Editor’s Note: The Red Cell series is published in collaboration with the Stimson Center. Drawing upon the legacy of the CIA’s Red Cell—established following the September 11 attacks to avoid similar analytic failures in the future—the project works to challenge assumptions, misperceptions, and groupthink with a view to encouraging alternative approaches to America’s foreign and national security policy challenges. For more information about the Stimson Center’s Red Cell Project, see here.

Red Cell

The media outrage over a president-elect who campaigned against war not ruling out the use of military force to obtain Greenland (and the Panama Canal) is right and understandable but misses the Arctic’s growing strategic dimension and Russia and China’s progress in staking out their claims. Greenland is rich in mineral deposits, and its geographic position makes control over Greenland and the Arctic crucial for power projection, rival monitoring, and securing shipping routes. 

Many viewers of the second season of the “Trump Show” see the president-elect’s warmongering as just another aspect of his blustering personality and not something to be taken seriously. This misses the significant implications of Trump’s ambitions. Climate change, which Trump has decried as a hoax, is melting Arctic icecaps, potentially revealing previously inaccessible raw material deposits. Greenland’s strategic position and rich raw material reserves, including oil, gas, zinc, copper, platinum, and rare earths, make it crucial in the Arctic region. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the region has an estimated 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of undiscovered natural gas. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that Greenland has 1.5 million tons of rare-earth element reserves, close to the 1.8 million tons in the United States. However, China leads with 44 million tons of deposits and could use them as leverage in a trade war. Given Trump’s tariff threats to China, Greenland’s rare-earth deposits are becoming increasingly significant.

Greenland’s proximity to the Arctic shipping routes means it could play a key role in managing, securing, and controlling these new trade pathways. The Northeast Passage, also known as the Northern Sea Route, is a shipping route along the Arctic coast of Russia that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This route is growing more significant due to the melting ice in the Arctic, creating permanently usable routes that can reduce transport times and costs between Europe and Asia.

The geopolitical dynamics involving Greenland, Russia, China, and the United States will influence the future of global trade and international relations not just in the High North but in the larger play for global advantage among the three great powers. 

Russia’s Geopolitical Thinking

Greenland abuts the GIUK gap, a key naval chokepoint between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK, which was closely monitored during the Cold War. Recently, Russia has increased submarine patrols and exercises there. Moscow recognizes the economic and strategic risks and potential of these serious changes and is massively expanding its presence in the north as part of an Arctic strategy. Already on October 26, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially adopted the new “Strategy of Development of the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation and the Provision of National Security for the Period to 2035.” Russia, whose eastern mainland lies just fifty-five miles across the Bering Strait from the Alaskan coast, has for years prioritized an expanded presence in the Arctic through airfield renovation, the addition of bases, troop training, and the development of a network of military defense systems on the northern border.

Russia’s big ambition is the development of the Northern Sea route via the Arctic Sea, which would cut the time to ship Chinese goods to Europe through the Suez Canal by almost half. Much of Russia’s original plans for extracting its Arctic resources involved the West. With Putin’s (second) invasion of Ukraine, European shipping companies mostly cut ties with Russian operators in 2022, and Western energy companies abandoned their energy projects.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has illustrated how lively geo-economic thinking is, especially in Moscow, including in imperial categories. Even with regard to Alaska, Russia is also aware of its “historical boundaries.” For example, when President Joe Biden declared in his March 2022 Warsaw speech that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine meant it was stepping “back to the nineteenth century,” the Russian Embassy in Canada posted on X: “Russia respects [the twenty-first] century’s sovereign borders. But when you are in Poland speaking about getting Russia back to the [nineteenth] century, we don’t mind. At least, with regard to Alaska,” a reference to Russian ownership of the territory before it was sold to the United States in 1867. Whether or not this remark was really meant in earnest, Russia’s neo-imperial Alaska discourse should be taken very seriously by U.S. officials, especially because geostrategic interests are at stake in the Arctic.

The United States Is Catching Up

The United States is responding with maneuvers and the expansion of its troop presence in the region. In this new Cold War, Alaska has a central role to play. The U.S. Air Force has deployed dozens of F-35 fighter jets to Alaska and announced in 2022 that the state would host the “largest concentration of fifth-gen, combat-coded airpower in the world.” Back in January 2021, the U.S. Army released its first strategic plan to “regain Arctic dominance.” The U.S. Navy, which conducted exercises above and below the ice within the Arctic Circle in March 2022, has also developed a plan to protect American interests in the region, warning that weakness there would mean that “peace and prosperity will be increasingly challenged by Russia and China, whose interests and values differ dramatically from ours.”

Faced with this challenge, the U.S. federal government has been investing hundreds of millions of dollars on the west coast of Alaska to expand the Port of Nome, which could turn into a deepwater center serving Coast Guard and Navy ships sailing to the Arctic Circle. At the moment, plans have been halted due to excessive costs. The Coast Guard plans to deploy three new icebreakers in the future—Russia already has forty-one in operation to open up new Eurasian trade routes. 

Perhaps Russia’s biggest challenge remains attracting people to such a forbidding environment. Compared to other northern regions—Alaska, Greenland, and Scandinavia—Russia’s Arctic population has decreased. There was a 20 percent decline at the end of the Soviet period and a continuing net outflow of about 18,000 residents per annum. The population, currently approximately 2.4 million, is “growing in the oil and gas areas and declining slowly in the others.” However, Russia’s increasingly friendly neighbor, China, has a significant population that might be prepared to relocate to the new frontier.

The Sino-Russian Entente

Especially for China, the Northeast Passage would offer an enormous advantage: lower transport costs between Europe and Asia. Compared to the longer sea voyages via the Suez and Panama Canal, the Northeast route reduces transport times between Europe and East Asia in half. “As a result of global warming, the Arctic shipping routes are likely to become important transport routes for international trade,” China’s government explains in its “White Paper on the Arctic.”

China is also interested in Greenland’s raw materials. Beijing has boosted its economic presence in the area, including investment in mining operations in Greenland. However, Beijing is dependent on Moscow to extract these raw materials and establish new transport routes.

The opening of the Northern Sea Route will solidify Russo-Chinese ties. Russia and China have signed an agreement to design and construct new ice-class container ships. More than any far-off global shipping potential, the Northern Sea route will be used to exploit and transport energy and minerals.

Both Putin and Xi have a fascination with the new Arctic route. Putin sees in the Arctic a new narrative about man conquering nature. The Arctic is a pillar of Russia’s return to great power status. For Xi, the Northern Sea route is a maritime artery intended to be Beijing’s “Polar Silk Road.” Unlike the Suez Canal and the Malacca Strait, it is less vulnerable to a blockade by the U.S. fleet. President Xi’s last state visit to Moscow in 2023 made it clear that China not only wants to cooperate economically but also seeks to deepen diplomatic relations with Moscow to counteract what China believes to be “a long campaign by the United States to hobble China’s ascent.” 

But President-elect Trump is ready to double down: “What [Trump] is trying to do is reinvigorate this focus on what are the outer boundaries of the Western Hemisphere, and defending them against great power competitors,” said Alexander Gray, who served as chief of staff on Trump’s previous National Security Council, in remarks quoted in The Wall Street Journal. “There is this idea that our number-one priority is the defense of the hemisphere and that China and Russia are coming into our backyard,” Gray said. “You have to see Greenland and Panama in that context.”

The Neo-Monroe Doctrine