to accurately distinguish between routine military patrols and escalatory maneuvers. For its part, the United States provides crucial visibility by tracking patterns of Chinese and Russian activity near Alaska that European allies might otherwise miss.
While the United States already gains significant strategic visibility from its Arctic allies, these systems are not always designed to integrate seamlessly across disparate geographies and institutional stakeholders. NORAD and NATO, for instance, each maintain a vital piece of the overall Arctic security picture, yet critical information and communications do not consistently flow seamlessly between them. Resolving this operational friction does not necessitate a single, overarching operational command structure or the forfeiture of control over sensitive national information; rather, it requires the United States to play the same standard-setting role it has historically maintained to keep allied military systems interoperable. This imperative is increasingly urgent as allies independently field their own sovereign sensors and communications networks. Scientific cooperation demands an equally intentional and collaborative approach. Because the climate is changing faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth, ongoing environmental research is increasingly integral to understanding operational parameters—ranging from submarine sonar performance and search-and-rescue viability to wildfire risk management.
Moving Together
The reliance of the United States on regional partners becomes even more pronounced whenever Washington needs to project physical mobility. The nation faces a distinct geographic dilemma: it seeks to project military 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 entirely through allied nations.
Over the decades, the United States has invested heavily in cultivating this necessary access. In 2018, when the USS Harry S. Truman conducted the first U.S. carrier strike group operation in the Arctic since the conclusion of the Cold War, the deployment relied extensively on Norwegian and NATO logistics and resupply networks, as well as the protective shelter of Norway’s deep fjords when severe storms generated 30-foot swells. In 2023, Iceland permitted a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine to enter its territorial waters to receive vital supplies and conduct crew rotations for the very first time. The following year, Finland, Norway, and Sweden finalized landmark defense cooperation agreements granting the United States operational access to dozens of military sites across their territories. These agreements were not diplomatic favors; they reflected a clear-eyed calculation by Nordic states that a visible U.S. presence, combined with advanced equipment and reliable resupply networks, substantially strengthens deterrence against Russia. They also demonstrated a mutual recognition that allied geography and U.S. military capacity are most effective when fully integrated.
The United States does not need to maintain a physical presence everywhere in the Arctic—nor is it logistically capable of doing so. Even as the Pentagon deepens its operational ties with allied Arctic militaries, Washington should actively empower its partners to assume primary responsibility in regions where they are geographically and logistically best positioned to act. This approach would constitute a meaningful and practical form of burden-sharing within the NATO alliance. For example, Norway and other Nordic states have spearheaded major investments in critical infrastructure, monitoring platforms, and advanced sensors designed to track Russian hybrid warfare tactics, such as undersea cable sabotage and GPS jamming along the northern approaches to the Atlantic. Sharing this operational burden would enable the United States to concentrate a greater share of its attention and financial resources on Alaska and the Pacific Arctic, where decades of systemic underinvestment have impacted nearly every category of regional infrastructure, including ports, icebreakers, runways, energy systems, and search-and-rescue facilities.
Building Together
Beyond the necessity of rethinking regional access, the Arctic presents a growing array of opportunities to advance joint allied industrial capacity, particularly in highly specialized sectors such as space programs and heavy icebreaker construction, which Washington has historically treated as direct symbols of national power. Many Arctic-specific systems are exceptionally specialized and costly, requiring an industrial base and engineering expertise that very few individual countries can sustain independently. Heavy icebreakers provide a clear case study. After struggling for years to rebuild its own aging fleet, the United States turned to Canada and Finland in 2024 to cooperate on pooling domestic shipyards, specialized knowledge, and skilled labor. Over time, this collaborative initiative will not only generate much-needed maritime presence in northern waters but will also help revitalize domestic U.S. shipbuilding expertise and strengthen the broader allied industrial base.
Washington should fully embrace this collaborative model rather than treating it as a rare exception to the rule. U.S. leadership could spearhead the development of a comprehensive Arctic industrial strategy that draws upon the premier capabilities existing across the entire alliance. Doing so would allow the United States to leverage its own defense industrial base while continuing to establish the technical standards and interoperability parameters that make allied systems function cohesively.
