In 2016, a 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 end early and leaving researchers scrambling to evacuate. Five years later, an early freeze trapped roughly two dozen commercial vessels in the East Siberian Sea; some had to wait weeks for Russian icebreaker assistance. And during a Canadian-led multinational military exercise in 2025, allied forces encountered a difficult combination of 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 location thick enough to land on.
These were not failures by unprepared or inexperienced Arctic actors. They involved three of the region’s most proficient nations, each operating in territory it knew well. But there was a common thread: the Arctic has a way of humbling those who operate there. Its distances, darkness, extreme weather, and sparse infrastructure expose the limits of even the most capable governments and militaries.
This fact creates a paradox. The Arctic is a main approach to the U.S. homeland and a platform for projecting power at the top of the world. That is precisely why, as geopolitical competition intensifies, Washington is becoming increasingly focused on protecting sovereignty and securing its interests in the region. Yet no single country, not even the United States, can see, maneuver, and sustain itself across the Arctic. Effective sovereignty there relies on building networks of dependence.
This week’s agreement between Greenland, Denmark, and the United States illustrates the point. After months of negotiation, the three parties struck a symbiotic deal codifying U.S. military access while affirming Danish and Greenlandic self-governance. U.S. President Donald Trump has called it a win for American interests; Denmark and Greenland a win for sovereignty. Both are true, as nearly every mission that makes Greenland strategically valuable—missile warning, submarine detection, basing, and resupply—works because the United States is embedded in an alliance system.
The agreement could mark a turning point in how Washington approaches Arctic security. Trump’s early talk of acquiring Greenland or making Canada the 51st U.S. state cast self-reliance as the goal and strained relations with key Arctic partners. This agreement signals a more productive direction. Working with allies preserves the advantages the United States already holds and closes the gaps, in both presence and allied political unity, that adversaries are eager to exploit.
But fully embracing the role that allies and partners must play for the United States to achieve its goals in the Arctic will require a shift in a long-held mindset. For the United States, pursuing interdependence is an uncomfortable strategy. Self-reliance remains closely associated with national power, and Washington has historically approached Arctic shortfalls by asking what additional U.S. capabilities it needs to generate. Decades of deprioritizing the Arctic, however, coupled with the region’s vast and forbidding geography, leave the United States with little choice but to work closely with partners. In practice, the interdependence it needs to have with allies in the Arctic is already found everywhere—now Washington must continue to build on it.
SEEING TOGETHER
The United States’ basic ability to understand and communicate what is happening in the vast Arctic region depends on partnerships. Arctic awareness remains uniquely fragmented across three distinct regions: North America, Europe, and the Pacific. Information is further dispersed across a variety of militaries, scientific institutions, intelligence agencies, and local indigenous communities, whose knowledge of the changing environment far exceeds any new sensor.
Since the early 1960s, just after the creation of the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the United States has intentionally based some of its most important missile-defense systems in Canada and Greenland. Because of gaps in its own coverage, the United States now relies on a Japanese satellite to detect the extent of Arctic sea ice, which 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 and on allied judgment to interpret competitors’ intent in the Arctic. Nordic nations have decades of experience observing the Russian military’s behavior around the Kola Peninsula, home to much of the country’s nuclear capacity, making their observations indispensable to Washington’s ability to distinguish between routine and escalatory behavior. The United States, for its part, can see patterns of Chinese and Russian activity near Alaska that European allies might miss.
The United States already gains a great deal of visibility from its allies in the Arctic, but the systems are not always designed to connect across geographies and stakeholders. NORAD and NATO, for instance, each hold a piece of the Arctic picture, yet information and communications do not flow seamlessly between them. Addressing this problem does not require one overarching operational picture or surrendering control of sensitive information; it requires the United States to play the same standard-setting role it has long played to keep allied systems interoperable. That matters even more now as allies build sovereign sensors and communications networks on their own. Scientific cooperation deserves a similarly intentional and collaborative approach. Because the Arctic changes faster than anywhere else on Earth, climate and environmental research is increasingly integral to understanding operating conditions from submarine sonar to search and rescue, as well as wildfire risk.
MOVING TOGETHER
The United States’ reliance on partners in the Arctic becomes even more obvious when Washington needs to move. It faces a distinctive geographic dilemma: it seeks to project power into both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the region, but Alaska is its sole sovereign Arctic territory. Everywhere else across the North Atlantic and European Arctic, the United States’ reach runs through allies.
The United States has spent decades building that 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, it depended on Norwegian and NATO logistics and resupply and on the shelter of Norway’s fjords when a storm swelled seas to 30 feet. In 2023, Iceland allowed a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine to sail into its territorial waters to receive supplies and exchange crew for the first time. The following year, Finland, Norway, and Sweden signed defense cooperation agreements granting the United States access to dozens of sites. These agreements were not favors. They reflected Nordic states’ calculation that U.S. presence, equipment, and resupply strengthen deterrence against Russia and a recognition that allied geography and U.S. military capacity are most valuable when joined.