Clear, practical opportunities for such a unified strategy already exist. Washington could facilitate collaborative architectures for Arctic military satellite communications to ensure that allied nations can interact smoothly during a crisis. It could invite select allies—with Canada being a primary candidate—to participate directly in the ground- or space-based components of broader missile defense initiatives, thereby extending regional coverage and redundancy that allied geography naturally provides. Furthermore, Washington could coordinate closely with northern partners to produce specialized cold-weather military gear tailored specifically to the North American Arctic climate, generating valuable cost-sharing benefits. It could similarly pool research and development for emerging energy technologies, such as cold-hardened batteries and small modular reactors, which would significantly enhance the operational reach of deployed troops while offering remote, off-grid communities a viable alternative to costly diesel generators. Finally, the United States could pursue strategic critical mineral development, processing, and stockpiling agreements to shore up the vulnerable supply chains underpinning numerous modern defense technologies.
Implementing such a collaborative industrial strategy would not require the United States to become overly dependent on single foreign suppliers, nor would it necessitate the creation of unwieldy, sprawling multinational procurement programs. Instead, the United States and its participating allies would make deliberate, strategic choices regarding what equipment each nation will build domestically, what they will purchase from one another, and where developing capabilities jointly makes far more sense than needlessly duplicating scarce technical expertise.
Join or Die
The primary strategic rivals of the United States already recognize the fundamental value of Arctic cooperation. Although Russia exercises sovereign control over roughly half of the entire Arctic coastline, Moscow is increasingly turning toward Beijing for financial capital, infrastructure development, satellite-based navigation and positioning services, and joint scientific endeavors across the region. While the two nations have no absolute guarantee that their long-term strategic interests will permanently align, they are steadily deepening their mutual interdependence in the Far North regardless.
By contrast, the United States begins from a position of profound strategic advantage. It possesses a network of capable allies spanning the Arctic and beyond whose geography, technical expertise, infrastructure, and industrial capabilities naturally complement its own. If organized intentionally, these longstanding alliances will transform into an indisputable source of national strength.
Operational cooperation among Arctic allies is arguably at an all-time high. Ongoing Nordic integration, expanded NATO regional planning, and newly forged industrial partnerships have created unprecedented opportunities for collective action. However, the ultimate ability of the United States to capitalize on these opportunities depends entirely on sustaining deep political 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 long-term future.
Washington has periodically tested this fragile trust. The recent negotiated trilateral deal represents a meaningful step toward restoring confidence, but several key allies are already actively hedging their bets. In 2025, when the United States temporarily suspended intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, multiple Arctic allies moved with urgency to invest in their own sovereign satellite and surveillance capabilities to reduce their operational dependence on Washington. Other partners have similarly sought to diminish their long-term reliance on American defense technologies. Furthermore, following early rhetoric from U.S. leadership concerning Greenland, even closely aligned foreign capitals have privately questioned whether future U.S. military access could eventually be leveraged as a diplomatic tool rather than remaining a reliable instrument of mutual reassurance.
This underlying dynamic 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 produce the exact opposite effect if it ultimately weakens the diplomatic 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 or less inclined to share vital intelligence, grant strategic access, or build infrastructure alongside American forces.
Critics of strategic interdependence frequently argue that relying on foreign partners introduces inherent vulnerabilities, pointing out that a partner nation might fail to share intelligence swiftly enough, deny necessary operational access, or simply lack the requisite capacity when a crisis strikes. Yet a policy of unyielding self-sufficiency carries its own severe risks, particularly when that self-sufficiency exists more as political rhetoric than as verifiable operational reality. A United States that projects the image of a leading Arctic power without the actual military and logistical capabilities to match its words is inherently weaker than a nation that relies deliberately and effectively on trusted allies.
Ever since the United States unveiled its inaugural Arctic Strategy in 1994, successive administrations have espoused grand visions for the region, vowing to protect both national interests and the fragile local environment. Yet multiple presidential administrations over the course of three decades have consistently failed to fully resource these ambitious plans. While this pattern reflects the reality that the Arctic has never been Washington’s sole global priority, it is a shortfall the nation can no longer afford to maintain as the region undergoes rapid environmental change and strategic competitors aggressively move to fill the resulting vacuums. A realistic assessment of regional history leads to an inescapable conclusion: Washington’s strategic ambitions can ultimately be achieved only by relying closely on trusted partners. In the unforgiving Arctic, the cold reality is that the future will inevitably be shaped by the coalition best equipped to act in concert, not by any single country that attempts to guard its sovereignty entirely alone.