The United States does not need to be everywhere in the Arctic; indeed, it cannot be. Even as the Pentagon deepens operational ties with allied Arctic militaries, Washington should empower its allies to take primary responsibility where they are best positioned to act—which would constitute a meaningful form of burden sharing within NATO. For example, Norway and other Nordic states have been leading efforts to invest in infrastructure, platforms, and sensors to monitor Russian hybrid activity such as undersea cable sabotage and GPS jamming along the northern approaches to the Atlantic. Sharing this burden would allow the United States to concentrate more attention and resources on Alaska and the Pacific Arctic, where decades of underinvestment affect nearly every category of Arctic infrastructure—ports, icebreakers, runways, energy systems, and search and rescue.
BUILDING TOGETHER
Beyond the need to think creatively about access, the Arctic offers an increasing number of opportunities to advance allied industrial capacity, even in areas such as space programs and icebreakers, which Washington has long treated as symbols of national power. Many Arctic systems are unusually specialized and expensive, requiring industrial capacity and expertise that few countries can sustain on their own. Icebreakers are a case in point. After years spent struggling to rebuild its own fleet, in 2024 the United States turned to Canada and Finland to cooperate on pooling shipyards, knowledge, and labor. Over time, this effort will not only create much-needed additional maritime presence but will also help rebuild U.S. expertise and the broader allied shipbuilding base.
Washington should embrace that model rather than treat it as an exception. It could lead the development of an Arctic industrial strategy that draws on the best capabilities across the alliance. Doing so would allow the United States to leverage its own defense industrial base while continuing to shape the standards and interoperability that make allied systems work.
There are obvious opportunities for such a strategy. Washington could facilitate collaborative architectures for Arctic military satellite communications that ensure nations can interact smoothly during a crisis. It could invite select allies—Canada, at a minimum—to participate in the ground- or space-based elements of the Golden Dome missile defense system, extending the coverage and redundancy that allied geography already provides. It could coordinate with allies on producing cold-weather gear unique to the North American Arctic climate, allowing for cost sharing. It could pool research for energy technologies such as cold-hardened batteries and small modular reactors that would aid troops’ operational reach and give off-grid communities alternatives to costly diesel generators. And it could pursue critical mineral development and processing deals, including stockpiling, to shore up supply chains that underpin many new technologies.
Such a collaborative industrial strategy would not require the United States to become overly dependent on single suppliers, nor would it demand the creation of sprawling multinational procurement programs. Instead, the United States and its allies would make deliberate choices about what each would build, what they would buy from one another, and where developing capabilities together would make more sense than duplicating scarce expertise.
JOIN OR DIE
The United States’ top rivals already understand the value of Arctic cooperation. Although Russia controls roughly half of the Arctic coastline, it is increasingly turning toward China for capital, infrastructure development, satellite-based positioning and navigation, and scientific endeavors in the region. The two countries have no guarantee that their long-term interests will align, but they are deepening their interdependence in the Arctic nonetheless.
The United States begins from a far more advantageous position. It possesses allies across the Arctic and beyond whose geography, expertise, infrastructure, and industrial capabilities complement its own, and if organized intentionally, those alliances will become an indisputable source of strength.
Operational cooperation among Arctic allies is arguably at an all-time high. Nordic integration, expanded NATO planning, and new industrial partnerships have created unprecedented opportunities for collective action. But the United States’ ability to take advantage of them depends on sustaining trust, both with allied capitals and with indigenous communities whose knowledge and voices are integral to decisions about the region’s future.
China and Russia are deepening their interdependence in the Arctic.
Washington has tested this trust. The recent negotiated deal is a real step toward restoring it, but some allies are already hedging. In 2025, when the United States briefly suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine, several Arctic allies moved to invest in their own satellite and surveillance capabilities to reduce their dependence on Washington. Others have sought to diminish their reliance on U.S. defense technologies. And after Washington’s early rhetoric on Greenland, even closely aligned capitals have privately wondered whether U.S. access could become a source of leverage rather than reassurance.
This is why political cohesion should be treated as a pillar of operational capability. The instinct to maximize the United States’ control and freedom of action can have the opposite effect if it weakens the relationships on which U.S. action depends. The United States does not become more powerful in the Arctic by making allies less willing to share information, provide access, or build alongside it.
Critics of interdependence may say that relying on other countries creates its own vulnerability. A partner can fail to share intelligence quickly enough, deny access, or lack capacity when it is most needed. But self-sufficiency carries its own risks, particularly when it exists more in political rhetoric than operational reality. A United States that talks like a leading Arctic power without the capabilities to match is weaker than one that relies deliberately on trusted allies.
Since the United States unveiled its first Arctic Strategy in 1994, it has espoused grand visions for the region, promising to protect both its interests and the environment. But multiple administrations over the course of three decades have never fully resourced these plans. This is not a failure, since the Arctic has never been Washington’s only priority, but it is a pattern Washington can no longer afford to follow as the region changes and competitors move to fill the gaps. A realist’s reading of history leads to one conclusion: Washington’s ambitions can be achieved only by relying on partners. In the Arctic, the cold reality is that the future will be shaped by the coalition best able to act in concert, not by the country that tries to guard its sovereignty alone.
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